I forgot to include one more night scene from Verona with the post yesterday: my yearly attempts to take a photo at night of the little carousel in Piazza Bra. Our favorite hotel in Verona — where we always stay — is just steps away from this carousel. When the weather’s good, its easy enough to get over to that little park for a photo shoot during out stay.
But while getting the chance to take the photo is easy, getting a photo of that carousel that matches my vision for what I want is not. Indeed, it is turning in my photographic bête_noire subject in Verona. I try something different each year, and each year I come a tiny bit closer, but never close enough.
Of course, I have not been motivated to haul our huge tripod down to Verona. When we lived less than a 2-hour train ride away, I should have tried to do it, but never did. Now, we’re a 9-hour train ride that requires 2 changes of trains, and I really don’t want to add the heavy, bulky tripod to our luggage. Chris let me use his little tripod this time, which was fun to try. And it helped … well, it at least helped me to see that to get the shot I really want, I’ll need to haul that big tripod down to Verona some day. 😉 Ah well.
In any event, no set of photos from one of our Christmas-time trips to Verona would be complete without some attempts at a night-time photo of the carousel. My top 3 picks from this year’s efforts are below.
BTW, I did take photos during the day in Verona on this trip, too – hopefully they will be sorted by next week and ready to post with more tales from the trip.
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- Carousel in Piazza Bra – Take #1
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- Carousel in Piazza Bra – Take #2
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- Carousel in Piazza Bra – Take #3
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Everytime I write a post about carousels, I wind up with that Jacques Brel song running endlessly through my head. Here’s a newly posted version of that song I found on YouTube, which is a little different since it’s performed by a woman, unlike most of the versions I found last year YouTube.
Nice pictures. What are you trying to capture that isn’t there?
One of the challenges with a shot like this is that the subject is a blur, so the eye doesn’t know where to go. If you could ask a little bambino to stand to one side looking at the carousel it would add balance and create stronger sight lines, but that’d be quite hard to light unless you hid a flash in the bushes.
I had some success at Disneyland using a slightly shorter shutter speed than you have here, so the shapes of the light arrangements are more clearly visible. I also managed to get a silhouette in front, plus a little bit of framing in the opposite corner from a nearby tree. It’s not an excellent picture, but it’s a start.
I recall I didn’t have a tripod either… I braced against a post. My light trails are a bit wobbly as a result.
Thanks, Ashley. In my “ideal” carousel photo, I want the horses to appear to be moving in the blurred part (so not too blurred, just enough to convey motion).
I agree with you that some kind of secondary (and stationary) subject near the carousel would be good – I got it by accident in the “crazy carousel” photo I did last year in Tübingen (seen in this post here http://22tue.clfotonline.com/2011/12/15/round-and-round/). But since the little girl who is in front of me wasn’t with me, I couldn’t ask her to move to my ideal location and turn in profile, which IMHO would have made a better shot. 😉 You have an advantage since you travelling with your own bambinos to use as models, so you can ask them to pose, eh? 😉
However, that older photo shows the kind of blur I’m trying for, where you can make out the horses “moving” little bit in the photos – Chris thinks if I had positioned myself at a different angle to the carousel in Verona, that could have helped. I don’t like the “gray” blur in the Verona carousel photos – it’s too indistinct. . The first photo above is my favorite of the 3 in this post, probably because there is a balance of things in focus and things out of focus. But the blur still isn’t quite right. And the angle wasn’t quite right – this was one of the first ones I did and I didn’t have the little tripod well positioned on the bench I was using to prop it up.
lovely pictures of the Carousel