Venice on laundry Day
In a 2014 group photography trip in Venice, one of our boat tours took us on a two-hour ride around the lagoons and canals for the water sceneries. Safety regulations dictated that each boat could only take four passengers. Most of the 8 or 9 of us favoured the cooler morning hours with better lighting. Being a novice, I had much else to grasp in photography so the afternoon light was fine for me.
The learning curve in photography is not too sharp if one’s enthusiasm is of a great magnitude and if one has formed a good habit of talking and teaching oneself about juxtaposing the picture and the camera’s settings, and capturing everything calmly, unencumbered by rules. My mentor Richard Martin often heard me complain about my tripod slowing me. I had so far been teaching myself to capture birds at flight and tripod was indeed cumbersome. In a photography trip to Namibia in 2013 I learned to incorporate quick reaction to match the speed of wildlife. Not always accomplishable, but one tries, and one gets reasonable results. (Perhaps a career in teaching ballet in my youth is a plus in journalistic photography.)
Tripods are made with heavy duty material for heavy-duty looking (National Geographic) camera crew with heavy-duty backpacks or for tall ladies with stronger muscles to haul duffle bags up into the plane’s overhead compartment. I have tried my best to find the lightest camera bag and suitcases that would give me the feeling of Milan Kundera’s Unbearable Lightness of Being.
The tripod diehard people also shot with handheld cameras in the boat. As the boatman moored the boat at a street waterfront for a brief quiet moment I looked up and saw the laundry in an alley. The light of the setting sun on the yellow walls facing the water gave a dark cool shade to the alley between the blocks of apartment buildings. Someone said the morning light would’ve been better. Now you’d need to use flash or a tripod and be on solid ground instead of the bobbing boat. Warnings galore: the pictures would be blurry, “blur” being the worst enemy of landscape and still-life photography. But think fast: the picture was neither landscape nor still-life. The boatman was moving to sail to another canal. I need not show anyone my blurry pictures, just delete them.
Digital cameras are equipped with the No Vibration button. Trust that and let all hard rules slide into the water. I had no blur in the 8 frames I shot on the bobbing boat. They were not tack sharp, just colourful. We all love having clean laundry!
This photo won many peer and panel awards on my photography platform on Viewbug.com, and I wrote a feature sharing the experience of capturing such a picture as requested by Viewbug.