Venice at Night

The city of Venice was founded in 421 AD.  Nearly two thousand years ago.  A loooong time.  It has had a long and sometimes violent past.  Locals don’t walk between the two pillars in Piazza San Marco, as that was where executions took place.  The plague hit the city on occasion.

I suspect the city might be haunted, if you believe in such things….

So let’s go on a Nighttime Photography tour!

Should be fun, right?  Running around a haunted city at night?  With the author of horror novels?!?!?!

Da-dah-daaaaaaah!

 

Here is my scary, ghostly picture, to get you in the proper frame of mind.

 

These drive the B.F. nuts, he wants me to work on taking pictures that are straight

 

I had heard of the Venice Experience from some of the reviews I read.  I checked them out on TripAdvisor and on their website, and liked what I saw.  The company is run by a couple who moved from Baltimore in the US to Venice to live.  We talked about their different tours, and decided a photography tour would be nice.  We had our choice of early morning, during the day or nighttime.  Since neither of us had done much nighttime picture taking, we decided to go for that one.  The price was affordable and it was only the two of us on the tour.

The Blog Fodder (BF) is, by his own admission, and old film guy.  He got his digital camera for our second trip to Italy, and is still working on figuring out digital.  His philosophy is to take one perfect picture.  I take 4,583 shots and then delete 4,582 of them.  A lot of his pictures have the back of my head, since I get tired of waiting.

That’s me in the hat from 2012, I was not talking on a cell phone, honest!

 The BF had a Nikon D7000 and he brought the nice, shiny 18-300mm lens I bought him for Christmas.  I have a Canon G12, which is deemed a “cute little camera” by the BF.  But it does almost as much as his.  And I want to point out, while he took some very spectacular pictures, I had a lot of nice ones too!  The photos in this blog area combinations of both of our pictures.

(The BF also added that we had a MeFoto Road trip carbon tripod and he used UV and polarizing filters…I thought that was too much information)

 

I had several nice emails with The Venice Experience to set up this tour.  We agreed to meet Mike at the Pillar with the winged Lion in Piazza San Marco at 7:30.  Mike was pretty easy to spot in his Baltimore Raven’s jacket…not many of those in Venice.

 We really hit it off with Mike.  While he is not a photography professional, he does have a lot of good advice on how to get nice nighttime shots, and he really knows some great places in Venice to take those pictures.

I really expected this to be the BF’s show and I would just be the hanger-oner.  But Mike made sure I was involved too.  It was a lot of fun

 

 

 

 

BF and Mike looking at an old well

 

 

 

We stopped by a canal and got some fun light trail shots.

 

 

We took several of this funny café.

 

We took this shot of a church that was very far away, and almost too dark to see with the eye.  I like the Vaporetto light trail in front. 

 

Here it is in the daytime 

Some of our favorite pictures from the tour

 

 

 

 

Overall, one of the best tours we’ve taken

 

Ever

 

Anywhere!