Exploring Venice

Venice, Italy

There is no better city to roam around in with no destination in mind than Venice, Italy. The history and age-old architecture is something to see. The city has such a romantic feel to it with all of it's canals and gondolas. What I really like is getting out from the main tourist areas to see what the real Venice is all about. There are gems found in almost every nook and cranny of the the city's back alleyways (canalways?). 

For the photographer, the city is found almost everywhere. The challenge in capturing some of these "backstreets" is balancing out the light and the shadows of the scenes. Cameras try to average out the light resulting in poor results (the human eye is much more effective in this). The advances in editing software like Lightroom (my editing program of choice) allow for easy fixing of the scene's highlights and shadows.  This image, for example, was quite dark in the shadows, which hid the details and darkened the reflections. With a quick adjustment of the shadow slider, the details and reflection just popped on out.