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enetian Spirit || Venice, Italy

While the weather in Bled was getting worse and it started raining I packed my bags and left that mesmerizing little town. The journey continued to one of the most unique cities in Italy, Venice. A three hour drive through the heavy rain really made me hopeless for the weather and the sunset I have planned to shoot that day, but as I was coming closer to Venice I realized that the weather is clearing up, and I have to say I did check the weather forecast app more than 30 times during the road trip, concluding that they Lie a lot, and actually the predictions are terrible (That was good, because they predicted rain). I parked the car, and the price of this was damn high, really terrible experience and something that you should be careful if you plan to go to Venice, (I suggest leaving the car a bit further away and go there by train) Dragging the bags was not fun as well, and when I arrived at the hotel around 6 o’clock I was super exhausted, never the less I just checked in, got some water and headed to the Rialto Bridge.

With the perfect view through the Grand Canal which is the division part between San Polo and San Marco, Ponte di Rialto is the most beautiful bridge and the biggest one in Venice, and believe me there are hundreds, or maybe even thousands of them there. Arriving there at around 18.30 and seeing the magnificent sunset that was about to happen was a big relief! Navigating through people who were taking selifes from the rialto bridge was really difficult and worse than that was finding a safe spot so people won’t actually touch the tripod while it was shooting, and that was definitely necessary (I’ll explain why in the part where I show how I processed the image). And it all went as planned!

Regarding the shot, I did around 200 different shots with many different settings, and this is why it was necessary for the position of the camera to be exact in all the shots so it won’t cause any trouble in the post production. The base image is consisted of 4 blended images in Oloneo (for the first time), and after that I did load the same images again on top of that so I could manually blend some parts which I did not like in photoshop, using different techniques such as luminosity masking, free hand masking and color Selection… I really loved what Oloneo did to the sky, but I was not really happy with the bottom part of the images… Other than that, later on I did capture a single shot only for the water, where the gondola was placed in the part that leads the viewer eye into the shot, and I did use a different speed for this shot to eliminate any motion that could happen… The third series of shots were actually for the city lights, and I did capture around 1.30 latest I did place my tripod to this exact location… With the help of Color Efex Pro 4 and Viveza2 I was able to fine tune this image and the colors, achieving the exact colors I wanted, further more with Topaz Labs DeNoise I eliminated the noise in some part of the sky and the darkest parts of the image to achieve the best quality