Earlier this year we visited Bologna and I published a short post of street photography – people and shops. Recently we went there again and I was able to get in some evening and night photography. Again, these were taken on my Fujifilm X-Pro3 camera which is assuming a similar place in my affections to my old Contax G1 35mm film camera.
Bologna, Via Altabella. The lady was making pasta in the front window, and although she looks a bit disapproving in this shot, a moment later she rewarded me with a dazzling smile (which I wish I had taken). Fujifilm X-Pro3 camera, Fujifilm XF 16mm lens (click to enlarge).
In terms of image quality the X-Pro3 cannot match my medium-format Fujifilm GFX 50R camera with its much larger sensor, but it has its advantages. It is small and unobtrusive compared to the larger camera, and much lighter – where the GFX 50R has brass and steel, the X-Pro3 has magnesium and titanium. And the lenses for larger cameras need more glass, which adds weight. As a result the X-Pro3 with a 16mm lens weighs a bit over 700 grams, while the GFX 50R with its 32-64mm lens weighs in at over 1.7 kilograms.
Fujifilm GFX 50R and X-Pro3 comparison (click to enlarge).
Of course night photography has challenges – as the light in the sky fades, shadows become darker and you need to boost the ISO, which makes the resulting images noisier, which is to say more grainy. Modern software can help a lot with noise reduction – I use something called Topaz DeNoise AI.
Evening in a back street, Bologna. Fujifilm X-Pro3 camera, Fujifilm XF 16mm lens (click to enlarge).
One of the best times is when the light in the sky is at about the same level as that illuminating the objects you are photographing. This period is quite short, although it lasts a bit longer in summer. Digital post-processing does allow you to extend that period by adjusting highlights and shadows, but if overdone it will look artificial.
A well-lit archway with blue natural light beyond, Bologna. Fujifilm X-Pro3 camera, Fujifilm XF 16mm lens (click to enlarge).
I was using a wide-angle lens, which has some disadvantages – objects and people appear smaller. But it has some advantages for street photography. The wide angle allows you to point the camera past people rather than at them, while still getting them in the composition.
Diners at a street-side trattoria, Bologna. Fujifilm X-Pro3 camera, Fujifilm XF 16mm lens (click to enlarge).
Wide-angle lenses can also give you a lot of foreground in the shot, which is not a good thing if the foreground is boring. On the other hand if you can make the foreground interesting, for example by looking for people casting long shadows, it can add to the mood, or even become one of the subjects of the composition.
Making the shadows part of the composition, Bologna. Fujifilm X-Pro3 camera, Fujifilm XF 16mm lens (click to enlarge).In this case, the shadows cast by the backs of the seats are what first caught my eye. Gelateria, Bologna. Fujifilm X-Pro3 camera, Fujifilm XF 16mm lens (click to enlarge).
By the time we got to the main piazza, the sky was getting a lot darker, but was still bright enough to create silhouettes. Silhouettes in night photography can be overrated, but when they are instantly recognisable like the Statue of Neptune, they can be worth it.
Piazza Grande, Bologna. Fujifilm X-Pro3 camera, Fujifilm XF 16mm lens (click to enlarge).Statue of Neptune, Bologna. The shape of his trident was borrowed by the Maserati brothers as a badge for their cars. Fujifilm X-Pro3 camera, Fujifilm XF 16mm lens (click to enlarge).
Eventually it got to the point where the only source of light was street lights and shop windows.
Night in Bologna. Fujifilm X-Pro3 camera, Fujifilm XF 16mm lens (click to enlarge).Night in Bologna. Fujifilm X-Pro3 camera, Fujifilm XF 16mm lens (click to enlarge).
Not long ago, most of the shop interiors would have been lit by fluorescent tubes. The light produced by these would come out on film and digital sensors as a ghastly blue-green. And incandescent light bulbs came out as very yellow, so when both sources were present, it was almost impossible to balance them without some advanced post-processing techniques. These days people mostly light their shops with LEDs, which produce light that looks a lot more natural to a camera. A win for night photography as well as for the environment.
In the days when this shop was lit by fluorescent lights, the interior would have been a strange green colour in a photograph. Via Oberdan, Bologna. Fujifilm X-Pro3 camera, Fujifilm XF 16mm lens (click to enlarge).
Lighting coming from odd directions can help the street photographer to pick out a subject and try and tell a story. As someone who mostly did landscape photography for many years I will admit that I am still coming to grips with this, but it is fun when it works out.
Bologna evening. People head from a deserted street towards a distant scene of activity. Fujifilm X-Pro3 camera, Fujifilm XF 16mm lens (click to enlarge).Bologna. A couple walk off together while a man looks at his phone. Fujifilm X-Pro3 camera, Fujifilm XF 16mm lens (click to enlarge).Bologna. A staff member from a gelateria rolls herself a cigarette while on a break. Fujifilm X-Pro3 camera, Fujifilm XF 16mm lens (click to enlarge).
Lake Maggiore is the largest of the north Italian lakes, sitting between between Lombardy, Piedmont and Switzerland. The area has some famous attractions, such as the Borromean Islands, and some less famous but very worthy ones.
This post describes a visit we made there a few years ago (pre-COVID). We flew from Australia, and thanks to a delayed flight from Melbourne we missed a connection in Dubai, arriving at Milan six or seven hours late. We then drove into the mountains above Lake Maggiore, arriving very late in the evening where our kindly hosts were still waiting to let us into the property.
The property was located in the strip of cleared land that lies under the cable car connecting the town of Stresa on the lake shore with the top of Mount Mottarone. That gave us some wonderful views, and since the cable car was not then in operation, it was very quiet.
Note: this is the cable car that was involved in a terrible accident in 2021. Investigators found that a safety mechanism had been deliberately disengaged.
Lake Maggiore, from the slopes above Stresa, looking north to the town of Verbania and beyond to Switzerland. Hasselblad 501C/M camera, Zeiss Sonnar CF 150mm lens, CFV-50C digital back (click to enlarge).
The day after we arrived saw storms and cold weather. The day after that was clear and sunny, and thanks to the bad weather the day before, there had been an unseasonable (it was May) dump of snow on the mountains, making excellent conditions for photography.
Geology
The great lakes of Northern Italy – Maggiore, Como and Garda, were all formed by glacial action in the Ice Age, and thus run roughly from north to south, from the Alps down towards the Po Valley. The Alps, formed by the collision of tectonic plates, run more or less east-west here. This is particularly clear in the case of Lake Maggiore, and makes for some spectacular scenery, particularly from the top of Mottarone, looking northwards to where the Lake enters Switzerland.
Lake Maggiore looking north-east from the top of Mottarone. Hasselblad 501C/M camera, Zeiss Distagon CF 60mm lens, CFV-50C digital back (click to enlarge)
Stresa
Stresa, while apparently of medieval origin, is today largely a 19th-Century resort town with some large hotels, and villas which are a bit architecturally reminiscent of Victorian-era post offices and fire stations in parts of provincial Australia. It therefore has a slightly faded death-in-Venice atmosphere and one can easily imagine chaps in top hats strolling along the lake front and helping ladies down from carriages. Still, as resort towns go it is an excellent example of the breed, and the scenery obviously keeps the tourists coming in the 21st Century.
Stresa, an ornate villa. Hasselblad 501C/M camera, Zeiss Distagon CF 60mm lens, CFV-50C digital back (click to enlarge)Stresa, Palazzo di CIttà and Tea Rooms. Google Nexus 6P phone camera (click to enlarge).
Lago d’Orta
We were struck by how comparatively few medieval buildings there were around, compared with further south in Italy. I suppose that, it being a wealthy area, people could afford to knock their old places down and rebuild.
In any case, if it is medieval that you want, a visit to the Lago d’Orta not far away will satisfy you. Lake Orta, just west of Lake Maggiore, is much smaller but formed by the same glacial system. The main town on the lake is Orta San Giulio, named after a Saint Julius who died on the little island nearby and was commemorated by a small oratory there from the 5th Century (completely obliterated by later buildings). The island appears to be some sort of pilgrimage centre these days, but whether this is due to a surviving cult of St Julius or for some other reason I was unable to establish.
The Island of Isola San Giulio, from the town of Orta San Giulio. Hasselblad 501C/M camera, Zeiss Sonnar CF 150mm lens, CFV-50C digital back (click to enlarge)Isola San Giulio from the shores of Lake Orta. Hasselblad 501C/M camera, Zeiss Sonnar CF 150mm lens, CFV-50C digital back (click to enlarge).
There is a splendid medieval town hall in the middle of the town. This presented a slight photographic challenge, which I will discuss later.
Orta San Giulio, Palazzo della Comunità. Hasselblad 501C/M camera, Zeiss Distagon CF 60mm lens, CFV-50C digital back. Multiple images combined in Photoshop (click to enlarge).
The Borromean Islands
For us, as for many other visitors, the main attraction of the region was a visit to the Borromean Islands. What are they? Well, in Lake Maggiore, just off the shore from Stresa, are three large islands – Isola Bella, Isola dei Pescatori, Isola Madre plus a couple of little ones – and they are owned by the Borromeo Family. This family started out in Milan around 1300 and is still going today – I believe the heir to the family title is a countess who is married to the head of the FIAT empire.
On the way to today they got very rich, produced several cardinals (but no popes) and one saint. The saint (San Carlo Borromeo) was archbishop of Milan during the 16th Century and was canonised not for extraordinary acts of piety but for playing a major part in the purification of the Catholic Church from corruption and the overhaul of doctrine that we call the Counter-Reformation. A bit like getting an Order of Australia for conspicuous service in public administration.
Isola Bella
The Borromeo Counts started acquiring the islands in the 16th Century, and in the 17th Century Count Carlo III renamed one of them Isola Bella after his wife, as a present. It means “Beautiful Island”, but it was also a pun on her name, which was Isabella. He then built a palace at one end and started an extraordinary baroque garden at the other, also as a present.
Isola Bella and Isola dei Pescatori. Hasselblad 501C/M camera, Zeiss Distagon CF 60mm lens, CFV-50C digital back. Four images stiched in Photoshop (click to enlarge).
Actually, the count didn’t manage to buy all of Isola Bella. A few indomitable fishermen refused to sell, doubtless with an eye to the profits of the tourist trade in four hundred years’ time, so there is now a small disorderly village running along a part of the lake front, all now converted into souvenir shops and the like.
Isola Bella from the lake shore. The palace is at the back of the island in this view, the gardens at the front. Hasselblad 501C/M camera, Zeiss Distagon CF 60mm lens, CFV-50C digital back (click to enlarge).
The garden was completed by his next few successors, who had large quantities of soil ferried across to build up a series of monumental terraces. These were exuberantly decorated with statues, including several unicorns, a reference to the Borromeo coat of arms.
We turned up in Stresa nice and early, early enough to get a free car park opposite the extraordinary Regina Palace Hotel (picture below). Then we walked to the ferry terminal and bought what was basically an all-day ticket for the central section of the Lake Maggiore public ferry system – doubtless for a good deal less than it would have cost to get a ticket to the islands with one of the private tour companies.
Stresa, Regina Palace Hotel. Google Nexus 6P phone camera (click to enlarge).
Having started early we therefore ended up on the first public ferry service to Isola Bella for the day. A couple of large French tour groups on private boats had beaten us there. To get to the gardens you have to buy a ticket to the palace, and go all the way through the palace. We took a tactical decision to do a speed tour of the palace and get to the gardens as quickly as possible. This was complicated by the tour groups who would spread out to block access to whichever room they were in but once it became clear that they were not going to move aside for us voluntarily, we did a bit of “scusi… scusi… scusi…” harassment and eventually penetrated their cordon sanitaire and made it into the gardens first. We had the gardens on Isola Bella all to ourselves, in beautiful weather, for probably fifteen minutes before the next few intrepid types broke through the French blockade.
Isola Bella; the gardens. Hasselblad 501C/M camera, Zeiss Distagon CF 60mm lens, CFV-50C digital back (click to enlarge).Isola Bella; the gardens. Hasselblad 501C/M camera, Zeiss Distagon CF 60mm lens, CFV-50C digital back (click to enlarge).Isola Bella; the gardens. Hasselblad 501C/M camera, Zeiss Distagon CF 60mm lens, CFV-50C digital back (click to enlarge).Isola Bella; the gardens. Hasselblad 501C/M camera, Zeiss Distagon CF 60mm lens, CFV-50C digital back (click to enlarge).Isola Bella; the gardens. Hasselblad 501C/M camera, Zeiss Distagon CF 60mm lens, CFV-50C digital back (click to enlarge).Isola Bella; the gardens. Hasselblad 501C/M camera, Zeiss Distagon CF 60mm lens, CFV-50C digital back (click to enlarge).Isola Bella; the gardens. Hasselblad 501C/M camera, Zeiss Distagon CF 60mm lens, CFV-50C digital back (click to enlarge).Isola Bella; the gardens. Hasselblad 501C/M camera, Zeiss Distagon CF 60mm lens, CFV-50C digital back (click to enlarge).
Isola dei Pescatori
The “Island of the Fishermen” is the next largest of the islands, and the only one to have a permanent population, albeit a small one. Having finished in the gardens at Isola Bella we made our way to the ferry jetty where one was just arriving and we hopped on to get to Isola dei Pescatori. There we found a little waterfront place called Trattoria Toscanini where we had a drink and watched the motor boats buzzing back and forth. The famous conductor wasn’t a local boy, but was apparently a regular visitor.
Isola dei Pescatore. Hasselblad 501C/M camera, Zeiss Distagon CF 60mm lens, CFV-50C digital back (click to enlarge).Isola dei Pescatore. Hasselblad 501C/M camera, Zeiss Distagon CF 60mm lens, CFV-50C digital back (click to enlarge).Isola dei Pescatore. Hasselblad 501C/M camera, Zeiss Distagon CF 60mm lens, CFV-50C digital back (click to enlarge).
Then we walked around the island – it doesn’t take long – and poked around a few shops before having lunch. After having checked out several restaurants we decided that the Trattoria Toscanini seemed as nice as any and went back there. I had perch from the lake and Louise had a fritto misto of various lake fish. While we were eating, the restaurant cat turned up to check that all was in order. Being the resident cat at a fish restaurant on an island called “Island of the Fishermen” seems like a fairly cushy gig, and the cat did seem to consider that all in all the universe was ordered fairly sensibly. Below is a picture of the cat with the palace end of Isola Bella in the background.
Isola dei Pescatore; the restaurant cat. Google Nexus 6P phone camera (click to enlarge).
Santa Caterina del Sasso
Another ferry trip we did from Stresa was to visit the convent of Santa Caterina del Sasso (Saint Catherine of the Rock). It was originally a hermitage that is built into a sheer rock and which until recently could only have been reached from the water.
Santa Caterina del Sasso. Hasselblad 501C/M camera, Zeiss Distagon CF 60mm lens, CFV-50C digital back (click to enlarge).
The story of the site is that in the 12th Century a merchant, in gratitude for having survived a storm at sea, became a hermit on this solitary rock, which in the usual way acquired a reputation for sanctity, a chapel and a religious community. The religious community was suppressed by the Austrians in the 19th Century, and the site was re-occupied and restored by the Dominicans in the 1980s.
Santa Caterina del Sasso. Hasselblad 501C/M camera, Zeiss Distagon CF 60mm lens, CFV-50C digital back (click to enlarge).Santa Caterina del Sasso. Hasselblad 501C/M camera, Zeiss Distagon CF 60mm lens, CFV-50C digital back (click to enlarge).
It is now possible to reach the site on foot from above, but approaching it from the water is not only consistent with tradition, but gives by far the best views.
Santa Caterina del Sasso. Hasselblad 501C/M camera, Zeiss Distagon CF 60mm lens, CFV-50C digital back (click to enlarge).
A Note on the Photography
The challenge in photographing the town hall in Orta San Giulio was that it looked onto a busy square, full of tourists, but if you look back at the photograph above, the square looks deserted.
I don’t mind including the odd human figure in such shots, providing they are of the right kind – an old lady on a bicycle, say, or someone walking a dog, or maybe a shopkeeper. But in this case the tourists were too numerous, and too brightly dressed, to allow me to capture the atmosphere of the place. I waited a while in the hope that they would move off, but in a phenomenon well-known to photographers, as each group left, a new one arrived. So I decided to try a creative method of making them go away (shouting “fire!” would not have worked).
You can of course “paint out” a figure in Photoshop or similar software, but the more figures there are, and the more complex the background, the harder it is. That wasn’t going to be an option here.
I had a nice sturdy Manfrotto tripod with me, so I set it up in a corner of the square where it would not obstruct anyone, and mounted the Hasselblad on top, attaching a shutter release cable so I could take multiple identical pictures from exactly the same place.
The aim was that each part of the square should be free of people in at least one picture. So as the tourists ambled about, I took the several shots I thought I needed. In the event five was enough – all identical, you will recall, except for the moving people.
I then combined them into several “layers” in Photoshop, erasing each figure to reveal the empty space in the next layer down. The result is as you see in the photograph above. If you look hard you can see three figures I didn’t bother about – someone with a shopping bag under the arches of the building, a gentleman approaching down the street to the right, and a lady in a pink dress bending over and looking at the wares in a shop on the right. All three are in shadow and don’t really disturb the composition.
These days you can achieve the same effect with a lot less effort, with clever software which merges the layers and deletes anything that is only present in one layer. I tried it just now using Affinity Photo 2 software (which is what I use these days instead of Photoshop) and it was almost instantaneous, even on a rather old laptop. It even aligns the photos if you haven’t taken them with the camera on a tripod.
Bologna is one of the best places in Italy for street photography, of the candid sort but also of some beautifully presented shopfronts and window displays. We recently spent a couple of days in Bologna with friends, and here is a short photo essay. All these were taken on my new Fujifilm X-Pro3 which is a small, discreet rangefinder-style digital camera.
Fujifilm X-Pro3 (source: Fujifilm.com)
The historic centre of Bologna is a good place for street photography, for a few reasons. One is that there are enough tourists that the guy with the camera doesn’t stand out, but enough locals that your picture is not going to be full of tourists.
Bologna Via Oberdan. Fujifilm X-Pro3 camera, Fujifilm XF 16mm lens (click to enlarge).Bologna, Via Oberdan. Fujifilm X-Pro3 camera, Fujifilm XF 16mm lens (click to enlarge).Bologna, Via Oberdan. Fujifilm X-Pro3 camera, Fujifilm XF 16mm lens (click to enlarge).
Another is that even when a shopkeeper does see you taking a photograph, he or she is probably used to it. A third is that the elegant shopfronts and food displays in the market quarter deserve to be photographed – when the proprietor has spent that much trouble making it look nice, it is a fitting compliment to take a picture of it.
In any case, in shops I often ask first. “Posso?” (may I?) I ask, pointing at the camera. No-one has ever said no, but it makes me feel more comfortable knowing that I have been given permission. In the picture above, the man in the cheese shop said “certo” (of course) and carried on cleaning his counter.
Immediately to the east of the Piazza Maggiore in Bologna is a small area of narrow streets and many shops, mainly butchers, fishmongers, greengrocers, wine merchants and the like. This is the historic market area, and the best time to go there is in the morning, when all the produce is fresh, and in any case some shops like the fishmongers close for the day at lunchtime.
Bologna is home to the world’s oldest university (founded in 1088) and it has the energy and edginess that one associates with student towns. But it is also a prosperous place – productive agriculture and high-tech industry clearly bring in a lot of wealth, and have done for a while. In the centre the shopfronts can therefore be very elegant – sometimes retaining their original antique signage when the actual shop has been taken over by something more modern.
Bologna shopfront near the Piazza Maggiore. Fujifilm X-Pro3 camera, Fujifilm XF 16mm lens (click to enlarge).Bologna, shopfront near the Piazza Maggiore. Fujifilm X-Pro3 camera, Fujifilm XF 16mm lens (click to enlarge).
But one of the special things about Bologna is that the Bolognese take food very, very seriously indeed, even by Italian standards. The food shops are therefore temples to gastronomy, places of wonder, delight and not inconsiderable expense.
One of the classiest shops in this area is “Atti & Figli”. You can walk away from there somewhat lighter in the pocket, but clutching a couple of hundred grams of tortellini in very elegant packaging and the feeling that somehow you have temporarily been admitted to an exclusive club.
Bologna, Atti & Figli. Note the exquisite packaging, and the “English jams for refined palates”. Fujifilm X-Pro3 camera, Fujifilm XF 16mm lens (click to enlarge).Even the camera shops look elegant in Bologna. Fujifilm X-Pro3 camera, Fujifilm XF 16mm lens (click to enlarge).Bologna, Via Clavature. Fujifilm X-Pro3 camera, Fujifilm XF 16mm lens (click to enlarge).Bologna, Via Clavature. Fujifilm X-Pro3 camera, Fujifilm XF 16mm lens (click to enlarge).Bologna, Via Pescherie Vecchie. Fujifilm X-Pro3 camera, Fujifilm XF 16mm lens (click to enlarge).One of the signs says “the tortellini for fooling husbands that you made it yourselves”. Fujifilm X-Pro3 camera, Fujifilm XF 16mm lens (click to enlarge).Bologna, Vicolo Ranocchi. Fujifilm X-Pro3 camera, Fujifilm XF 16mm lens (click to enlarge).
A note on the photography – black and white conversion
I was very pleased with the photograph above of the man in the cheese shop – the simplicity of the scene and the rich colours required little in the way of post-processing. But nonetheless I was interested to see if I could make it more dramatic by converting it to back and white. Most cameras (and smartphones) have a monochrome option, and sometimes this does little more than convert each pixel in the red, green and blue channels to the same intensity in greyscale.
But have you ever seen a black and white photograph and wondered why it seems more dramatic than its colour equivalent would have been?
The answer may be that the colours have not been given equal priority in conversion to greyscale. This was something that the old film photographers understood well; when I was a child learning to take black and white pictures, my father showed me how to attach a yellow filter in sunny weather. This had the effect of blocking much of the blue light, and darkening skies while leaving clouds white, making it much more dramatic.
You can do the same with a digital photograph. In the image below, I boosted the red and yellow while reducing the blue, using Affinity Photo 2 software. This made the orange colours of the cheeses seem to glow, while reducing white and blue – see how the man’s white coat has become dark. Is it an “accurate” photograph? Not in some ways, but that’s not always the point.
Man in a cheese shop: monochrome conversion with reds and yellows enhanced and blues suppressed. Fujifilm X-Pro3 camera, Fujifilm XF 16mm lens (click to enlarge).Screen grab from Affinity Photo 2 software, showing relative proportions of colours converted to greyscale (click to enlarge).
Note: we made a second visit to Bologna a couple of months later. On that occasion I took quite a few evening shots, which you can see here.
Here is a short photographic essay on street photography in Naples, with thoughts on the genre as a whole.
I feel a bit diffident about taking candid photographs of strangers – I talked about this before in my post on Street Photography. There are a few ways around this – apart from sticking exclusively to landscapes, of course.
One is to include people as anonymous distant or abstract objects in a composition.
Naples, Piazza del Plebiscito. Fujifilm GFX 50R camera, Fujifilm GF32-64mm R LM WR lens, two images stitched in Affinity Photo software (click to enlarge).
Another is to choose occasions when implied consent may reasonably be assumed – such as street performers or people taking part in historical pageants. People doing both are even better, although it seems only fair to toss a euro in the hat if you take their photographs.
If in doubt you can always ask – pointing at the camera and raising your eyebrows will get the point across fairly well. People in professional environments – shopkeepers or craftsmen – often respond positively.
And it is really hard to define, but there are certain places when you just feel that people are less self-conscious, more exuberant and outgoing, and less likely to be bothered by the presence of a camera. Such a place is Naples.
Naples, Montesanto Market. Fujifilm GFX 50R camera, Fujifilm GF32-64mm R LM WR lens (click to enlarge).Naples Lungomare. Fujifilm GF32-64mm R LM WR lens (click to enlarge).Naples Lungomare. Fujifilm GF32-64mm R LM WR lens (click to enlarge).Naples, Piazza Giulio Rodinò. Fujifilm GFX 50R camera, Fujifilm GF32-64mm R LM WR lens (click to enlarge).Naples: Via Chiaia. Fujifilm GFX 50R camera, Fujifilm GF32-64mm R LM WR lens (click to enlarge).
These things are admittedly subjective and I am quite likely to be projecting my own responses to the city onto others, but both times we have visited Naples I have taken a great many pictures of people and I’ve never felt that my doing so was unwelcome.
Naples, Spaccanapoli. Hasselblad 501C/M camera, Zeiss Distagon C 50mm lens, 6x6cm film back, Fujifilm Velvia 50 film (click to enlarge).Naples, Via Chiaia. Fujifilm GFX 50R camera, Fujifilm GF32-64mm R LM WR lens (click to enlarge).
A lot of the time, the attraction of photographing people just going about their daily lives is that it helps you capture a sense of what it is like living there. Of course there is plenty of scope for being selective – if you just chose happy people, you could make a city seem like a wonderful place to live, and if you just chose down-and-outs, it could seem horrible. You see this sort of tendentious selection quite a lot in journalism. I’m not saying that it is necessarily dishonest, but if you are illustrating a story that is making a particular point, then obviously your choice of illustrations will be consistent with that.
But I am not a journalist, and I don’t really have any agenda. So for me the point is to try and illustrate the impression a place makes on me, as honestly as possible. Yes, that means I am going to be selective, but with the the best of motives. So for Naples I try and take pictures of happy people, because that how Naples makes me feel. Then again, people in Naples really do look happier.
Naples Lungomare. Fujifilm GFX 50R camera, Fujifilm GF100-200mm R LM OIS WR lens (click to enlarge).Naples Lungomare. Fujifilm GFX 50R camera, Fujifilm GF32-64mm R LM WR lens (click to enlarge).Naples, Castel dell’Ovo. Fujifilm GFX 50R camera, Fujifilm GF32-64mm R LM WR lens (click to enlarge).Naples Lungomare. Fujifilm GFX 50R camera, Fujifilm GF32-64mm R LM WR lens (click to enlarge).
Some of the best street photographs, for me, are those that seem to tell a story. In the picture below, is the girl on the shore dreaming that one day it will be her turn to be drinking champagne on a superyacht?
Naples Lungomare. Fujifilm GFX 50R camera, Fujifilm GFX 50R camera, Fujifilm GF100-200mm R LM OIS WR lens (click to enlarge).
And in some cases the attraction of the photograph is just the sheer oddness of it – what on earth is going on here?
Naples: Goldilocks hung the three bears out to dry. Fujifilm GFX 50R camera, Fujifilm GF32-64mm R LM WR lens (click to enlarge).
In August 2022 we visited Naples, and took a day trip to the almost absurdly beautiful island of Procida. I took a couple of hundred photographs – here are a few of them.
Procida is one of the islands in the Bay of Naples, of which the largest is Ischia and the most famous is Capri.
The Bay of Naples (source: Google)
A Brief History
Like pretty much every other geographical feature around Naples, Procida is the product of volcanic activity. Apparently it is made up of four volcanoes, all now dormant. Human settlement on the island is very ancient, with some Mycenaean Greek artefacts (ie from around 1500 BC) having been found there, and Hellenic Greek settlements from the period of colonisation a few hundred years later. The Greeks of Magna Graecia were famously bellicose and the steep-sided hill at the eastern end of the island would have made an attractive defensive position.
The ancient Romans, like us, could afford to think about enjoying themselves rather than worrying about being invaded. And so just like us they had a good eye for real estate locations, and in classical times Procida was a popular place for wealthy people to build luxurious villas.
Good defences became important again in the Middle Ages, with Saracen raids, then a succession of wars as various dynasties fought over Naples. At some point the natural defences were augmented by artificial ones, and the area within those walls became known as the Terra Murata (“walled land”). The current structure on the site dates from the early 16th Century and is known as the Castle (or Palace) of d’Avalos, after the Spanish cardinal who had it built. In Bourbon times it became a prison, and continued to be used as such until the 1980s, housing a few notorious mafiosi.
The “Terra Murata”and Port of Procida from the ferry. Fujifilm GFX 50R camera, Fujifilm GF32-64mm R LM WR lens (click to enlarge).
Procida Now
These days Procida is a bustling place, especially around the port, but was hardly overrun when we visited in late August. This may partly be because non-residents may not bring cars to the island for most of the year, but I believe that it is also Procida’s good fortune that a majority of tourists opt to stay on the ferry and keep going to Ischia. And it was only the first post-COVID tourist season.
Satellite view of Procida (source: Google)
The main town of Procida covers the eastern end of the island, and the distinguishing feature of the place is that the houses are rendered in plaster and then painted in pastel colours. The streets around the port are lined with tall narrow houses which give the impression of being densely-populated, but behind the houses there are many open spaces with what appear to be fruit and vegetable gardens.
Not surprisingly Procida has been used as a location for quite a few films including The Talented Mr Ripley, but to Italians and italophiles the most famous is Il Postino (“The Postman”).
Getting There
There are ferry and hydrofoil services to Procida and Ischia from a couple of locations. We were staying in downtown Naples, so decided to catch a ferry from the main terminal. I tried to google information on tickets and schedules, but as is the way with Google these days, I just got pages of sponsored advertisements, so we decided just to turn up to the terminal. Taxis are cheap and plentiful in Naples, and the best way to get around, so we caught one.
The Ferry from Naples to Procida and Ischia. Fujifilm GFX 50R camera, Fujifilm GF32-64mm R LM WR lens (click to enlarge).
Once at the terminal we established that there was a ferry departing shortly, and that the queue to buy tickets was short and moving quickly. It also appeared that even if we had managed to book online, we would still have had to queue to get a paper ticket. A couple ahead of us when boarding the ferry found this out the hard way as despite having evidence of the purchase on their phones, they were sent back to the ticket office to get a proper paper ticket. Italy still doesn’t entirely “get” the internet.
We caught the ferry there and the hydrofoil back. The hydrofoil is not all that much more expensive than the ferry, but takes about half the time. However one has to sit downstairs with very little outside visibility, while on the ferry you can wander around on deck. So we would definitely recommend taking the ferry in at least one direction, for the views.
Naples from the ferry. Fujifilm GFX 50R camera, Fujifilm GF32-64mm R LM WR lens (click to enlarge).
Of views, there are many – Naples as you leave, then along the northern edge of the Bay of Naples. Our fellow passengers seemed to be mainly locals – either Neapolitans out for a day trip or Procidans and Ischians returning from a shopping trip. There were a few foreign tourists, but perhaps not as many as there would have been before the pandemic.
On Procida
We got off the ferry in the port of Procida which is on the northern side of the island. There are plenty of mini-taxis and bike rentals which can help you get further afield, but we chose to stay on foot and climb up to the Terra Murata, then descend to the little fishing port of Corricella on the southern side, now a marina.
“Micro-taxi”on Procida. Fujifilm GFX 50R camera, Fujifilm GF32-64mm R LM WR lens (click to enlarge).
The main road up the hill towards the Terra Murata is called “Via Principe Umberto” after the son of King Vittorio Emmanuele. After the 1946 referendum which abolished the monarchy, parts of central and northern Italy renamed at least some of the streets and piazzas which had commemorated members of the House of Savoy. That this happened less in the south reminds us that in these parts the vote was actually in favour of retaining the monarchy. I can’t imagine that this was out of great affection – the Piemontese royal house was alien to the South and had ruled united Italy for less than a century. I have not seen this discussed much in Italy, but I would speculate that it was more from deep conservatism and scepticism that the Republic would actually improve conditions in the south. Did it? Who can say?
Procida: Laundry on Via Principe Umberto. Fujifilm GFX 50R camera, Fujifilm GF32-64mm R LM WR lens (click to enlarge).Procida: Via Principe Umberto. Fujifilm GFX 50R camera, Fujifilm GF32-64mm R LM WR lens (click to enlarge).
The view down towards Corricella from just outside the fortress is well worth the climb, and features in many a calendar and postcard.
Procida: Corricella. Fujifilm GFX 50R camera, Fujifilm GF32-64mm R LM WR lens (click to enlarge).
Once down at sea level again, there is a very pleasant walk along the waterfront of Corricella, where the only challenge is choosing a seafood restaurant in which you might have lunch.
Procida: Corricella. Fujifilm GFX 50R camera, Fujifilm GF32-64mm R LM WR lens (click to enlarge).Procida: Corricella. Fujifilm GFX 50R camera, Fujifilm GF32-64mm R LM WR lens (click to enlarge).Procida: Corricella. Fujifilm GFX 50R camera, Fujifilm GF32-64mm R LM WR lens (click to enlarge).Procida: Corricella. Fujifilm GFX 50R camera, Fujifilm GF32-64mm R LM WR lens (click to enlarge).Procida: Corricella. Fujifilm GFX 50R camera, Fujifilm GF32-64mm R LM WR lens (click to enlarge).Procida: Corricella. Fujifilm GFX 50R camera, Fujifilm GF32-64mm R LM WR lens (click to enlarge).Procida: Corricella. Fujifilm GFX 50R camera, Fujifilm GF32-64mm R LM WR lens (click to enlarge).Procida: Corricella. Fujifilm GFX 50R camera, Fujifilm GF32-64mm R LM WR lens (click to enlarge).Procida: Corricella, with the Terra Murata in the distance. Fujifilm GFX 50R camera, Fujifilm GF32-64mm R LM WR lens (click to enlarge).Procida: Corricella. Fujifilm GFX 50R camera, Fujifilm GF32-64mm R LM WR lens (click to enlarge).
After gorging on the photographic opportunities in Corricella, the way back is via a steep narrow road called the Discesa Graziella, which continues to offer lots of good photographs.
Procida: Discesa Graziella. Fujifilm GFX 50R camera, Fujifilm GF32-64mm R LM WR lens (click to enlarge).Procida: Discesa Graziella. Fujifilm GFX 50R camera, Fujifilm GF32-64mm R LM WR lens (click to enlarge).Procida: Discesa Graziella. House featuring a shrine to the Virgin and a statue of a poodle. Fujifilm GFX 50R camera, Fujifilm GF32-64mm R LM WR lens (click to enlarge).Procida: Discesa Graziella. Fujifilm GFX 50R camera, Fujifilm GF32-64mm R LM WR lens (click to enlarge).
Here is another instalment of photographs of Italian shops. In March 2020, as the COVID-19 pandemic took hold and all shops were closed in Italy, I published an elegaic photo essay celebrating the shopfronts and the shopkeepers of Italy. It was a worrying time and I published it as much to cheer myself up as for anyone else, although I hope it may have cheered others up as well.
Now, two and a half years later, the pandemic has eased, although the hoofbeats of another horseman of the apocalypse can be heard to the northeast. So in slightly happier but still nervous times, here is another chapter.
As I said in the earlier post, Italians have a flair for design and presentation which in the case of shops manifests itself both in the design of the shopfront and in the care which goes into the displays of merchandise.
Let us start with a very elegant butcher’s shop in Arezzo, a Norcineria (delicatessen) in Orvieto, and a Gastronomia in the Naples suburb of Vomero.
Macelleria Alfredo, Arezzo. Fujifilm GFX 50R camera, Fujifilm GF32-64mm R LM WR lens (click to enlarge)Norcineria Roticiani, Orvieto. Fujifilm GFX 50R camera, Fujifilm GF32-64mm R LM WR lens (click to enlarge)Gastronomia San Martino, Vomero, Naples. Fujifilm GFX 50R camera, Fujifilm GF32-64mm R LM WR lens (click to enlarge)
Still on the subject of food – a very important subject in Italy – here are a gastronomia from the town of Bevagna with an impressive delivery bike outside, and an osteria in Todi, the interior of which promises a warm welcome as the evening draws in.
Alimentari, Bevagna. Fujifilm GFX 50R camera, Fujifilm GF32-64mm R LM WR lens (click to enlarge)Osteria Valle, Todi. Fujifilm GFX 50R camera, Fujifilm GF32-64mm R LM WR lens (click to enlarge)
Bars occupy a special place in Italian life. In the mornings they serve coffee and pastries for breakfast – often eaten standing up at the counter by people on their way to work. This is the only time of day when milky coffees like cappucini are ordered by Italians. A strong black espresso is of course acceptable at any hour of the day or night. Then in late morning people stop ordering cappucini and it becomes acceptable to order a pre-lunch aperitivo – a glass of wine or a spritz, or a beer if it is hot. Snacks, often quite substantial, may be offered – and outside the main tourist areas may even be included in the price of the drinks. Bars may double as pasticcerie and gelaterie, and many cheaper restaurants and trattorie double as bars before mealtimes.
In the warmer months a bar’s tables and chairs may spill out into sunny piazzas, and in winter a bar offers a bright, warm and steamy refuge on a dark and cold morning.
Bars can be huge and swanky with uniformed waiters, or tiny and utilitarian with a single person serving. An example of the former is Caffè Paszkowski in Florence, and there are literally thousands of examples of the latter. Below the picture of Caffè Paszkowski is one of a tiny and anonymous bar in Corso Cavour in Todi.
Caffè Paszkowski, Florence. Hasselblad 501C/M camera, Zeiss Planar C 80mm lens, 6x6cm film back, Fujichrome Velvia 50 film (click to enlarge).Anonymous bar, Corso Cavour, Todi. Fujifilm GFX 50R camera, Fujifilm GF32-64mm R LM WR lens (click to enlarge).
But Italians all have their favourite, and are faithful to them. There is a phrase – di fiducia, literally “of trust” – which tells you a lot about Italian behaviour. Your bar – or greengrocer’s, or butcher’s – di fiducia is the one you are faithful to, where they recognise you and greet you. And if the proprietor saw you going into another establishment they would feel slighted. As people who are obviously not Italian and are therefore usually assumed to be tourists, it means a lot to us to have a bar and shops di fiducia in our adopted town.
Here are two more examples of neighbourhood bars – the Bar Viviani in Arezzo and the Bar Loreti in the little town of Acquasparta in Umbria.
Bar Viviani, Arezzo. Fujifilm GFX 50R camera, Fujifilm GF32-64mm R LM WR lens (click to enlarge).Bar Loreti, Acquasparta. Fujifilm GFX 50R camera, Fujifilm GF32-64mm R LM WR lens (click to enlarge).
Of course where else but in Rome could you actually find shops that specialise in liturgical vestments?
Arredamento Liturgico, Rome. Hasselblad 501C/M camera, Zeiss Planar C 80mm lens, 6x6cm film back, Fujichrome Velvia 50 film (click to enlarge).
The gritty streets of downtown Naples must be one of the most challenging environments for the proud shopkeeper. Theft and vandalism are equal threats, and the response is armoured steel doors that when closed look as if they would withstand anything short of assault with an anti-tank weapon. But when they are opened they reveal display windows and shelves on the insides of the doors, whether for the beautifully boxed chocolates of Gay-Odin, or the books of the d’Ambrosio bookshop, both below.
Gay-Odin Chocolate Shop, Naples. Fujifilm GFX 50R camera, Fujifilm GF32-64mm R LM WR lens (click to enlarge).Libreria d’Ambrosio, Naples. Fujifilm GFX 50R camera, Fujifilm GF32-64mm R LM WR lens (click to enlarge).
After hours, when the doors are closed again, you would walk past them without a second look, unaware of the treasures within.
I will finish with what must be one of the most elegant barbershops anywhere. Mr Bertini’s establishment in Todi is rightly famous for its ornately carved shopfront, which has been seen in many online travelogues and even featured in a television advertisement for Moretti Beer. Mr Bertini is also a real artist with scissors and razor.
Barbiere Bertini, Todi. Fujifilm GFX 50R camera, Fujifilm GF32-64mm R LM WR lens (click to enlarge)
Evening photography can produce dramatic results, although it has its challenges. Here are some examples from Venice, Rome and Tuscany.
Earlier I promised some evening shots to complement my early morning photographs of Venice. Evening photography has the same main benefit as dawn, which is to say warmer light and lower contrast. In fact, sometimes the atmospheric haze at the end of a long day (natural or from pollution) can produce more pleasing colours than in the clarity of dawn.
Venice at sunset from the bridge over the Rio de la Tana. Horseman 45FA large format camera, Nikon Nikkor-M 300mm lens, Horseman 6x12cm rollfilm back, Fujichrome Velvia film (click to enlarge).
Another advantage over dawn photography is not having to set the alarm clock. The disadvantage, of course, is that there will usually be many more people about. So bridges and waterfronts are good places to be to try and avoid having people wander through your shot.
Getting the exposure right can be tricky – even if your camera has the very latest algorithms to calculate exposure, it won’t always get it right. For much of my photography life, I did not use cameras with automatic exposure, but found that a good result could usually be obtained by using a hand-held spot meter on a point just to the side of the setting sun. For the photograph above I metered on a point about halfway between the sun and the belltower in Piazza San Marco. For the photograph below I metered from the clouds in the centre, just above the trees.
Rome: the dome of St Peter’s silhouetted by the setting sun, from Ponte Umberto I. Hasselblad 500 C/M medium format camera, Zeiss Planar C 80mm lens, 6x6cm rollfilm back, Fujichrome Velvia film (click to enlarge).
The picture above was taken with a “standard” focal length which roughly approximates what the eye sees. But if I had used a telephoto lens just to zoom in on the bright area, the result would have been less realistic but more dramatic. The photograph of the Val d’Orcia below shows how, with a long telephoto lens, you can take that to extremes – if that is the sort of thing you like.
Sunset in the Val d’Orcia, Tuscany. Canon EOS-3 35mm film camera, 100-400mm IS L lens at 400mm. Fujichrome Velvia film. No filter was used, and no colour manipulation was applied to the digital file (click to enlarge).
The picture below of St Peter’s in Rome demonstrates a similar effect, although this time with some foreground detail. The “starburst” effect on the streetlights is not the result of a filter, but of the type of aperture used in large format lenses. The long exposure has smoothed the surface of the Tiber.
Rome: The Gianicolo Hill and the dome of St Peter’s after sunset, from Ponte Umberto I. Horseman 45FA large format camera, Nikon Nikkor-M 300mm lens, 4×5 inch sheet film back, Fujichrome Velvia film. No filter was used, and no colour manipulation was applied to the digital file (click to enlarge).
From memory, that photograph needed an exposure of almost ten minutes, given the slow film and the very small aperture I was using. Onlookers on either side took quite an interest, so I had to do my best to avoid anyone knocking the tripod. Halfway through the exposure, one of Rome’s ubiquitous hawkers tried to sell me a selfie stick but I explained to him that my camera was too big and heavy for that.
Venice: the lagoon in front of Giudecca, from the temporary pontoon bridge erected for the Festa del Redentore each year. Hasselblad 501 C/M medium format camera, Zeiss Distagon CF 60mm lens, CFV-50c digital back (click to enlarge).
When you have a distant silhouetted skyline, as in the photograph above, it is important that it be sharp. But to focus at infinity, while giving you that sharpness in the distance, would throw the foreground out of focus. The solution is to focus on the “hyperfocal distance”. The exact calculation of hyperfocal distance, and why it is important, is explained here, but a rule of thumb is to focus about a third of the way into the area you wish to be in focus, and use focus guides on your lens, if it has them, to give you an indication of the closest and furthest points that will be acceptably sharp at your chosen aperture. Some modern cameras will give you an indication of the range of sharp focus on the display, but I always like to see focus guides on a lens.
After sunset, as the light fades, there will come a point where everything is lost in shadow. But before that there will be a brief period, perhaps only a couple of minutes, when the intensity of both sky and ground is similar enough to capture detail and colour in both. Exactly when that is will depend on various things, including how bright it is in the areas you want to capture. In the photograph below I wanted to roughly balance the sky, the lights strung between the lamp posts, and the interior of the shop. Although it was still quite crowded, the people walking along the quayside are largely lost in the shadows, giving a sense of peace.
Venice: the Giudecca after sunset, with festive lights put out for the Festa del Redentore. Hasselblad 501 C/M medium format camera, Zeiss Distagon CF 60mm lens, CFV-50c digital back (click to enlarge).
If you are not sure, a hand-held spot meter reading from all areas you wish to capture will help. My meter even has an function which allows you to take spot readings from multiple sources and then gives you an average exposure value. High-end modern SLRs can do the same thing in-camera. But I have to admit that in this picture I guessed – the more experience you have, the more likely you are to guess right. And if you are using digital, it costs you nothing to try various settings.
This final photograph in the set was quite challenging to take. I was set up on the Riva degli Schiavoni in Venice, which is one of the busiest areas, just near the Doge’s Palace. It was around 8pm, so there were still many people about, but I couldn’t leave it any later without the sky fading to black. My calculated exposure was around 10 minutes, and there was no way that I could go that long without other people wandering into the shot, or, even if they were out of shot, taking flash photographs which would have reflected off the nearer objects.
So I set the camera up, and started the exposure, timed with a stopwatch. Whenever it looked as if someone was about to wander in front of me, or was getting ready to take a flash photograph, I closed the shutter and stopped the stopwatch. When the coast was clear, I re-opened the shutter and restarted the stopwatch. All up, my ten-minute exposure took more than half an hour.
Venice: the Basino and San Giorgio Maggiore from the Riva degli Schiavoni. Horseman 45FA large format camera, Fuji Fujinon-W 125mm lens, Kang Tai 6x17cm rollfilm back, Fujichrome Velvia film (click to enlarge).
The long exposure necessarily produced some artefacts. Obviously, the rocking of the gondolas blurred their outlines. The faint white blur about a third of the way over from the left is the shirt of a gondolier who climbed onto his boat and rowed away. Various bright horizontal streaks mark the passage of the lights on vaporetti and other craft. And the wavy bright line to the right of the centre is made by the light on the back of a gondola that was being rowed along.
Is it a “realistic” photograph? Probably not in any technical sense of the word. But to me it does bring back the mood of that evening rather powerfully. And I really only make photographs to please myself, so I guess that makes it a success.
“Street Photography” is a term that actually means “candid photography of people in the street” as in the famous photographs of Henri Cartier-Bresson. So that usually requires that you are doing it without those people’s consent. That makes it a bit tricky, but it is legal in Italy if it is not for commercial purposes, as this article explains.
Candid means not staged, although there are degrees of candidness. The very famous 1951 photograph An American Girl in Italy (actually one of a series) was planned by the photographer and the subject, who even did a second pass through the group of men to try and get better reactions. Despite her apparent distress, the subject, Ninalee Allen, claimed to have enjoyed herself thoroughly, imagining herself as Beatrice in a famous Victorian painting of Dante and Beatrice, as explained in her 2018 obituary in The Economist. Afterwards she went for a ride on the back of the scooter on the right.
An American Girl In Italy by Ruth Orkin, 1951. I hope that reproducing this poor quality image may be considered fair dealing for review purposes.
And of course there are some good although much less famous examples from Francis Sandwith here.
My approach tends towards the opportunistic, and I do worry about the privacy aspect. That being said, the group of jolly gondolieri below, sauntering along the Riva degli Schiavoni in their traditional costumes looking for business can probably be assumed not to be seeking privacy. Similarly, people dressing up in historical costume and parading in the streets are not doing it for privacy either.
Gondolieri. Hasselblad 500C/M, Zeiss Planar C 80mm lens, 6×6 rollfilm back, Fujichrome Velvia 50 film (click to enlarge).
Children make good subjects, thanks to their lack of self-consciousness, however – sadly – taking candid pictures of children can be thought a bit creepy in these nervous times, so it is a good idea to make sure that they are anonymous.
Via Garibaldi, Venice. Contax G1 35mm rangefinder camera, Zeiss Planar 45mm lens. Fujichrome Velvia film (click to enlarge).Child chasing soap bubbles in Via Garibaldi, Venice. Contax G1 35mm rangefinder camera, Zeiss Planar 45mm lens. Fujichrome Velvia film (click to enlarge).
People who clearly have no expectation of privacy, or right to it, are those who walk in front of me when I am obviously trying to take a photograph. You have been warned.
A good example of street photography won’t just be a picture of people milling about aimlessly. There should be something special about it – it might tell a story, like Ninalee being ogled in Florence, or it might make the viewer speculate about what is happening. Sometimes there might be an element of drama, or you might catch someone in a serendipitous artistic pose, or in a position which adds to the composition.
Souvenir seller, Burano, Venice. Hasselblad 501C/M, Zeiss Distagon CF 60mm lens, CFV-50c digital back (click to enlarge).
My favourite camera for street photography was my beloved Contax G1 35mm film camera(1). It was small, quiet and unobtrusive, and its quick autofocus and large-aperture Zeiss lenses meant that you could quickly grab a sharp image. In comparison, the medium-format Hasselblad V-series is pretty large, needs to be focussed manually, and makes a terrifically loud agricultural-sounding clonk when you trip the shutter, so it isn’t particularly subtle. That being said, you can always fit a longer lens and take from further away. And although I usually use an eye-level prism viewfinder on the Hasselblad, if you fit the traditional looking-down-from-above waist-level viewfinder, you can be a bit sneaky about composing the shot.
Rio Sant’Anna, Venice. Contax G1 35mm rangefinder camera, Zeiss Planar 45mm lens. Fujichrome Velvia film (click to enlarge).
Sometimes you can add the drama yourself through photographic artefacts. In the picture below, I was looking down on St Mark’s Square and realised that with some people moving quickly and some standing still, a slow-ish exposure through a long lens might show some people blurred and some sharp. I had to steady the camera on the balustrade of the St Mark’s Basilica portico, but the result was acceptable.
Tourists in Piazza San Marco, Venice. Hasselblad 500C/M camera, Zeiss Sonnar C 250mm lens, 6x6cm rollfilm back, Fujichrome Velvia 50 film (click to enlarge).
If children make great unselfconscious subjects, dogs are even better (to the best of my knowledge, no-one has yet deemed it creepy to take pictures of dogs).
A stand-off at high noon, Campo Santa Margherita, Venice. Hasselblad 501C/M, Zeiss Distagon CF 60mm lens, CFV-50c digital back (click to enlarge).An enthusiastic customer, Bellagio, Lake Como. Hasselblad 501C/M, Zeiss Distagon CF 60mm lens, CFV-50c digital back (click to enlarge).
Sometimes a picture with a group of unrelated people can achieve a sort of balletic unity. In the picture below, there is a family group in the centre, one of whom is in a wheelchair. The child at the left rear looking at his phone seems almost posed, and at the right rear a young woman is working on a painting. All are positioned against an architecturally regular background, as if a theatre director had thought carefully about where each should go.
Giudecca, Venice. Hasselblad 501C/M, Zeiss Distagon CF 60mm lens, CFV-50c digital back (click to enlarge).
The next picture looks to me a bit like one of those scenes of frantic activity before the first act of an opera, where the cast bustle about the stage doing various bits of business while the orchestra gets stuck into the overture. Here a waiter approaches from the left holding a handful of bills, while nearby a father and daughter attend to their ice cream cones. And the little boy in the centre, hanging on to his mother’s hand, was clearly posed by someone who studied at the Louvre.
Castello district, Venice. Hasselblad 501C/M, Zeiss Distagon CF 60mm lens, CFV-50c digital back (click to enlarge).
Because of the influence of photographers like Henri Cartier-Bresson and Ruth Orkin, black and white photographs tend to evoke their brand of “reportage” photography.
On the Ponte Santi Apostoli in Venice, a pair of gondolieri scan the passing crowd for likely customers. Hasselblad 500C/M camera, Zeiss Planar C 80mm lens, 6x6cm film back, Ilford 200 B&W film (click to enlarge).Street scene in Florence. Hasselblad 500C/M camera, Zeiss Planar C 80mm lens, 6x6cm film back, Ilford 200 B&W film (click to enlarge).
The group of young buskers below were playing in one of the back streets in Naples, raising the price of their morning coffees and pastries, or maybe a lunchtime aperitivo. I like various things about this, including the dog lying in front of the guitarist, and the way that the natty red costume of the gentleman on the left is balanced by the scooter of the same colour on the right.
Buskers in Via Tribunali, Naples. Hasselblad 500C/M camera, Zeiss Planar C 80mm lens, 6x6cm rollfilm back, Fujichrome Velvia 50 film (click to enlarge).
The next picture was taken in Rome, in the Piazza del Popolo. It was evening, at the time of the passeggiata when people put on their nice clothes and head out into the street for a stroll and a chat. The setting sun was shining straight along the Via del Corso, and illuminated this very elegantly dressed old gentleman, who is talking to an equally elegant young carabiniere, standing very respectfully as he listens. And the red stripe on his trousers gives the picture a bit of life.
Piazza del Popolo, Rome. Hasselblad 500C/M, Zeiss Planar C 80mm lens, 6×6 rollfilm back, Fujichrome Velvia 50 film (click to enlarge).
The final two photographs were taken on fast (and therefore grainy) black-and-white film on a dull rainy day in the Ghetto area of Venice. “Ghetto” is an old Venetian word for foundry, and it was the area given to the Jews to live in. It is still a place of Jewish culture, and like “lido” and “arsenal”, it is another word that Venice gave the world. The first picture is of a shopkeeper who has stepped out into the street for a quick cigarette.
Ghetto, Venice. Hasselblad 500C/M camera, Zeiss Planar C 80mm lens, 6x6cm rollfilm back, Ilford 400 B&W film (click to enlarge).
Shortly the light drizzle turned into proper rain, and a couple of deliverymen halted their boat under the Ponte delle Guglie to shelter until it passed.
Ponte delle Guglie, near the Ghetto, Venice. Hasselblad 500C/M camera, Zeiss Planar C 80mm lens, 6x6cm rollfilm back, Ilford 400 B&W film (click to enlarge).
Note (1) February 2023: After many years of looking for a digital equivalent of the Contax G1 I have recently bought a Fujifilm X-Pro3 which promises to be just that. I will report separately when I have had a chance to come to grips with it.
Note (2) March 2023: I have posted again on street photography, this time in Naples, here.
The large format photographer is no stranger to the early morning alarm clock, and this is particularly the case when the subject is a city like Venice. Firstly, you need to get up early to capture the special light before, during and immediately after sunrise. Secondly, you don’t normally want a seething mass of people in your shot. And of course if there is a seething mass of people, you may be unable, or not permitted, to erect a substantial tripod with a heavy camera on it. Look at the photograph below, taken at around 6am, and imagine what it would look like at 11am when all the cruise ships and tour buses have emptied their passengers into St Mark’s Square.
The Doge’s Palace, Venice. Horseman 45FA large format camera, Fuji Fujinon-W 125mm lens, rising front standard to correct perspective. 4×5 inch sheet film back, Fujichrome Velvia 50 film (click to enlarge).
A good many Venice photographs naturally involve water, and the very early morning is a good time to find it at its most still.
My Horseman 45FA in Venice, in this case with the 6x12cm rollfilm back fitted, and the Fujinon-W 210mm lens, with slight rising front (click to enlarge)
As I pointed out in my post on Urbino, early morning photography is an exercise that benefits from prior planning and reconnaissance. There is no point turning up to take a classic view, and finding that what you want is deep in shadow. This is particularly important in somewhere like Venice where you are unlikely to have too many choices of angles from which to compose your picture. So you need to work out where the sun will be coming from at the time, and on the date, you have in mind. I used to do this with paper maps, a compass, and tables of sunrise times and azimuths for the appropriate time of year. These days you can get apps that do it for you, and overlay the information on a map.
A screenshot from a smartphone app called Sunphos. The yellow line is the azimuth of sunrise, the red line that of sunset, and the black line the direction of the sun at the moment the screenshot was taken. The concentric circles indicate the elevation of the sun.
Fortunately in Venice the vaporetti start running pretty early, and even on foot you can get to places quite quickly. So for this next picture I was able to take the vaporetto across to Giudecca and be in position well before sunrise to take a photograph looking back across the Basino, with Palladio’s church of San Giorgio Maggiore silhouetted on the right and the main island in the distance. I used a neutral density graduated filter to balance the sky and the sea, and in low light conditions and using slow (ISO 50) film, I needed a long exposure which smoothed out the movements of the water. To the left, the Renaissance church on the other side of the lagoon, with the classical-style façade under an older campanile, is the Pietà, the institution for orphan girls where Vivaldi was the music master.
San Giorgio Maggiore from Guidecca before sunrise. Horseman 45FA large format camera, Nikon Nikkor-W 150mm lens, 4×5 inch sheet film back, Fujichrome Velvia 50 film (click to enlarge).
Of course in Venice, particularly in the cooler months, all your plans to catch the breathtaking dawn sunlight can be frustrated by morning fog. This need not be a disaster, as the muted light can produce low contrast and some attractive pastel colours, as in this picture of Rio Sant’Anna.
Rio Sant’Anna. Horseman 45FA large format camera, Nikon Nikkor-W 150mm lens, 4×5 inch sheet film back, Fujichrome Velvia 50 film (click to enlarge).
If you are still not happy that the muted colours give enough drama to your photograph, it is always worth trying converting it to black and white. I find that boosting the contrast, and sometimes the graininess, can add a bit of atmosphere.
Rio Sant’Anna. Horseman 45FA large format camera, Nikon Nikkor-W 150mm lens, 4×5 inch sheet film back, Fujichrome Velvia 50 film. Converted to black-and-white and grain added in Photoshop (click to enlarge).
Sometimes one finds oneself choosing a spot simply for the fact that you can expect the dawn light to be particularly good there. This row of houses on the Rio San Pietro in the Castello district is a case in point. It faces east, into the rising sun, and on the other side of the canal is an open area so that the houses are fully illuminated even when the sun is still very low.
Rio San Pietro. Horseman 45FA large format camera, Fuji Fujinon-W 125mm lens, Horseman 6x12cm rollfilm back, Fujichrome Velvia 50 film (click to enlarge).
Rio Sant’Anna is a canal that once ran all the way from Rio San Pietro back down to the Basino. During the period of Napoleonic rule, the lower part of the canal was filled in to form what is now called the Via Garibaldi, and an adjacent canal was filled in to form the public gardens, a name familiar to many tourists due to the nearby “Giardini” vaporetto stop (the “Giardini Biennale” stop is a bit further down). Right at the point where the Rio Sant’Anna ends and the Via Garibaldi begins, a greengrocer’s boat is permanently moored. I determined that I would take a photograph of it in the pre-dawn light, with the tripod placed on an elevated point on a small bridge, looking back down the Via Garibaldi where, in the distance and illuminated by the dawn, you can see the church of Santa Maria della Salute at the entrance of the Grand Canal. This was a challenging photograph in several respects. Large format cameras do not generally have built-in light meters or other electronics; everything is manual. With slow (ISO 50) film, a narrow aperture to give maximum depth of focus, and very low levels of light, my hand-held light meter suggested an exposure of about 30 minutes. To that I added another 15 minutes to compensate for what is called “reciprocity failure” where the sensitivity of film decreases with extended exposure times. However I then had to take into account the fact that while the exposure was happening, everything would be getting brighter as sunrise approached. So to accommodate that I mentally subtracted 10 minutes again. Not an exact science.
About halfway through the exposure, the damn greengrocer had the nerve to climb onto his boat to rearrange some fruit. This set the boat rocking and ripples going on the canal. As soon as I realised what was happening I closed the shutter and paused the timer on my watch. That avoided some of the worst effects, but the mirror-stillness of the water was lost, and the front of the greengrocer’s boat is a bit blurred from movement. The boat in the foreground became very blurred, but I didn’t really mind that as it wasn’t a key element of the composition. The greengrocer got back on dry land, and eventually the movement of the boat subsided to the point where I felt I could reopen the shutter and restart the timer. The total time to take the photograph ended up being around 50 minutes, and in addition to the increasing light, more and more early risers were appearing in Via Garibaldi on their way to work. This didn’t affect the photograph too badly, as due to the very long exposure they tended not to register on the image. A few people paused to chat long enough to show up as “ghosts”, which you can see if you zoom in on the photograph. (This by the way, is why many early 19th-Century photographs show apparently deserted scenes. It wasn’t that there was nobody there, but that people didn’t stay still long enough to be captured on the very slow photographic emulsions of the day.)
Greengrocer’s boat in Rio Sant’Anna. Horseman 45FA large format camera, Nikon Nikkor-W 150mm lens, 4×5 inch sheet film back, Fujichrome Velvia 50 film (click to enlarge).
I was pretty chilly when I finally finished, but fortunately there is a bakery just on the right in the photograph, where I was able to buy some warm fresh pastries before heading back to our accommodation.
I will finish with three iconic views of the Basilica of Santa Maria della Salute (Our Lady of Health). This was a relatively late addition to the Venice skyline, being commissioned in 1631 as an act of public thanksgiving for the end of a particularly deadly outbreak of the plague. The first photograph was taken at water level, at the end of one of the little lanes that run down to the Grand Canal. It was on a cloudy morning when, during the brief moments when the sun broke through, the clouds turned red. The second was taken from the Accademia Bridge (again, I had to interrupt the exposure a few times, this time when joggers came bouncing over the bridge behind me, shaking the tripod). You can tell that the second picture was taken in high summer, because the sun is further north (and out of the picture on the left, illuminating the houses on the right of the Grand Canal). In the first photograph, taken in autumn, the sun is further south and rising behind the church, making the buildings into silhouettes.
The Grand Canal and Santa Maria della Salute in autumn. Horseman 45FA large format camera, Rodenstock Sironar-N 180mm lens, 4×5 inch sheet film back, Fujichrome Velvia 50 film (click to enlarge).Grand Canal and Santa Maria della Salute in summer. Horseman 45FA large format camera, Nikon Nikkor-W 150mm lens, 4×5 inch sheet film back, Fujichrome Velvia 50 film (click to enlarge).
The third picture of Santa Maria della Salute is from near the San Marco (Giardinetti) vaporetto stop, with the morning light illuminating the front of the building, this time in spring.
The Grand Canal and Santa Maria della Salute. Horseman 45FA large format camera, Nikon Nikkor-W 150mm lens, 4×5 inch sheet film back, Fujichrome Velvia 50 film (click to enlarge).
Evening is another special time for photography. I will do another post of evening photographs in due course.
This is an affectionate photographic tribute to the shopkeepers of italy, most of whom were forced to close this week because of COVID-19.
So there I was, unable to get back to Italy for the foreseeable future and worried about the people we know there. Then I saw the news about most shops being closed, which depressed me further, but then I realised it had given me an idea about something else to celebrate about Italy. It might cheer me up a bit, and I hope it cheers you up too.
The Italian genius for design manifests itself in various celebrated ways. The fashion houses of Milan. Alfa Romeo and Ferrari. The classic Vespa. The Piaggio P.180 aircraft. It isn’t enough merely to be fit for purpose. – it must be beautiful. (In fact thinking back to my much-loved Alfa 159, sometimes form clearly had taken precedence over function). But it isn’t just the highly-paid designers. Deep down, every Italian is a stylist. You can tell by the way they dress for the evening passegiata. And in every market and every shopping street, you can tell by the care with which they arrange the displays of merchandise for maximum effect on stalls and in shop windows.
The architecture can be a delight too – especially the way that a vintage shopfront is carefully maintained for decades.
Italians are famously individualists. Not always a good thing, when it comes to following public health directives. But the pride that people take in themselves and their own enterprise really comes out in their shops. I’ve already posted a photo essay on the market at Padua, which you can look at to see the displays of fruit, fish and meat.
So here is an affectionate tribute to shopfronts and shop window displays, dedicated to all of their proprietors, and what they are going through right now. Things may not always be done in the most refined taste, indeed sometimes they are positively idiosyncratic, but in every case they have been done carefully.
We start in the town of Norcia. Apart from being the birthplace of St Benedict, it is famous for its smallgoods manufacturers. So much so that salumerie throughout Italy often refer to themselves as Norcinerie.
Norcia. Contax G1 35mm rangefinder camera, Zeiss Planar 45mm lens. Fujichrome Velvia film (click to enlarge). Norcia. “Da Tre Porcellini” (The Three Little Pigs). Contax G1 35mm rangefinder camera, Zeiss Planar 45mm lens. Fujichrome Velvia film (click to enlarge). Cool dudes in Norcia. “Coglioni de lu Mulu” means “mules testicles” in dialect, but they are just a form of salami. Contax G1 35mm rangefinder camera, Zeiss Planar 45mm lens. Fujichrome Velvia film (click to enlarge). A Norcineria in Norcia. Fratelli Ansuini (Ansuini Brothers) is quite a big producer, and I can’t help wondering if that really is their name, since “suini” means “pigs”. If so it is a happy coincidence. Hasselblad 500C/M camera, Zeiss Planar 80mm lens, 6x6cm rollfilm back, Fujichrome Velvia film (click to enlarge).
The first three of those pictures were taken with my favourite 35mm camera of all the many I have owned. The Contax brand originally referred to cameras made by the branch of Zeiss that stayed in the old East Germany. The brand was bought by the Japanese Kyocera company, and they produced a couple of absolutely beautiful little rangefinder cameras, with superb genuine Zeiss lenses. If they would bring out a digital version I would buy it like a shot. Being small and light, the Contax G1 is great for candid street photography, such as the following two taken in Via Garibaldi in the Arsenale quarter of Venice.
Via Garibaldi, Venice. Contax G1 35mm rangefinder camera, Zeiss Planar 45mm lens. Fujichrome Velvia film (click to enlarge). Via Garibaldi, Venice. Contax G1 35mm rangefinder camera, Zeiss Planar 45mm lens. Fujichrome Velvia film (click to enlarge).
This next is also from Venice, and is of course a shop in a Venetian context. Not a candid street snap, as it was taken on a large format camera on a tripod.
Greengrocer’s “shop”, Rio San Barnabà, Venice. Horseman 45FA large format camera, Nikon Nikkor-W 150mm lens, 4×5″ film back, Fujichrome Velvia film (click to enlarge).
The island of Burano, in the Venetian lagoon, is famous for its brightly coloured buildings. Here is a butcher’s shop.
Butcher’s shop on Burano. Horseman 45FA large format camera, Nikon Nikkor-W 150mm lens, 4×5 inch film back, Fujichrome Velvia film (click to enlarge).
The town of Sulmona is in the rugged region of Abruzzo, surrounded by high mountains. It is famous in Italy for the production of confetti for weddings and other celebrations. Now in Italy confetti are not bits of coloured paper to throw at the happy couple. They were originally hard sugared almonds – not the sort of thing you would throw at anyone. These days “confetti” include all sorts of hard candies, many garishly coloured. The maker pictured below specialises in making sunflowers out of them.
Sulmona, confetti maker’s shop. Hasselblad 500C/M camera, Zeiss Planar C 80mm lens, 6x6cm rollfilm back, Fujichrome Velvia film (click to enlarge).
In Naples, the colour and glow of shops, especially a baker like this, make a particular contrast to the gritty streets outside.
Baker’s shop in Via Tribunali, Naples. Hasselblad 500C/M camera, Zeiss Planar 80mm lens, 6c6cm rollfilm back, Fujichrome Velvia film (click to enlarge).
The picture below is from Bologna, which is generally thought of of a gastronomic centre. Needless to say, it has several excellent (and expensive) food shops, which clearly feel obliged to have window displays that match the reputation.
Bologna salumeria. Contax G1 35mm rangefinder camera, Zeiss Planar 45mm lens. Fujichrome Velvia film (click to enlarge).
Here are four very elegant shop fronts. A cafe and tobacconist in Urbino, another confetti outlet in Sulmona, a butcher’s in Spoleto, and an electrical parts shop in Bologna.
Caffetteria Fratelli Boni, Urbino. Fujifilm GFX-50R camera, 32-64mm lens (click to enlarge).Confetti Rapone Panfilo, Sulmona. Hasselblad 500C/M camera, Zeiss Planar 80mm lens, 6x6cm rollfilm back, Fujichrome Velvia film (click to enlarge).Macelleria Giovanni Luna, Spoleto. Hasselblad 501C/M camera, Zeiss Distagon 60mm lens, CFV-50C digital back (click to enlarge).Bottega della Luce, Bologna. Hasselblad 501C/M camera, Zeiss Distagon 60mm lens, CFV-50C digital back (click to enlarge).
Here are two very traditional shops. Another salumeria, from Verona, and “Everything for the Home” from San Quirico d’Orcia in Tuscany.
Salumeria G. Albertini, Verona. Hasselblad 501C/M camera, Zeiss Distagon 60mm lens, CFV-50C digital back (click to enlarge). Tutto per la Casa, San Quirico d’Orcia. Canon EOS-3 35mm camera, 28-135 IS lens, Fujichrome Velvia film (click to enlarge).
And I will finish with two of my favourites. The first is from the town of San Zeno in Montagna, high up above Lake Garda. The second is the town of Castiglione del Lago, a fortified town sticking out into Lake Trasimeno in Umbria. They are my favourites because they include the proprietors. Bless them, and all the shopkeepers of Italy.
San Zeno in Montagna, Veneto. Hasselblad 500C/M camera, Zeiss Planar 80mm lens, 6x6cm rollfilm back, Fujichrome Velvia film (click to enlarge). Castiglione del Lago. Hasselblad 500C/M camera, Zeiss Planar 80mm lens, 6x6cm rollfilm back, Fujichrome Velvia film (click to enlarge).
Note, added 2024: I said earlier that I wished I could find a digital equivalent of the Contax G1 35mm camera. A year ago I bought a Fujifilm X-Pro 3 and I must say that does give me much of the same kind of feeling when using it.
Just over a year ago I posted this “History in Focus” article, about the large-format panoramic photograph I took at dawn one morning in early spring 2006, with the rising sun illuminating the mist in the valleys of the Val d’Orcia, and the history associated with the area. A crop from that photograph is the banner image for this blog.
It was quite a productive early morning shoot; not only did I have my Horseman 45FA large format camera with me, I also had a Hasselblad 500C/M medium-format camera and a Canon EOS-3 35mm SLR (I travel lighter these days; carrying a 25kg backpack onto an aircraft is harder to get away with, and harder on my back).
The aim of that post last year was to concentrate on a single photograph, which meant that several other fairly decent pictures did not get published. So here they are. If you haven’t read the original article, I recommend you take a quick look at it before proceeding.
I set up in the dark and waited for the sun to rise. When it did, at first the colours were soft, muted and pink-tinged, and the contrast was very low.
The Val d’Orcia at dawn. Horseman 45FA camera, 125mm Fujinon-W lens, Horseman 4×5 inch sheet film back, Fujichrome Velvia film, 0.6 ND graduated filter (click to enlarge).
The picture above was taken in exactly the same position and in the same direction as the photograph in the original article, so showing the low contrast and pastel colours. The difference is that I used a 4×5 inch sheet film back rather than a 6x17cm panoramic rollfilm back. Interestingly, I am looking at this on a 15-inch laptop screen and the size of the image is only slightly greater than the original sheet-film transparency. That is why large format photography captures such an extraordinary amount of detail.
The Val d’Orcia at dawn. Horseman 45FA camera, 125mm Fujinon-W lens, Kang Tai 6x17cm rollfilm back, Fujichrome Velvia film, 0.6 ND graduated filter (click to enlarge).
The photograph above was taken immediately after that shown in the original article. I simply rotated the camera on the tripod about 45 degrees to the left. Since the sun was now in shot I had to reduce the exposure time, and the shadow areas were much darker, and the contrast much greater. But it makes it quite dramatic. As with the photograph in the original article, I used a 2-stop neutral density graduated filter to balance the sky and the land, but no coloured filter. In the distance, right below the sun, you can make out the silhouette of the town of Pienza.
The Val d’Orcia at dawn. Horseman 45FA camera, Rodenstock Sironar-N 180mm lens , Horseman 6x12cm rollfilm back, Fujichrome Velvia film, 0.6 ND graduated filter (click to enlarge).
The photograph above was taken only a few minutes later, but in the time it took me to change the lens and film back, the sun had climbed a little way into the sky and the warm pink colours were fading. Photographers talk about the “golden hour” around dawn and sunset when the light is at its best, but the colours when the sun is only just above the horizon are very ephemeral. It is more like a “golden ten minutes”. For this photograph I changed from the slightly wider than standard 125mm lens to a slight telephoto 180mm. By the way, this is a very famous view: you see it in lots of calendars and advertisements.
Val d’Orcia at sunrise. Hasselblad 500C/M camera, Zeiss Distagon 150mm lens, 6×6 rollfilm back, Fujichrome Velvia film (click to enlarge).
As the sun rose higher, the contrast in the scene increased, especially looking further round to the east where the mist was backlit by the sun. I switched to the Hasselblad. Using a telephoto lens foreshortened the perspective of the series of hills.
Then something unexpected happened: it started to get darker. Although it was a cloudless day the mist around me grew briefly thicker and partly blotted out the sun. The scene became almost monochrome. Since I already had my “classic” dawn light shots in the bag, I spent a few minutes with telephoto lenses on the medium format and 35mm cameras picking out interesting shots. In just the minute or two that it took me to take them, the mist thinned out again and it got lighter.
Val d’Orcia before sunrise. Hasselblad 500C/M camera, Zeiss Sonnar 250mm lens, 0.6 neutral density graduated filter, 6×6 rollfilm back, Fujichrome Velvia film (click to enlarge). Val d’Orcia in the early morning. Canon EOS-3 35mm camera, Canon 100-400 IS L lens, Fujichrome Velvia film (click to enlarge). Val d’Orcia in the early morning. Canon EOS-3 35mm camera, Canon 100-400 IS L lens, Fujichrome Velvia film (click to enlarge). Val d’Orcia in the early morning. Canon EOS-3 35mm camera, Canon 100-400 IS L lens, Fujichrome Velvia film (click to enlarge).
A few weeks ago I was browsing a second-hand bookshop in the inner-Melbourne suburb of Carlton, when my eye fell on a slim book with the title Camera and Chianti. Now one of the reasons I write about photography and Italy is that these are subjects I like to read about myself. So naturally I took it down from the shelf, and for the vast sum of $6.25 Australian I became its new owner and was soon heading to a nearby pub to celebrate my find with a glass of wine at an outdoor table.
The book turned out to be an account of a journey around Italy, with photographs by the author, a chap called Francis Sandwith. It was published in 1955 but in the text there are references to the forthcoming coronation, and the photographs appear to show spring foliage, so my guess is that the actual trip was in the first half of 1952. In those days of post-war austerity, the costs needed to be offset by assistance from the Italian State Railways, and Ilford film. Also doubtless a sign of those times, the book is cheaply printed on poor quality paper, and the reproductions of photographs are not the best.
I was mildly surprised, looking at the contents page, to see that despite the title, he did not go anywhere near Chianti or even Tuscany. As I read, though, it became clear that he used the term “Chianti” to refer to any locally-produced Italian wine in a straw-covered flask, red or white, just as people might once have referred to any dry red wine in a straight bottle as “claret”, whether or not it came from Bordeaux. In fact, his trip started in Milan, then continued to Padua and Ferrara, then went south via San Marino to Puglia and Calabria, and ended in Naples via the Amalfi Coast.
“A Good Joke, Ferrara”by Francis Sandwith. (click to enlarge)
Francis does not seem to have left much of a mark on literary history – he has no Wikipedia entry – but I did find a website here which appears to have been set up as an online repository of works by Francis and his daughter Noelle, an artist, photographer and ethnographer who worked extensively in Australia and the South Pacific. The website gives his year of birth as 1899, but not a year of death. According to the website, he was educated at Oxford, and went on to hold editorial positions on several newspapers in England and the Dominions, including Ceylon and South Africa. As a photographer he did advertising work and photography for Country Life and the Morning Post, and ran the photography department of a major advertising agency.
Unfortunately the website appears not to have been completed – sections titled “Library” and “Gallery” are not linked to any content. And there is no apparent way to contact the creator of the site, who is presumably a descendant of Francis Sandwith. So, not having been able to seek permission, I hope that the few reproductions of Francis’s photographs in this post – scanned from the book – can be considered fair dealing for review purposes.
Francis comes across as a nice chap. He was a journalist and photographer, not a writer of books. In fact he only seems to have produced two books – this one, and one in the 1930s of night photographs of London, called London by Night. That one seems to be a bit of a classic, no doubt using what would now be called large format cameras using sheet film or even glass photographic plates.
I was pleased to see that like H.V. Morton here, Francis thought the market in Padua was a wonderful timeless place. And like me here, he thought it a good place for photography.
Padua Market, early 1950s, by Francis Sandwith. (click to enlarge)
We made our way to the market in the Piazza delle Erbe. It was a gay scene. Pigeons flew over the stalls covered with huge red umbrellas and coloured awnings. As in London, children eagerly bought peanuts for the birds, which clustered on the cobbles, and there was also a colleague reaping his harvest with a miniature camera. Italians love children. It was a delight to watch hard-bitten business men stop to watch a scene, which they must have looked at hundreds of times, and the tides of pleasure that suffused their faces.
The market was very tidy. Everything was spick and span, orderly and quiet. The stall-keepers, mostly women, sat at the back of their stalls, on which the goods were displayed with an eye to colour and design, with an apparent air of indifference. They did not bother to glance at a foreigner, for they had seen many foreigners come and go in recent years. About them there was an eternal quality, like the ancient stone bronzed with the sun of centuries, a timelessness, so that whether a sale was made to-day or to-morrow did not matter greatly.
OK, so he might have used a few clichés, but he was a journalist after all. And we should remember that he was writing for a generation whose opportunities for travel had been severely limited by the Depression, the war and the subsequent period of austerity. What might seem a bit hackneyed to our more fortunate and blasé generation might well have come across as fresh and new to them.
“Calabrian Signorine in Fiesta Costume” by Francis Sandwith. (click to enlarge)
He has a dry and rather self-deprecating humour as well. In
Taranto he was being shown around by the Director of the tourist office, a
prominent local photographer, and an interpreter.
In southern Italy the traveller is overwhelmed with hospitality. Your host will see that every moment of the day is occupied and is reluctant that your night should be spent in solitude and without suitable entertainment. So I was not surprised, for I had been warned about these old southern customs, when the interpreter inquired with a gay and confidential air whether I would like a young and beautiful signorina to share the midnight hours. The interpreter and the photographer, both delightful young men, gazed at me with warm understanding and sympathy. The Director hummed a little tune. I was a little embarrassed, for I did not like to let down the reputation of British photographers for enterprise, but I am in the middle fifties and was tired with the heat and travelling. So I excused myself by saying that I was too old.
“Trinity”by Francis Sandwith. (click to enlarge)
Cameras and technique
A particular highlight for me is that throughout the book he also describes the process of taking his photographs, and at the end he lists the cameras and film that he used. Although he describes his cameras as “miniature”, only one of them, an Ilford Advocate II, used 35mm film. The other three were all what would now be called medium format, using 6cm-wide 120 roll film. One was a twin-lens reflex Microcord, a British version of the Rolleicord. He also used two Zeiss Ikonta folding cameras. This was a pleasure to read because I have a couple of these in my collection:
My two Zeiss Ikonta cameras. The one on the left is an Ikonta 521 (6×4.5cm format) manufactured in the 1940s. On the right is an Ikonta 521/2 (6x7cm format) made in the 1950s. Behind is an original leather case for the 521/2. (click to enlarge)
The smaller one dates from the 1940s, and the larger from the 50s. With relatively little work I have restored both of these to working order and I have taken pictures with them. The lenses are very sharp, all things considered.
Photograph of Gundaroo, New South Wales, taken with the Zeiss Ikonta 521 camera and Fujichrome Velvia 50 film. The camera was about 70 years old when I took the picture. (click to enlarge)
The only two things wrong with them is firstly that the lenses are very contrasty, and secondly that the colour balance isn’t quite right on modern (Fujichrome Velvia) film – there is a bit of a blue cast. For lenses designed before colour film was really a thing that isn’t too surprising. Given the sharpness of my results, I’m not sure how to explain the poor quality of the reproductions in the book. It could be the how the book itself was printed, or it could be that by his own account Francis was mainly using fast black and white film, which would have produced quite grainy results. Film emulsion technology still had some way to go in the 1950s.
Francis also took some colour photographs on his trip. Alas none are reproduced in the book. Images in online bookshops show that the original dustcover was a colour version of the “Calabrian maidens” but unfortunately my copy has lost its cover. However it is nevertheless interesting to read Francis’s descriptions of the limitations of colour film in those days. The postscript in the book says he was using a colour negative film called “Pakolor” which according to my online searches was an English film based on an Agfa chemistry. A description here suggests that the film had an effective speed of ISO 10 which is very slow indeed by modern standards – requiring much longer exposures for a given light and aperture. So a tripod, or bright sunlight, would have been necessary. However Francis also explains that the high contrasts and harsh light encountered in the middle of the day were also unsuitable for colour film and that he could therefore only use it in limited circumstances. On one occasion in Taranto he took some pictures having forgotten that he had colour film in the camera, and the results were too badly underexposed to be used.
As I said, after buying the book I went to the pub, or as Francis would doubtless have put it, I repaired to a nearby hostelry, and enjoyed making his acquaintance over a glass of wine. From memory it was a Barolo, which is probably close enough, given his somewhat elastic definition of Chianti. Cheers, Francis.
The first four photographs were taken at the Giostro della Quintana (“Joust of the Quintain”) which has been held twice a year in the Umbrian town of Foligno since its revival in 1946. The joust (where mounted lancers try and hit a target on a rotating wooden dummy) is preceded by a parade in costume. I took these photographs in the park in which the participants were forming up.
Giostro della Quintana, Foligno 2019. Hasselblad 501 C/M, Zeiss Distagon 60mm lens, CFV-50c digital back (click to enlarge).
Foligno is located, somewhat unusually for this region, on the valley floor rather than perched on a hilltop or halfway up the side of a mountain. That means it has spread out a bit and the outskirts are quite industrial (which also means it was bombed during the Second World War). So our visits to Foligno had been restricted to shopping trips to the outskirts, until friends recommended we take a look at the centre.
Giostro della Quintana, Foligno 2019. Hasselblad 501 C/M, Zeiss Distagon 60mm lens, CFV-50c digital back (click to enlarge).
That turned out to be good advice. The centre of Foligno has lovely buildings, nice restaurants, and cheap parking. And being flat, you can wander around it with less effort than in most Umbrian towns. It also has a museum (the Palazzo Trinci) with extraordinary frescoes and a staircase that could have been designed by M.C. Escher. I plan a separate post on all that one day. Edit: I have now posted two articles on the Palazzo Trinci. You can find the first here and the second here.
Giostro della Quintana, Foligno 2019. Hasselblad 501 C/M, Zeiss Distagon 60mm lens, CFV-50c digital back (click to enlarge).
My readers, being all very educated, will have noticed that the Renaissance costumes in these photographs are consistent in both period and authenticity, unlike in some festivals where the concept of – say – “medieval” can be a bit elastic, as is how the participants’ trousers are held up . This consistency is not the result of careful selection of the photographs; they are all consistently based on Renaissance originals, and consistently this good.
Giostro della Quintana, Foligno 2019. Hasselblad 501 C/M, Zeiss Distagon 60mm lens, CFV-50c digital back (click to enlarge).
The remainder of these photographs were taken at the annual festival of the patron saint of the town of Todi, also in Umbria. I wrote about the 2018 festival here. The grand parade in Todi is preceded by various events, including an archery competition between the town districts, flag-tossing, and a competition between drumming groups from various towns in the region.
La Disfida di San Fortunato, Todi 2019. Hasselblad 501 C/M, Zeiss Sonnar 150mm lens, CFV-50c digital back (click to enlarge).
Some of the drumming groups were very good indeed, but the prize went to the local team (admittedly a popular decision).
La Disfida di San Fortunato, Todi 2019. Hasselblad 501 C/M, Zeiss Sonnar 150mm lens, CFV-50c digital back (click to enlarge).
Although some Renaissance (and later) themes appear in the parade, here the emphasis is on the medieval, and specifically the High Middle Ages, because let’s face it, the costumes were more fun then than earlier.
La Disfida di San Fortunato, Todi 2019. Hasselblad 501 C/M, Zeiss Sonnar 150mm lens, CFV-50c digital back (click to enlarge).
However just because the costumes are a bit flamboyant, that does not mean that the participants are not extremely serious about it.
La Disfida di San Fortunato, Todi 2019. Hasselblad 501 C/M, Zeiss Sonnar 150mm lens, CFV-50c digital back (click to enlarge).
Indeed, sometimes it seems that there is an inverse relationship between the exuberance of the costume and the demeanour of its wearer.
La Disfida di San Fortunato, Todi 2019. Hasselblad 501 C/M, Zeiss Sonnar 150mm lens, CFV-50c digital back (click to enlarge).
There is one group of participants who have trouble maintaining the regulation straight face, and that is the children, because they are all having such tremendous fun.
La Disfida di San Fortunato, Todi 2019. Hasselblad 501 C/M, Zeiss Sonnar 150mm lens, CFV-50c digital back (click to enlarge).
In my post On the Pleasure of Old Travel Books I mentioned the writer H.V. Morton’s felicitous comment that the market at Padua was “obviously joined to the Middle Ages by a continuous string of onions”. What I did not mention at the time was that it is one of our favourite markets in Italy, more so even than Campo dei Fiori in Rome.
There are many good reasons to visit Padua, and in my view the principal one is to visit the extraordinarily beautiful Scrovegni Chapel with its frescoes by Giotto. But there is also the botanical garden, founded in 1545 by the University of Padua, part of the formalisation of the study of botany, and to house new specimens being brought to Europe from the New World and Asia.
Actually, most visitors to Padua are probably there to visit the Basilica of one of the most popular saints in the Catholic hagiography, Saint Antony of Padua. Outside the basilica you can see the magnificent bronze statue by Donatello of the condottiere Erasmo di Narni, known to history as Gattamelata or the “honeyed cat”.
And it’s just a really pretty place all round.
But for all its many attractions, we would never visit Padua without going to the market. Not only does Morton’s observation about the sense of historical continuity hold true, but the quality of the produce is outstanding, it sits under, and beside, an extraordinary medieval building called the Palazzo della Ragione (Palace of Reason), and it’s a great place for people-watching.
The market gets going very early and is a heaving mass of activity all morning. Then, after everyone has bought the ingredients for their lunch and is going home to cook it, a miracle happens. Within half an hour or so the shops under the Palazzo are shuttered, the stalls in the piazza outside are folded up and taken away, and before you know it the place is deserted and the sleepy afternoon sets in.
So here is a photographic tribute to the Padua Market.
Padua Market. Hasselblad 501 C/M with Zeiss Distagon 50mm lens, CFV-50c digital back (click to enlarge). Padua Market. Hasselblad 501 C/M with Zeiss Distagon 50mm lens, CFV-50c digital back (click to enlarge). Padua Market. Hasselblad 501 C/M with Zeiss Distagon 60mm lens, CFV-50c digital back (click to enlarge). Padua Market. Hasselblad 501 C/M with Zeiss Distagon 50mm lens, CFV-50c digital back (click to enlarge). Salumeria at Padua Market. Hasselblad 501 C/M with Zeiss Distagon 50mm lens, CFV-50c digital back set to ISO 3200 (click to enlarge). Macelleria at Padua Market. Hasselblad 501 C/M with Zeiss Distagon 50mm lens, CFV-50c digital back set to ISO 3200 (click to enlarge). Macelleria at Padua Market, with proprietor. After taking the photograph I touched my cap to thank him, which he acknowledged with a small bow. Hasselblad 501 C/M with Zeiss Distagon 50mm lens, CFV-50c digital back set to ISO 3200 (click to enlarge). Fishmonger at Padua Market, with typically aesthetic display. Note the labels on the clocks – Chioggia is the town at the southern end of the Venetian lagoon where most of their fish would come from. Hasselblad 501 C/M with Zeiss Distagon 50mm lens, CFV-50c digital back (click to enlarge). Florist outside in the Piazza. Hasselblad 501 C/M with Zeiss Distagon 60mm lens, CFV-50c digital back (click to enlarge). The stalls in the Piazza delle Erbe, showing the Palazzo della Ragione. Hasselblad 501 C/M with Zeiss Distagon 60mm lens, CFV-50c digital back (click to enlarge). Lots of people ride bikes in Padua. Hasselblad 501 C/M with Zeiss Distagon 60mm lens, CFV-50c digital back (click to enlarge). Under the colonnade in the Palazzo della Ragione. Hasselblad 501 C/M with Zeiss Distagon 60mm lens, CFV-50c digital back (click to enlarge). Frescoes inside the Palazzo della Ragione. Hasselblad 501 C/M with Zeiss Distagon 60mm lens, CFV-50c digital back (click to enlarge). The lunchtime cleanup under way. Nice bar at the right. Hasselblad 501 C/M with Zeiss Distagon 60mm lens, CFV-50c digital back (click to enlarge). The deserted Piazza delle Erbe, shortly afterwards. Hasselblad 501 C/M with Zeiss Distagon 60mm lens, CFV-50c digital back (click to enlarge).
Next to the market is a pleasant bar where we enjoyed an aperitivo. Later, while at the Basilica of St Antony, I realised that I had mislaid my combined walking stick and camera monopod. I hurried back to the bar, to find that they were keeping it for me behind the counter. When I rejoined Lou, she observed that its recovery was to be expected, because among his other portfolios, St Antony is the patron saint of lost property.
Watching one of the countless Italian events where people
get dressed up in historical costume is great fun for tourists. But here’s the
thing – most of the time they aren’t really doing it for you, they’re doing it
for themselves.
Yes of course, events like the Palio in Siena are big tourist drawcards, but by all accounts the
municipal rivalries on display are no less intense for that. And for every big
event there are dozens if not scores of smaller local ones. Few are genuine
survivals from antiquity, but many have been bolted on to things that are, such
as the commemoration of a town’s patron saint, or a Good Friday recreation of
the Passion.
Moreover, there seems to be a difference between the way
these things are approached in Italy and in English-speaking countries. While
living in England several years ago we saw an historical re-enactment which was
clearly exemplary in its attention to historical detail – in costumes, weapons
and military tactics. In Italy things can sometimes be a bit more approximate –
the costumes worn by participants in a “medieval” festival might range from the
13th to the 17th Centuries.
But, with great respect to the English lot, they do seem to come from a more narrowly-defined (dare I say nerdy?) group than do their equivalents in Italy. In Italy you might find your neighbour – a carpenter during the week – walking solemnly along dressed in a monk’s cowl. Or the chap who wins the archery contest is the accountant who helps you work out your annual property tax. Or the gonfaloniere (banner carrier) in the parade is your plumber. Or the beautiful damsel in the flowing dress is the girl who serves your morning coffee at your favourite bar in the piazza. In other words, in Italy you get the sense that a broader section of the local community is involved. And thoroughly enjoying itself, to boot.
Here are four vignettes of this – one from Como in Lombardy,
one from Rome, and two from Todi in Umbria.
Como, 2017
We had been staying in Cadenabbia, halfway up the lake, and
had caught the hydrofoil down to Como for the day. The main object of the visit
was the 11th-Century Lombard-Romanesque Basilica of Sant’ Abbondio,
which involved a pleasant walk through the length of the historic centre of
Como.
On the way back to the ferry terminal we heard the
characteristic sound of a group of drummers some way off, and before long we came
across a group of drummers and sbandieratori
– those people who do the complicated displays with flags, including tossing
them into the air and catching them.
Sbandieratori in Como. Hasselblad 501 C/M with Zeiss Distagon 60mm lens, CFV-50c digital back (click to enlarge).
They were accompanied by a leather-lunged individual who, in
breaks between drumming and flag-tossing, announced the forthcoming highlights
of the medieval fair that was on that weekend. He in turn was accompanied by a
small serious-looking child in a white smock and skullcap, and large
spectacles. The effect (hopefully intended) was of some sort of miniature Doctor of Physick.
Drummers and friends, Como. Hasselblad 501 C/M with Zeiss Distagon 60mm lens, CFV-50c digital back (click to enlarge).
The flag-tossers were not the most expert, and a couple of
times had to run into the crowd to catch the flags before they landed on spectators,
but no-one seemed to mind very much.
Sbandieratori in Como. Hasselblad 501 C/M with Zeiss Distagon 60mm lens, CFV-50c digital back (click to enlarge).
Buon Compleanno, Roma, 2015
We were making our way into the city from our digs in Trastevere, intending to visit the Aventine Hill (one of the Seven Hills of Rometm). On the way, near the church of Santa Maria in Cosmadin, I pointed to a crowd in the distance and observed that there seemed to be an awful lot of tourists down there. Lou’s eyesight was better than mine in those days and she thought that it looked more like some kind of political demonstration.
At that point we realised that it was at least seventy years since political demonstrations in Rome involved people marching in ranks wearing polished helmets, carrying weapons, and axe-heads in bundles of sticks. In fact, what we had stumbled on was the annual celebration of Rome’s traditional birthday. By tradition, Rome was founded on the 21st of April, 753 BC. That made the following Tuesday the 2768th birthday of the city. So instead of fascists (OK, some of them were being fascists but in the ancient sense) what we were seeing was a large number of historical re-enactment societies from all over Italy – and there are a LOT of them – descending on Rome to take part in a parade.
A centurion. Google Nexus phone camera (click to enlarge).
Several of the societies clearly took it very seriously
indeed. They had adopted the legion that was raised in their own area and had
put enormous effort into authentic recreation of the armour and weapons of the
era. Others were a bit – well – cardboard, but everyone was having a jolly good
time.
Light infantry. Google Nexus phone camera (click to enlarge).
There were lots of legionaries, chanting the Latin version
of the Romans, united, will never be defeated, a fair few gladiators, a
handful of foederati (barbarian allies), and lots of vestal virgins.
I’m sure I saw this chap in an Asterix book. Google Nexus phone camera (click to enlarge).
A group of senators dressed in their scarlet-trimmed white
togas came past. I gave them an “ave” which they solemnly returned.
Senators. Google Nexus phone camera (click to enlarge).
Festa di San Fortunato, Todi, Umbria, 2018
Saint Fortunatus is the patron saint of Todi. He seems to have been an historical figure, as he was a bishop of the town in the 6th Century who is said to have persuaded the invading Goths not to attack. On the other hand it is possible that they were just put off by the prospect of the long steep climb up from the Tiber Valley below, which is challenging enough for a Fiat Panda.
A falconry demonstration. Hasselblad 501 C/M with Zeiss Sonnar 150mm CF lens , CFV-50c digital back (click to enlarge).
His saint’s day continues to be marked by religious observance in Todi, and there is no reason not to believe that the tradition has continued without interruption since antiquity. In recent times, the tradition has been augmented by a weekend of medieval high jinks including falconry demonstrations and an archery competition between the rioni or town districts, culminating in a grand parade.
Todi, Festa di San Fortunato. Hasselblad 501 C/M with Zeiss Sonnar 150mm CF lens , CFV-50c digital back (click to enlarge).
Many of the groups in the parade were from other towns in the region, and as I said before, the definition of “medieval” was elastic enough to include costumes from eras up to the 17th Century.
Todi, Festa di San Fortunato. Hasselblad 501 C/M with Zeiss Sonnar 150mm CF lens , CFV-50c digital back (click to enlarge).
Some groups, in costumes that could have been painted by Rembrandt, looked so fine that I was prepared to forgive them the anachronism.
Todi, Festa di San Fortunato. Hasselblad 501 C/M with Zeiss Sonnar 150mm CF lens , CFV-50c digital back (click to enlarge).
Several of the young women of Todi had obviously decided to
go with a general medieval vibe over strict authenticity and rather than
wearing long dresses, had opted for long tights and short tunics. After careful
consideration, I was prepared to forgive them that as well.
Archery
Competition and Sbandieratori, Todi, Umbria,
2019
Medieval archery has become quite a thing in Todi and in April there is a competition which attracts teams from all over Italy. Contestants move between various locations in the town, where they take part in different events – shooting at conventional targets, shooting at targets that move, shooting from moving saddles that mimic the movement of horses, and so on. You can see a video of the 2018 tournament here.
That little girl has just decided what she wants to be when she grows up. Hasselblad 501 C/M with Zeiss Sonnar 150mm CF lens , CFV-50c digital back (click to enlarge).
There is a medieval-themed market, some of which is just stalls selling the usual local produce with the stallholders in period dress, but some of which are selling “medieval” wares of varying degrees of authenticity.
Todi, Festa di San Fortunato. Hasselblad 501 C/M with Zeiss Sonnar 150mm CF lens , CFV-50c digital back (click to enlarge).
A group of drummers and sbandieratori is associated with the Todi archery group and they are very good.
Todi Sbandieratori. Hasselblad 501 C/M with Zeiss Sonnar 150mm CF lens , CFV-50c digital back (click to enlarge).
The crowd favourites were three small girls who took part with special lightweight flags, and who took it all very seriously indeed. Each did a session with an adult (maybe her dad) in which they followed his movements with great concentration.
Todi Sbandieratori. Hasselblad 501 C/M with Zeiss Distagon 60mm CF lens , CFV-50c digital back (click to enlarge). Todi Sbandieratori. Hasselblad 501 C/M with Zeiss Sonnar 150mm CF lens , CFV-50c digital back (click to enlarge).
Welcome to the second post in my series “History in Focus” where I feature the happy combination of a beautiful place, a rich history and a single successful photograph.
Urbino. Horseman 45FA field camera, Fujinon 125mm lens, Kang Tai 6x17cm rollfilm back, Fuji Velvia 50 film (click to enlarge)
The Place
We are looking at Urbino, in the region of Le Marche. It is on the unfashionable eastern side of the Apennines, in rolling hills between the high mountains and the coastal plain where the rivers run towards the Adriatic. The countryside is as pretty as anything in Tuscany or Umbria. They make decent wine, and the white wines of Jesi are moderately well known.
Great events of history have, by and large, passed Le Marche by. Yes, in antiquity one of the major routes north from Rome, the Via Flaminia, wound over the mountains here. But the going was still hard, and in comparatively recent history if you wanted to get from Rome to – say – Ancona on the Adriatic coast, you might have been better served going by sea.
The region lacks the extraordinary fertility of the Po Valley, was the centre of no mighty ancient civilisation, and the trade routes that passed through it were of the second order at best. Empires did not often fight over it. Its location, in short, did not create the environment for an economic or strategic powerhouse. And yet one of Italy’s jewels is found here.
The History
Urbino seems almost too perfect to be true. The town,
stretched along its ridge, and its major buildings, look like illustrations
from a fairy tale or a romance. The painter Raphael was born and served his
apprenticeship here. Its court was where one of the classics of Renaissance
literature was written. Its palace is a jewel box of architecture and art. It
was ruled by an archetypal Renaissance philosopher-prince, a stern warrior with
a humanist education who patronised artists and intellectuals and assembled one
of the greatest libraries outside the Vatican. In almost every respect, it
could be considered an exemplar of Renaissance ideals – an ideal ruler in an
ideal court in an ideal city. And its greatness came and went quickly – its
light burned briefly, but brightly.
Urbino was a Roman city in antiquity, but was close enough to the late Roman capital of Ravenna to suffer in the wars between Byzantines and Goths, and during the Lombard invasions. One comes across few references to it in most histories of the Middle Ages, and at the end of that era the impression is of a provincial capital whose ruling family controlled enough territory to make a few advantageous dynastic marriages in the immediate region, but for whom greatness did not obviously beckon.
Then, in the mid-15th Century, along came Federico da Montefeltro, Duke of Urbino. He was the bastard son of a former duke, and the title was first inherited by his half-brother. Federico set out on one of the standard careers for such young men, as a condottiere or mercenary leader, selling his services in the interminable wars of the period to the leaders of wealthy states such as Milan and Naples, or indeed the Pope.
As it turned out he was very successful at this profession,
which proved to be useful. For when he assumed the dukedom on the death of his
half-brother, he inherited a minor duchy whose finances were not in a good
state. But the considerable income from his military activities, combined with
the bargaining power of being a competent general at the head of a loyal and disciplined
force, meant that Urbino was suddenly punching above its weight.
Having a humanist education, Federico enthusiastically embraced the ideals of the Renaissance, governing his small duchy justly based on the best examples of the classical world. Painters, scholars and architects were all attracted to his court. A classic of Renaissance literature, Il Cortigiano (The Courtier) by Baldessare Castiglione, was written there and described an ideal court, based in good part on Federico’s actual court. It was hugely influential throughout Europe in describing what it meant to be a gentleman, when that had come to mean more than just landed wealth and skill at arms, but manners, learning and culture as well.
Urbino’s position in our imaginations as the exemplar of so much that was admirable about the Renaissance has been around for a while. It started with Castiglione, but Castiglione’s line was enthusiastically taken up by the man who really invented the modern idea of the Renaissance – the 19th Century Swiss historian Jacob Burckhardt. The legend of Urbino was given a further enthusiastic endorsement by Kenneth Clark in his seminal 1970s BBC television series Civilisation. (A few years ago the series was remastered in high definition from the original 35mm film stock – it occasionally turns up on streaming services and is worth looking out for.)
Modern historians point out, correctly, that the greatest architect of the legend of Federico the warrior-philosopher-prince was Federico himself. That’s true; he was a careful curator of his own legacy. But that doesn’t make him a fake – there is no evidence that he did not genuinely aspire to be the person he wanted to be remembered as.
But Federico’s son died without heir, the duchy passed to a family allied to the Papacy, and before long Urbino became part of the Papal States and entered the long economic and intellectual decline that came with it. Paradoxically, like other places in Central Italy, it was just that sudden reversion to a backwater which preserved the city for us much as it was during those glory days. These days Urbino is a university town which gives it a sense of intellectual energy very much in keeping with its past.
The Photograph
This photograph was the product of good planning and good fortune. Of course, having done the former makes it more likely that you will be in a position to take advantage of the latter.
We were staying a couple of dozen kilometres away near a
small town called Isola del Piano, and it was a quick trip over fairly decent
back roads from there to Urbino. The evening before I took the photograph, we
drove over to Urbino and I picked a spot which had a good view of the city. In
addition, I had a compass with me and a table for that time of year showing the
time of sunrise, and the azimuth of the sun at dawn. It seemed likely that,
given good conditions in the morning, the city would be illuminated over my
right shoulder by the rising sun. I marked the position on my satnav. These
days I have an app on my smartphone which does all that!
I set the alarm for an hour or so before sunrise the next
morning, and crept out taking all my large format camera gear with me. Arriving
at the spot I spent half an hour or so setting up and composing the picture; I
had chosen to use a 6x17cm rollfilm back on the Horseman camera to give me a
panoramic format, and a slightly wide-angle lens.
And this is where the good fortune comes in. It had rained
quite heavily the day before, but the morning proved to be fine. As the light slowly
increased, I realised that the valleys were filled with mist. This not only
meant that various main roads, petrol stations and other modern buildings were
hidden, but the magical city of Urbino, which floats in our imagination as an
embodiment of the Renaissance ideal, was transformed into an island floating in
a sea of cloud. The cloud started burning off quite quickly once the sun hit
it, so I only had a few minutes in which to take pictures at various exposures.
In this version I used a long exposure to smooth out the movement of the cloud,
and a 2-stop neutral density graduated filter to bring the brightness of the
sky and the land closer together, as it would be perceived by the human eye.
Edit: in 2024 we revisited Urbino and the photographs I took then are the basis of a separate article here.
A photographic trip to the Italian Alps provided us with an historical and cultural experience as well as a good deal of natural beauty. The Valle d’Aosta (“Vallée d’Aoste” to its French-speaking majority) is in the far north-west of Italy, and its views, both natural and man-made, offer much to the photographer.
The reason for the natural views is obvious – the valley runs
right up into the Alps below Monte Bianco (Mont Blanc to the francophones).
Monte Bianco (Mont Blanc) from the Valle d’Aosta. Canon EOS-3, 17-35mm L zoom lens, Fuji Velvia 50 film (click to enlarge)
The man-made views are due to its history as a bottleneck on the routes over the western Alps. As the valley gets closer to the watershed of the Alps it splits in two – the right fork leads to the Great St Bernard Pass which leads to Switzerland, and the left fork to the Little St Bernard Pass which leads to France. It is thought that the latter is the route used by the Carthaginian general Hannibal in his invasion of Italy in 218 BC. These days you cross under the Alps in the 12 km-long tunnel, which is faster but less interesting.
Monte Bianco (Mont Blanc). Canon EOS 3, Canon 100-400mm IS L lens, Fuji Velvia film (click to enlarge)
Other invaders used the valley too, as did grand tourists in the 18th Century, and countless pilgrims through the Middle Ages. The Via Francigena, which I mentioned in my post on the Val d’Orcia, enters Italy here.
The valley is narrow, which would assist defenders to deny passage to an army, or at least hold it up for a while. Even when travellers came in peace, there would have been other reasons to control the road – to exact tolls or to levy customs duties.
The result is that in many places you can look around you and see multiple castles, often in different architectural styles. In the photograph below, the castle of Saint-Pierre (the nearer one) shows some of the decorative flair of the High Middle Ages, with the more distant one being a dour and forbidding keep from an earlier, harsher time. I imagine that there might have been forts on both sides of the valley since early times, with one of them being progressively modernised, becoming larger and more comfortable as the town grew up around it, while the other was retained as an outpost or watch tower.
The Castle of Saint-Pierre in the Valle d’Aosta. Horseman 45FA field camera, Nikkor 150mm lens, Horseman 6x12cm rollfilm back, Fuji Velvia 50 film (click to enlarge)
Some of the high villages are very pretty, with picturesque
medieval churches in front of the backdrop of the mountains. We were there in
spring and it was still quite cold at altitude, with the alpine meadows yet to
get their full complement of wildflowers.
Verrayes, in the mountains above the town of Aosta. Horseman 45FA field camera, Fujinon 125mm lens, Kang Tai 6x17cm rollfilm back, Fuji Velvia 50 film (click to enlarge)
Halfway down the valley is the town of Aosta, after which the valley and the region are named. It was founded by the Romans around 25 BC and named Augusta Prætoria Salassorum after the Emperor Augustus, and was originally a garrison town to secure the mountain passes as the Roman legions pushed northwards. You can still see the odd bit of Roman stonework in the town.
Roman arch, Aosta. Canon EOS 3, 28-80mm IS lens, Fuji Velvia 50 film (click to enlarge)
In the Middle Ages Aosta became part of the County (then Duchy,
then Kingdom) of Savoy and its royal family eventually ruled Piedmont and
became rulers of united Italy. Apart from lasting nine hundred years or so, it
is hard to think of anything the dynasty did to deserve the honour, but that’s
a topic for another post one day.
Culturally the valley is an interesting mix of Italian and French. Most of the population (in the upper valley, at any rate) speak French. There is a third language called Valdôtain (ie, “Val d’Aostian”) which is a dialect of Arpitan or Franco-Provençal. Between Italian unification and the end of the fascist era Italy was shamefully intolerant of its non-Italian linguistic minorities, so I was surprised to read in this Wikipedia article that Valdôtain has actually survived better than its relatives in France and Switzerland, thanks to Val d’Aosta’s status as an autonomous region, granted by the 1948 Italian constitution.
Since no-one was going to address us in Valdôtain, the most evidence of it that we saw was in placenames like Oyace, Dzovennoz and Bionaz, which sound neither French nor Italian. In practical terms, the cultural mix meant that we found an amazing supermarket on the outskirts of Aosta, with sections for both Italian and French produce.
The Matterhorn (Cervino on the Italian side). Canon EOS 3, 100-400mm IS L lens, Fuji Velvia film (click to enlarge)
Our visit to the Valle d’Aosta was the first time I had taken my large format equipment overseas. I wasn’t all that confident in its use, so I still took a lot of pictures with my 35mm camera. And for those pictures I did take in large format, after all the time spent loading and unloading film, and setting up and focusing the camera, it was a nervous wait for the transparencies to come back from processing to see if any had worked out. They mostly did, and the first experience of putting 4×5 inch or 6×17 cm transparencies on the lightbox is very exciting.
Some of the most dramatic photographs can be made when there is a combination of sunlight on your subject and dark stormy clouds behind. Under those conditions the light can take on a particular intensity and clarity. I have encountered this in central Italy at several different times of year. In spring and early summer the effect on the young vegetation can produce some extremely vivid greens, while in late summer or autumn you will often get some very warm and rich browns.
These four photographs were all taken in early June from the belvedere outside the walls of the town of Pienza, overlooking the Val d’Orcia. On the other side of the valley, from San Quirico d’Orcia to Monte Amiata, a thunderstorm was building, and for a brief period the closer part of the valley remained in sunlight while the distant part got darker and darker. The film I used – Fuji Velvia 50 – is sometimes criticised for the intensity of its green colours, but in this case it only served to heighten the drama.
I recall that I only just made it back to the car before the storm hit (Hasselblads are not particularly waterproof) and we drove back to Umbria in heavy rain.
Hasselblad 501C/M, Zeiss Distagon 250mm lens, Fuji Velvia 50 film (click to enlarge)Hasselblad 501C/M, Zeiss Sonnar 250mm lens, Fuji Velvia 50 film (click to enlarge) Hasselblad 501C/M, Zeiss Sonnar 150mm lens, Fuji Velvia 50 film (click to enlarge) Hasselblad 501C/M, Zeiss Distagon 50mm lens, Fuji Velvia 50 film (click to enlarge)
I posted another photograph of one of the iconic Val d’Orcia views as part of the History in Focus series of posts.
Sicily has a “Wild West”, or at least it seems like it.
The landscape – especially in the nature reserve of Lo
Zingaro and the north-west corner of the island around the fishing port of San
Vito Lo Capo – is dry and desert-like, with some spectacular scenery. There are
places where it would not feel all that surprising to see Terence Hill and Bud
Spencer1 ride over the hill to the accompaniment of an Ennio
Morricone score.
The light is harsher, the colours are brighter and it has an
edgier feel than does the softer, more pastel-coloured southeast.
Lo Zingaro Nature Reserve, Horseman 45FA Large Format Camera with 4×5 inch sheet film back, Fuji Velvia film, Nikkor 150mm lens (click to enlarge)
And of course, there is the Mafia, the malevolent roots of
which penetrate more deeply here, it is said, than elsewhere in Sicily, especially
in towns like Trapani.
But – and here the Wild West comparisons are best set aside – it has layer upon glorious layer of history going back to the remotest antiquity, which causes the classier sort of travel writer (ahem) to use words like “palimpsest”. Here you will find remnants of Ancient Greek, Phoenician, Carthaginian, Roman and Arab, and that short-lived but wonderful hybrid of Arab, Byzantine and Norman cultures that emerged during the reign of the Hautevilles in the 12th Century. Much less of this survives in the east and south-east of Sicily, due I suppose to earthquakes.
I described our arrival in Sicily and settling in to our accommodation near Castellammare del Golfo in “Il Miracolo di San Bagagio“.
San Vito Lo Capo
Next day, we set out from Castellammare and headed for San Vito Lo Capo. There is no direct road from Castellammare to San Vito – such a route was once mooted but would have gone through the nature reserve of Lo Zingaro and, despite being backed by companies with reputed Mafia connections, it was defeated by a local popular movement, which was a pretty big deal under the circumstances. So we headed across the peninsula to Trapani, whence we headed up the coast. There was still a howling hot wind coming in from Africa a short way to the west, and after a long hot summer the country was very stark and desert-like – a bit like Central Australia, only with steeper mountains and bright blue sea.
Looking Northwest from Erice towards Monte Cofano and San Vito lo Capo in the distance. Hasselblad 501C/M camera, Fuji Velvia 50 film, Zeiss Sonnar 250mm lens (click to enlarge)
Why were we going there? We had established that this would be the weekend of a sagra or food festival. These are held all over Italy and generally celebrate the local speciality. In the case of San Vito lo Capo their local speciality is couscous – obviously it is a dish of North African origin, but here you are closer to Tunis than you are to Rome or even Naples, and the Sicilians have absorbed it into their own cooking traditions along with much else from the Arab world. And rather than a simple sagra, this had built itself up as a big multicultural festival and rather than simply “la sagra del couscous” it goes by the rather grandiose name of “Couscousfest”. There were two reasons why we were going. One was that we had had opportunities to go to sagre before but chickened out. The second was that our landlord had been very keen that we should and neither of us would have been game to admit that we hadn’t.
San Vito lo Capo was heaving with people, it was dreadfully hot and we had to park a kilometre or so away and walk. We finally got into town and worked out what we had to do – buy a ticket which entitled us, at one of three locations, to a bowl of couscous, a glass of local wine and a typical Sicilian sweet (while stocks lasted).
When we got to one of the venues, in a series of brightly-decorated tents set up on the beach, I decided that I liked the sound of one of the couscous on offer, and asked the person serving for some. She wasn’t sure who was serving that one, but was pretty sure it wasn’t hers, and directed me down the line. The same happened twice more until I got to the end of the line, where I was directed back to the first bowl. There was a different person serving there now, and he was certain that what he had was what I wanted, and served me some. It wasn’t. Still, it was a fish couscous which was quite representative of local cuisine, and Lou and I swopped. I ended up with Busiate alla Trapanese which is a local pasta in a local sauce which I had been intending to try, and it turned out to be delicious, so all was well. Trapanese sauce is olive oil, tomatoes, basil, garlic, pepper and parmesan.
As we left San Vito it was still desperately hot, with the tents drumming and flapping under the onslaught of the scirocco, but mercifully, that night the scirocco eased, and was replaced by weather which was still pleasantly warm, but which could surprise you with the occasional sudden thunderstorm.
Segesta
Not far from Castellammare is a place called Segesta, with a very fine Greek temple and amphitheatre. During the great period of Greek colonisation around 500 BC, Greek city-states were established along the east and south coasts of Sicily. The Carthaginians settled the west coast. Although Segesta isn’t on any of these coasts it marks the furthest extent of Greek culture in Sicily. The Greek cities showed no sense of ethnic solidarity, and fought some extraordinarily vicious wars among themselves.
We paid an initial visit to Segesta one afternoon when there were a few tourist buses in the car park, and it took a bit of artful composing to get pictures that did not include their passengers.
The amphitheatre at Segesta, with interesting meteorology in the distance. Hasselblad 501C/M camera, Fuji Velvia 50 film, Zeiss Planar 80mm lens (click to enlarge)
We have noticed that while the Romans built their towns down
in the valleys, around here the Greeks often built theirs on hilltops. Doubtless
this was as a result of their perennial warfare, but it does make for some
spectacular views. From the amphitheatre we could see the weather changing constantly
around us – there was a warm moist wind from the west and on the lee side of a
mountain a boiling mass of dark cloud was continuously forming.
Despite the crowds it was an opportunity to scout for further photographs and with the aid of a compass I established that there would be a good chance of the temple being illuminated by the rising sun, and that there was a dirt road at a suitable distance where I would be able to set up my large format camera.
A couple of days later, therefore, I got up very early and drove back to Segesta. The satnav suggested a shorter back way to get there – but I should have known not to trust it. The Italy maps don’t seem to distinguish between good metalled roads and tiny goat tracks and one must be ever on the alert for attempts to send you down the latter. Which it did, on this occasion, and before long I was making slow and very tentative progress along a “road” of a type that was almost certainly not covered in my car rental contract. Every now and then I would pass an early-rising local who would watch in amazement, presumably wondering when James May and Richard Hammond would appear.
Eventually I emerged at Segesta, found my pre-chosen spot, and set up the tripod and the camera while waiting for sunrise. A couple of farm dogs came bounding up barking furiously, but when they saw I had a large format camera they sat down and watched proceedings quietly and with interest. I often notice that a large format camera has this effect. It was a bit cloudy to the west, but the sun found a gap to shine through which illuminated the temple.
The temple at Segesta. Horseman 45FA large format camera with 6x12cm rollfilm back, Fuji Velvia 50 film, Fujinon 120mm lens (click to enlarge)
In the history of Sicily, the Ancient Greek colonies of Southern Italy (“Magna Graecia”) had some genuine cultural glories – they were part of the broader Hellenic intellectual world, and being provinces did not necessarily make them “provincial”. Even quite recently art works of considerable sophistication have been found, fished up in nets from the sea bed.
That history, however, is also replete with tyrannical
rulers, wars, acts of treachery and appalling cruelty. Behind the temple of
Segesta is a deep ravine. When Segesta was sacked by the tyrant Agathocles of
Syracuse, a reported 8,000 of the inhabitants of the town were killed by being
thrown into the ravine. Segesta came under Carthaginian protection, but during
the Punic Wars it treacherously murdered the Carthaginian garrison and changed
allegiance to Rome. The price for Sicily of the Pax Romana was that it declined into an agricultural backwater.
I was going to make this a combined post on both the Ancient Greeks and the Normans in Sicily but there is far too much to say about the Normans, so will write on them separately in due course.
edit: I have now done so and you can find the post here.
Note1: Terence Hill and Bud Spencer appeared in a
number of so-called “Spaghetti Westerns” in the 1960s and 70s. Their real names
are Mario Girotti and Carlo Pedersoli, respectively.
Recommended further reading on the History of Sicily: Blue Guide Sicily, edited by Michael Metcalfe, Sicily, Three Thousand Years of Human History by Sandra Benjamin, and Sicily, A Short History from the Ancient Greeks to Cosa Nostra, by John Julius Norwich.
Sometimes it all comes together – a successful photograph of a beautiful scene with a rich history. For those few fortunate conjunctions I have decided to create posts based on a single image, and call them “History in Focus”. I will start with the image of the Val d’Orcia that I use as the header for this site. If you are looking at this on a desktop computer or tablet, please be sure to click on the image to see an enlargement – it’s worth it.
The Val d’Orcia (click to enlarge)
There is a spot on the strada provinciale (SP) 146 between San Quirico d’Orcia and Pienza from which a thousand calendar and coffee-table book photographs have been taken. Setting up your camera there, you are putting your tripod feet into the holes worn by hundreds of landscape photographers before you, including some of the greats like Joe Cornish, Lee Frost and Charlie Waite. It is for many foreign visitors the perfect Tuscan landscape of rolling hills, topped by picturesque farmhouses at the ends of avenues of cypresses.
The place
Val d’Orcia runs south-east from below Siena. To the west
are mountains, tallest of which is Monte Amiata. To the east is a lower range
of hills which divides the Val d’Orcia from the Valdichiana.
The difference between the two valleys is marked: until relatively recently the Valdichiana was full of lakes and swamps, and is now extraordinarily fertile. The Val d’Orcia, on the other hand, is more gaunt; the bones show beneath the skin, as it were. The area was heavily forested in antiquity, but denuded of its trees by the Etruscans and Romans. The resulting erosion seriously degraded the land, and by the early 20th Century this area, which we now think of as a land of milk and honey, was in fact in the grip of dreadful poverty. Its recovery, and the creation of the landscape we see today, is due to a program of agricultural reform and partial reforestation started in the 1930s and 40s by an Italian aristocrat called Antonio Origo and his wife, Iris.
Iris Origo – Anglo-Irish-American aristocrat, landscape gardener, writer of scholarly historical biographies, and war heroine, deserves a post of her own at some stage.
Down the western side of the Val d’Orcia runs an ancient road. In places it lies under the route of the modern SP2, and in places it wanders off by itself, a quiet unpaved road among the wheat fields, cypresses and oaks. Modern travellers on the autostrada and high-speed rail line follow the Valdichiana to the east, but in medieval times that route would have been hard to travel due to swamps and lakes, not to mention dangerously malarial. So if you were on a pilgrimage to Rome, or leading an army there, you might well have come this way. The route was generally referred to as “the road out of France”, or the Via Francigena.
The Val d’Orcia has always been a border region. It lies at the southern margin of what was republican Siena in the Middle Ages, later the Grand Duchy of Tuscany. The hilltop fortress of Radicofani, visible from pretty much anywhere in the valley, marked the northern edge of the Papal territories. You can see it in the photograph as a flat-topped hill on the horizon with a tower on it.
Here, in the year 1155, the army of Frederick Barbarossa paused in its southward march, while Frederick waited for emissaries from Pope Adrian IV.
These two men were among the most forceful personalities in medieval history. Frederick was determined to assert all the historic power – and more – of the Holy Roman Empire to which he was heir. Adrian (born Nicholas Breakspear, the only English pope) was elected to replace an unworldly and vacillating predecessor at a time when both the religious and temporal authority of the Church were facing multiple threats. Frederick’s army approached the papal domains from the north. The kingdom of Sicily, under its Norman rulers, pressed from the south. The aristocratic families that ruled Rome were asserting their historic independence, both from Pope and Emperor. And the greatest challenge of all was spiritual, in the form of a monk by the name of Arnold of Brescia who preached against the worldly wealth and power of the Church.
Adrian decided that his best approach was to make common cause, at least temporarily, with Frederick. He would agree to crown Frederick as Emperor, in return for Frederick’s help dealing with his various problems. After some careful preliminary negotiations with Papal legates here in the Val d’Orcia, Frederick and his army moved south until they were just across the border into Papal territory. There, after some protracted and prickly meetings between the principals, they moved south to Rome where the Roman senators were comprehensively outmanoeuvred, and Frederick was crowned Emperor by the Pope before the senators realised it was happening.
Later, after signing a treaty with Sicily, Adrian changed sides, and united the northern Italian cities against Frederick in what would become the Lombard League.
The biggest loser in all of this was Arnold of Brescia, who, deprived of Imperial protection, was condemned by the Church and hanged, his body burnt, and his ashes thrown in the Tiber. Allowing no bodily relics to survive was intended, in the Middle Ages, to ensure that a person did not become an object of popular veneration or even a saint. Arnold’s back-to-basics message was not all that different from that of St Francis of Assisi in the next century, but Francis lived in a more politically propitious time, and was more fortunate in his Pope. Therein lies another post, one day.
Recommended reading:
The Popes, A History, by John Julius Norwich, London 2011, Chapter XI.
The photograph
We were staying in the Agriturismo Cretaiole, just outside Pienza, only a few minutes’ drive away along the SP146. It was April, cool enough for morning mists, and when the sunrise is late enough that the aspiring dawn photographer does not need to get up in the middle of the night. It is also early enough in the year that a camera set up to take this view would be shooting into the sun. That would make things tricky in terms of contrast and lens flare, but on the plus side, any mist might be dramatically backlit.
I set the alarm for about 5.30am and crept out. It was still pitch dark. What’s more, I realised, there was a thick fog. I decided to put my hope on the fog clearing a bit when the sun hit it, and continued to the spot I had chosen earlier. I was going to use the Horseman 45FA large format camera, with a 6x17cm Kang Tai panoramic rollfilm back. I chose a standard focal length, which meant my Nikkor 150mm. On the assumption that the sky would be a good deal lighter than the ground, I also fitted a 0.6 neutral density graduated filter. This reduces the difference in brightness between the sky and the land to something that colour film or digital can manage without losing detail at either end of the range. As with all filters, the test of whether you have done it right is that it should not be possible to tell from the finished image.
No other filter was used. I say this because some people have seen this image and assumed that the pink colour is due to a filter. No, it is all natural.
By the time I had got all that set up, the sky was beginning
to lighten and the fog had lifted enough to see the tops of the hills sticking
out. I made the final adjustments to the composition on the focusing screen,
then removed it and replaced it with the panoramic film back, loaded with ISO
50 Fuji Velvia. Then I waited. The sun rose, and very quickly the mist started
to thin. I removed the dark slide, cocked the shutter, and got ready to take
the picture. Just at the last minute I realised that the filter had completely
fogged up with condensation from the mist. After quickly removing it, wiping it
dry and replacing it, I shielded the lens from the direct sunlight and took the
shot.
Time to set up: about 15 minutes. Time waiting for the light
to be right: about 40 minutes. Length of exposure: 1 second.
The resulting 6x17cm positive image was then scanned on an Imacon Flextight II film scanner. Post–processing in Photoshop was limited to making the scanned image as close to the original as possible. I have printed this image at a width of 86cm and it is completely sharp.
I took several more photographs after this one, which I have made the subject of a separate post here. And you can find more pictures of the Val d’Orcia, taken from Pienza, here.
Since this is supposed to be a blog about photography as well as history and travel, I suppose I ought to talk a bit about cameras, in particular large format photography. It’s a bit geeky so feel free to skip it if you are just here for the travel and history posts.
Small format is where the image size on film or on a digital sensor is 35mm or smaller (the so-called 35mm format is actually around 36x24mm in size).
Medium format comes in standard sizes of 6×4.5cm, 6x6cm, 6x7cm,
and 6x9cm.
Large format is anything larger. Standard sizes for sheet film are 4×5 inches (approximately 10x13cm) 5×7 inches and 8×10 inches. 6x12cm and 6x17cm (using roll film) are also considered large format.
The vast majority of digital sensors are small format – some are called “full frame” which equates to the same size as 35mm film, to distinguish them from the even smaller APS-C format. Note that while there is a relationship between the number of megapixels and the physical size of the sensor, they are not the same thing.
There are a small number of cameras which use medium format digital sensors, such as those made by Hasselblad or the Fujifilm GFX series. Anything which approached large format digital would be colossally expensive and limited to military or scientific (including astronomical) applications.
I got into large format photography about a dozen years ago. The Royal Australian Air Force School of Photography had gone digital and was selling off its analogue equipment. I bought a Horseman 45FA camera with a Nikon 150mm lens (in large format, 150mm is considered a “standard” lens, equivalent to 50mm in small format). It is what is often called a “view camera” or “field camera”. Although it looks very old, the 45FA was introduced in 1984, and stayed in production until at least the 1990s.
Horseman 45FA camera with Fujinon 210mm lens and 6x12cm rollfilm back. It was about to take the picture of the Temple at Segesta shown in this post.
This picture of my Horseman shows the design principles for most large format cameras. The lens is attached to the front bit, which is attached to the back bit by light-proof bellows. You move the front bit forward and backwards to focus the image. The front and back move independently of each other. If you move them up and down or from side to side while keeping them parallel, that can alter perspective and is often used in architectural photography to correct the converging verticals or “leaning back” effect when you photograph a building from ground level. If you change the angle by tilting either the lens or the back plane away from the vertical or horizontal, it does funky things to the depth of focus, according to a rule of optics called Scheimpflug’s Principle after its discoverer, an artillery officer in the army of the Austro-Hungarian Empire who was investigating the use of photography for reconnaissance from balloons. If you tilt the front standard forward, you can increase the depth of focus considerably. If you tilt it backward, you decrease it considerably, which has the effect of fooling your brain into seeing objects as much smaller than they really are. The latter effect can be simulated digitally, and is often referred to as “tilt and shift”, after the physical movements which originally created it.
I have several large format lenses in a range of focal
lengths. Some are made by companies like Nikon and Fuji. Others, like Zeiss,
Schneider-Kreuznach and Rodenstock, are more associated with the fields of
medical and technical imaging.
To take a large format photograph on sheet film, you do the
following:
Decide what lens to use, take the front and rear caps off, and clip it to the front standard. The aperture and shutter mechanisms are attached to the lens, not the camera.
Open the shutter. Focus by moving the front standard backwards or forwards while observing the image (upside down and back to front) on the ground-glass screen on the rear standard. Make any alterations to the geometry in accordance with the Scheimpflug principle. For accuracy you will probably want to use a magnifying loupe. If it is a bright day you might need to use a dark cloth over your head.
Set the aperture and exposure, manually, on the shutter. You will have established this either by using a hand-held light meter, or by calculating it in your head (which is not as hard as it sounds, when you know how).
Close the shutter. This is really important and forgetting it is one reason why novices ruin their shots.
Insert a film magazine between the rear standard and the ground glass screen. The magazine might hold one or several sheets of film, but you will have pre-loaded it earlier, either in a completely dark room, or using a changing bag.
Remove the dark slide which protects the film from the light. Forgetting to do so is reason number two for novices ruining their shots.
Make the exposure by cocking the spring-loaded shutter and pressing the shutter release cable.
Put the dark slide back (yes, reason number three…).
All the processes described above are totally mechanical. A large format camera contains no electronic components because there is nothing for them to do. Assuming that the light is cooperating, I would say that it typically takes about 15-20 minutes to set up and take one large format photograph. So it is not something you can do on the spur of the moment; I tend to select my spots in advance and then come back, usually early in the morning or late in the evening when the light is at its best. Originally I used to carry a compass so I could estimate where the sun would be at sunrise and sunset, but these days you can get some clever smartphone apps to do that part for you.
So what is the attraction of large format photography? The first reason is that size does matter. For a given density of silver grains in the film emulsion, or pixels on a digital sensor, the larger the size of the image, the more of them you will have. Moreover, the larger the image, the less magnification you are asking the lens to do, and the less you will be pushing the limits of the resolving power of focused light – limits which show themselves in things like chromatic aberration. All this means sharper images for a given enlargement size.
The second reason is that being forced to slow down and think about what you are doing is no bad thing when it comes to photography. It makes each image more of an individual artefact, and the taking of such an image into an act of craftsmanship.
There is a third, far less noble reason to enjoy large format photography. It’s fun turning up to a famous beauty spot and setting up your large-format camera next to some hotshot with the latest Canon or Nikon and a lens the size of a bazooka. “That’s not a camera, son. This is a camera…”
Update: 18 March 2022: Yesterday I took a big step and traded in all my large format gear for a Fujifilm GFX 50R mirrorless medium format digital camera and 32-64mm zoom lens. So this post is now of somewhat historical interest. But for my current life, travelling style (and age), large format gear is just too bulky and heavy.
Welcome to a site specialising in the things that interest me – travel, history and photography in Italy.
About twenty years ago, while posted to England for two years by my Australian employer, I started a website to share my photographs with family and friends. The website was first created in hand-rolled HTML on a text editor (on an Amiga computer!) and although I later used various website authoring tools, it retained a fairly basic “Web 1.0” look.
On return to Australia, I migrated the website to my new ISP, but work got busier and busier and after a few years I stopped updating the website. Eventually I changed my ISP plan, the free web hosting stopped, and the website disappeared.
In more recent years, while travelling for work or pleasure, I would send e-mails, often with pictures attached, to my late parents, to whom were then added my wife’s parents, then our respective siblings, and so on.
I have now entered a phase of life where I will be working much less, and only on things that interest me. I have therefore decided to start again, combining the two aims of sharing my photography and my writing about travel and history, this time using more contemporary web technology to create a site about history and photography in Italy.
My photography has evolved over time as well. The earliest pictures I posted were taken on a Minolta X-300 35mm SLR film camera. That was replaced by a Canon EOS-50e, then by a Canon EOS-3. Then, at about the time when digital was really starting to take off, I had a long think about my photography, and decided to go in the other direction – back to basics. I bought a Hasselblad 500 C/M camera, with no electronics or built-in metering, and started learning to take photographs without artificial assistance.
But I was on a slippery slope, and as more and more professionals got out of film, like many amateurs I was tempted by the newly-affordable second-hand professional film gear that was coming on the market. A series of medium-format rangefinder cameras complemented the Hasselblad, and then I saw an advertisement for a Horseman 45FA large-format camera that took 4×5 inch sheet film images. For several years after that I was of the view that the only real cameras were ones with bellows on the front, and on which one composed upside-down and back-to-front on a ground glass screen. In bright light, one had the additional pleasure of doing it under a cloth, to the embarrassment of one’s wife.
Recently, and ironically just as film started its resurgence, I finally used my impending retirement as an excuse to indulge myself with a 50 MP digital back for my Hasselblad system.
My current (active) photographic gear consists of:
Hasselblad 501 C/M medium format camera, with A12 and A24 film backs, a CFV-50c digital back, and 40, 60, 80, 150 and 250mm lenses.
Horseman 45FA large format camera, with 4×5-inch sheet film back, and 6x12cm and 6x17cm roll film backs, and 90, 125, 150, 180 and 210mm lenses by Schneider-Kreuznach, Rodenstock, Fuji and Nikon..
Nikon Coolscan 9000 and Imacon Flextight II film scanners.
Update: 18 March 2022: Yesterday I took a big step and traded in all my large format gear for a Fujifilm GFX 50R mirrorless medium format digital camera and 32-64mm zoom lens.
Update: March 2023: I found myself using the Fujifilm GFX 50R far more than I did the Hasselblad, so I sold the Hasselblad gear after almost 20 years and bought a Fujifilm X-Pro3 rangefinder and several lenses.
You can find a post about my large format system here.
And the blog name? It isn’t a direct reference to the Homeric hero. The Patroclus was a ship of the Blue Funnel Line that made the run between Liverpool and Hong Kong in the early 1960s. I travelled on it as a small child.
