How can you give life to a block of marble?

How can you give life to a block of marble? Well, sculptors do. They know how to make a 2 tons piece of unanimated rock turn into something alive. Michelangelo fired his hammer against his Moses once it was finished asking ”Perché non parli?” (Why don’t you talk?), and if you are like me and like sculptures, you will be probably staring at a statue in awe mouth open and with your head going blank.

I’m not a great fan of paintings, or I should better say not as much as I am of sculptures. Classic sculptures are my favorites, from the ancient Greeks and Romans masterpieces to Donatello. Funny to admit it; being a photographer or at least someone who is in love with photography and working on his learning process, painting should be the thing to look at with more attention. The use of light, then rule of thirds, the search for the third dimension, all valuable inputs any photog should grab from the master painters. Yet it is harder for me to understand how a man can sculpt the body of The David and Goliath, than painting The Last Supper. Probably I have the wrong concept that if you make a mistake while working on your canvas you can go back and somehow fix it, but if the scalpel knocks out too much marble your work has gone for good.

Now, just to make something clear I’m not an educated lover of sculpture, paintings or art in general. Yet I grew up in a city like Rome and spent long summer holydays in Tuscany, hence art and architectural beauties where around me all the time. I’m pretty sure that my small brain and my short sighted eyes absorbed all that beauty like sponges, and stored it somewhere. Now it floats to the surface and every once in a while, when I have the chance to witness shows of manmade wonders I breath it deeply, and if I have the camera with me I grab my vision of it.

Wandering around the Vatican Museums for a whole day has been such a grateful experience that I almost thanked my wife for dragging me there. I was scared to go, mid August, crowded with people, sticky hot… not a great plan. My longing to see the museum was being beaten by my laziness, but thank God I was not alone. To my surprise, once inside the Museum I was alone. Not that the thousands of people grazing around have gone at once, just that when I put my eye behind the viewfinder of my Nikon everything softened out and quieted down.

My wife had her ear glued to the audio guide and never interrupted me in my inspired journey through those wonders. I was literally absent, walking on a cloud and filling GB of images. Thus, I wasn’t shooting like a madman; neither was I looking for the most famous statues or masterpieces. I mostly shot what I liked, the way I liked it and using the available light as much as I could. Looking back at the images I have the exact proof of what I’m now stating so confidently. The only real good images I have are those I shot with the most passionate feeling, being attracted by the details or the rim of light coming through the windows, or the composition I managed to get by moving around it and profoundly looking for the best possible angle (at least for me).

Last but not least I shall not forget the editing work in Lightroom. I couldn’t be happier of my reading of David duChemin book “Vision & Voice”. His work is having a profound influence in the developing of my images and especially for things like sculptures, I believe that the editing process is utterly important and I tried to take care of it the best I could. I hope that they manage to convey what I want them to, and the way I felt about them.

There’s still a long way to go but we’re working hard J

Three from Rome

I have been few days in Italy visiting the family and enjoying my vacations; needless to say I had an amazing time. Few days in Rome and few others in Tuscany allowed me to grab quite a few Gigabytes of images with my D90.  For these two weeks I borrowed a Nikkor 24-70 f2.8 that I have used a lot. Is not a lens designed for an APS sensor but I must say that was tough for me to unscrew it from the camera. What a superb piece of engineering! What a sharpness! It has been an unfortunate move to carry it with me, now I brutally raised my quality demand, and in addiction to that I also put my eye on the 70-200 f2.8VR to replace the already sold 18-200VR.  I’m longing for a fast bankruptcy because they would both work well with a FX body…..

Anyway, back to Rome for the moment. I took my wife for some brief sightseeing visits and collected most of the shots during a late afternoon one that eventually stretched into the night. Being together with someone who wants to see things and walk around at a different pace than yours is not the best option to do the things properly but she’s patient and I had my share of time. As a matter of fact I also carried my tripod, which is not known for being a tool that fastens things up.

The Gianicolo is one of those spots you must visit. Is one of the roman hills and the view you get from there is quite staggering. Rome spreads in front of your eyes like a renaissance painting, the old mixes with the new and the churches’ domes scratch the polluted sky. The sky was dark but the sun was finding its way through the clouds giving me the chance to grab at least a dramatic light. For this image I did a bit of work in Lightroom, transforming it in a duotone and pumping up the contrast. For the original shot I used a ND Grad filter but I enhanced a bit more the sky with an additional grad filter in post.

Then it got dark and it was that magical hour when the tungsten lit buildings create that amazing contrast against the dark blue sky. I love this time of the day, even an average image collects few extra points, and most of them are quite elegant to say at least. Doesn’­­t last for too long though, so you have to work pretty fast to seize the moment. In this case I had a problem with quite a bulky and dark object in the foreground, name it statue: Marco Aurelio’s. I took a first shot, and it was quite poor. With a 30 seconds exposure I had the sky well exposed as well as part of the building, but the statue was pitch dark and the lights burned out. So I took a different approach; slowed the exposure to 20 seconds and pulled the SB800 out of the waist jacket. I don’t know how many times I have used the speedlight so far to dramatically change the result of an image, being this animated or not, this for sure has been one of those. With the camera on the tripod, during the whole length of the exposure I painted the statue with the flash and pulled out most of the details not long before hidden in dark shadows.

When the sky turned black I was still around Piazza Venezia trying to figure out how to make a decent image with so many people around, work in progress, cars and bad lights. Finally I decided to go for the Chiesa del Santissimo Nome di Maria, in front of the Foro Traiano including the famed Colonna Traiana. There’s nothing really special in this image, but I had a ball working on the HSL in Lightroom retouching saturation, luminance and hue in most of the colors.

Obviously there’s much more photos in the laptop’s hard disk but either I had not much time to edit them, or they were not worth it. Soon more stuff about Rome though, maybe some museum….