Rome

I've noticed the artwork in the hotel, photographs of many of the different tourist hotspots in the same frame, a lot of creative manipulation that works really well, I'll keep this in mind for the next assignment which requires me to cut & paste an image together for 'real or fake'

I'm thinking of my assignment, I have a few approaches to it, there's the Henri Cartier-Bresson geometry, lines, shapes etc along with tone, texture etc, I'm not sure if I will take the usual images of landmarks (for the assignment anyway), but may take the approach of trying to capture the essence of Rome or rather what that means to me. I've looked at several photographers who between them take a bit of everything.

Vatican City - amazing, beautiful, as expected but not the spiritual feeling I was expecting, maybe the sheer numbers of people and the feeling of cattle hearding spoilt that ambience! The lighting conditions were a challenge and the dynamic range being high in most cases needed to avoid windows and direct light. I did get some nice lines and curves, but they looked better in colour so I may use them, I may not. I also got some pictures of beggars, these are images to take quite quickly, fortunately my new camera allows me to flip out the screen, use live view, and focus by simply touching the screen, I've taken a few images this way without being noticed. I may change my approach to that of a different view of Rome, that of the numerous beggars. I have an image of a woman begging with a little plastic tub with a postcard of the pope, asking for money...in the name of the pope??  My other images are of a beggar with one leg, sitting by a bin, at the bottom of some steps with the light spilling down with him looking up, unfortunately this wasn't sharp enough for my assignment. I have images of people in the Vatican queuing to touch the 'feet' of St Peter, I noticed the dislocation between poverty and the perceived piety of touching the feet of a statue whilst outside the doors there are beggars with nothing and people walk by.

Trevi fountain and Spanish steps provided me with plenty of touristy images, I took a bit of a twist with the Spanish steps image and positioned myself about halfway up and after much manoeuvring, got an image of the steps with 3 or 4 different angles, the most difficult bit being getting the exact moment where there wasn't a person in the frame!

The trip to the Trastevere area (old town) was my chance to take images in a Daido Moryama style, like the stray dog walking the streets capturing life around him, well it was me, my husband and the kids but my intention was there! What a gorgeous place, old rustic buildings galore, the narrow streets made composition a bit of a challenge.

Images for assignment so far seem to fall into 2 sets, images with a lilt toward geometrical shapes and the second part looking at the part of rome people wouldn't want to see, the beggars, the underbelly of the beautiful city that attracts so much attention. I'm especially pleased with the blind beggar on the steps which I took with the live view touch screen feature of my new camera which I'm really pleased with.