The challenge with taking outdoor photos at night is, of course, the fact that it’s dark outside at nighttime. For photos of people, you can use a flash, but if you want to take a photo of something as large as the Roman amphitheatre, L’Arena, in Verona, a flash just isn’t going to cut it. And while you can use an ISO setting with a high number to make the photo seem lighter, there’s only so much you can do even with those settings. The best solution is to use a tripod and take a really long (multi-second) exposure. But carrying a heavy tripod on vacation has never been something I’ve wanted to do. So to get any photos of L’Arena at night, I usually try to balance the camera on a bench and crop out edges of the bench (or our legs, if we are sitting on the bench when I take the photo).

But on that rainy day in Verona when I was shooting photos of all those puddles outside L’Arena,  I realized it would be fun try a nighttime photo of the entire amphitheater itself.  The benches were all covered with rainwater at that point, though, and rainwater is not good for a camera to sit in while you’re taking a photo. So, lacking a tripod — or the a viable bench to use — I couldn’t do a long exposure of any kind.

Instead, I snapped a couple of experiments taken with short exposures that were more easily “hand-held” (i.e. taken without a tripod). My idea was see if I could do a little magic in my “digital darkroom” to lighten up images that were going to be by default a bit too dark for my vision of what the nighttime ambience near L’Arena should look like. Two of the resulting images are below — straight from the digital darkroom. See what you think.

L’Arena at night #1

L’Arena at night #2