Source Photos

Duomo Scaffold

It's no secret that air pollution and general tourist traffic are eroding many of Europe's most prominent landmarks. This has resulted in numerous restoration efforts in Tuscany that spare no expense to erase hundreds of years of dirt and grime. Although it's easy to applaud these efforts, it not necessarily easy to swallow when you have just a few days in Florence and your majestic view of the Duomo is shrouded in a lattice of steel pipes.

 Duomo Scaffold Nikon D2H
EV +.33
1/250 sec, f/4
Focal length 36mm

When I saw that the restoration wasn't going to allow me to take any traditional images of Florence's famous cathedral, I shifted gears and looked for an alternative composition. I was thankful that the skies were gray and overcast on that day, which minimized the shadows that were cast and saturated the colors. I set up my tripod and composed a photo that integrated the scaffolding with the façade of the building itself. After shooting a few dozen images like this, I caught this view as I was walking away and glanced over my shoulder for one last look. I didn't bother to set up the tripod, I just hand-held it and shot a bracketed set of images. This one used a +.33 EV compensation setting, which brought out the color definition just a bit more than the others.

San Galgano 5

By now you're getting the sense that San Galgano was one of my favorite landmarks in Tuscany (you've noticed that it's made several appearances in the images). This is one of the last photos I shot, taken just minutes before I was leaving. I had taken perhaps a few hundred photos that were cropped and composed more abstractly or dramatically, and I was making one more pass through the structure, capturing photos that were more documentary in nature. Similar to the Duomo Scaffold photo above, this was another quick-capture, hand-held shot that I selected because of its strong, intuitive composition.

 San Galgano 5
Nikon D2H
1/80 sec, f/7.1
Focal length 18mm