After a long day of work, a gondolier heads home in Venice. The first of my night images from our one-night trip to Venice this week, this was one image that I knew I would love when I took it. As with any image, I hoped it would turn out well, but you can’t always tell at the time. I’m sure there will be more photos that I missed, and more that surprise me as I go through them. In the meantime, here’s the sneak peek for a Friday – have a great weekend!
Follow your Bliss
This may not look like a blissful photograph to you, but it is to me. Photographing Venice in the day is wonderful, photographing Venice at night is blissful. I’m so excited to be going back for a one night visit for a special session of night photography, I’ll be absent here for a couple of days. After the last visit I knew I had to get back for this while I’m here in Italy. It called to me.
What about you? Do you follow your bliss? Do you feel the little tugs on your heart that pull you in a certain direction? How do you respond?
When life gives you rain…
Take photos anyway! This photo is from a back alley in Orvieto, a hill town in Umbria. I love the old scooter, the textures of the wall, the greenery and the reflections of the wet ground. A peaceful little scene, I can almost feel the cool, damp air.
The two days we spent in Orvieto on our April were rainy. I found that I wasn’t as inspired to take photos – have you ever tried to take good photos with a two handed camera while holding an umbrella? Not the easiest thing to do. But the photos I did take, I find that I like. They have a very different mood than the sunny, perfect weather photos. Maybe even a little more character.
As we travel around, sometimes only a day or even less visiting a new place, I have to make the most of that time. Regardless of the weather, my goal is to capture some essence of that place. I don’t have the luxury to visit again and again, to study a certain place in all light, all weather, all seasons. And you know what? I find that’s ok. I’ve learned that when life gives you rain, you take photos anyway.
As usual, another life lesson we can take beyond photography or our other creative endeavors. Today, here in Italy, it is rainy. I think I’m going to make the most of it!
At the Doorstep
As I mentioned last week, when we were in the Cinque Terre I was just drawn to doors with peeling paint. Here is another one from Riomaggiore, I love the green paint, against the grey of the door and the chips of it on the red brick of the doorstep. It must be the light, the texture, or as one person commented on that post, “I would like to chunk them off and mash them in my palm with my thumb.” I realized that I feel the same, there is an interactive nature to these photos, a desire in me to participate in the removal of paint from the surface, to pick off flakes and crumble them to nothingness.
Now, I could not have said any of that at the time I took the photo. All I knew at the time was that I was drawn to these spots, compelled to take a photo or two. After the fact, I see that this desire to take pictures of peeling paint is coming from somewhere other than my rational brain. The theme this month for the Creative Every Day challenge has been intuition, and it’s really caused me to sit back and look at how I use and follow my intuition in different areas of my life. I realize that when I take photos of a subject like this, it’s my intuition talking. I can’t explain it rationally in the moment, but I act on the feeling then and there. And, usually, it results in images that I like, and that have something to show to me later.
Even if the message is just that I have an obsessive urge to crush paint flakes.
It Takes Hard Work
Evening comes in to Riomaggiore, in the Cinque Terre of Italy. I love the colors and light in this photo. Not full dark, the “blue hour” as I’ve recently learned.
Since night photography has become a recent interest, I’ve had to practice. It’s hard to get a really good night shot. You take so many, playing with exposures and ISO and lenses and compositions… but it pays off when you get that one beautiful one.
It’s easy to dream about doing something, but the actual doing is always a lot harder. It takes hard work to improve, to get really good, to make a vision real. The beauty of it is, if it’s something you LOVE to do, it doesn’t feel like work.
Yesterday I spend the day learning things about XML and CSS code. A beautiful sunny Saturday afternoon in Italy and I was on the computer most of it. Why? Because I have a vision of what I want this blog to look like, where I want it to go, and I’m willing to put some work into getting there. I used to hate being on the computer when I wasn’t working at my corporate job, because I associated the computer with things I didn’t really have a passion for. Computer = work = not fun. The truth of it is, the computer is just a tool for whatever the job is. And now that what I’m doing on the computer is aligned to my passion, it’s totally different.
This is an amazing realization for me, that’s been slowly creeping up. My time here in Italy so far has been spent exploring my creativity and dreaming of possibilities. Now it’s time to continue the dream into reality. I look forward to sharing with you some of these things as I work on them, like the blog update, along with my view of the world through photography.
Thanks for participating in my journey! I love hearing from you in comments and emails and facebook posts. It’s such a fun thing, to be able to share my passion with the world in this way.
Sunny Saturday
It’s a beautiful, sunny Saturday here in Italy so I thought I would pick a photo with some bright sun and color. This is from a Saturday a few weeks ago, in Burano (of course!). The first two times we were in Burano it was overcast so I had been hoping to get there when there was some sun. When we left for Venice on Saturday morning it was grey and drizzly. We even were rained on as we exited the train station. But after lunch, the sun came out and we headed directly to Burano. Do not pass Piazza San Marco, do not stop in Murano. And I was rewarded with sun on the beautiful colors! Often when traveling, you only have one opportunity, one visit to get the images. It is nice we have the chance to go back someplace once in a while!