Needless to say, i took my camera with me. This is where the trouble started, having more than one lens. I could take every lens i own, but this would not have been a wise thing to do. You have to consider that everything you take you will have to carry. I decided that i had to limit myself only to take 2 lenses.
I took the 18-55 kitlens because i probably would take a bus-tour through the city and than i would need the versatility of a wide to normal zoomlens.
And i took my 28mm f/3.5 because i really like this lens. It is a slightly wide normal lens on the DX format and probably would do a good job in the crowded streets of Rome. It turned out that this lens almost didn't get off my camera.
Our hotel was close to the colloseum, and we went there on the day we arrived. Even though it was an overcast day i was able to shoot at f/11. Using hyperfocus and F/11 gave me a large depth of field. For the family shots of my brother and my mother i didn't have to worry about focussing at all. However the contrast between the sky and the buildings and the ground was too large for my camera. I had to use a graduated neutral density filter. This filter, and a polarizer filter are always in my camera bag. They are light and during almost every shoot outside they can come in handy.
The GND filter caused a new problem, the colloseum was way higher than the horizon. I just turned the filter a bit, that the line wasn't in line with the horizon anymore, but with the line which needed to be darkened. I payed very close attention to my composition, because the part beside the colloseum would be darkened. So it should not contain any information, or at least something important.
The reason i took such pictures, not showing the whole structure, was that everyone knows the colloseum. We all have seen beautiful photographs of it. And that in order to show the whole colloseum you also need to include background. This background was crowded with tourists, busses, and other traffic. I decided to take only close crops of it to get better, less touristic shots.
As you can see in the photographs above the GND wasn't straight but tilted, you can see little lighter areas.I do not really mind this as long as it is not too obvious. It produces a slight halo effect, increasing the contrast between the building and the sky, without blowing out the sky.
However you can make mistakes really easy. The most important thing, according to me, is that it looks true. One thing you should pay attention to is that you do not darken the buildings. With the photo below I messed up. But due to the darker part of the colloseum at the top it isn't really disturbing, even with this flaw i like this photograph. I particulary like the colours, how the blue makes a great contrast with the colours from the buildings. And that the colours from the colloseum kind of come back in the houses in the background.
In the evening i got back to the colloseum. This is something i certainly recommend when you visit a city, cityscapes look very different in artificial lighting. And most of the times there has been done some thinking about how to light important buildings. I found a small square which was a bit higher than the street. The street caught my attention when i was in the daylight at the colloseum because it made a turn just before it.
The traffic was fairly unpredictable because there were traffic lights just behind me. So i closed my aperture down to f/16 to get a shutter speed of 30 seconds. This way it wouldn't show up in the picture if there weren't as many cars as I hoped for. This approach did quite a good job, but if you look closer there's a traffic light in the middle of the picture as well. It turned out that I had to do 6 exposures before i got the picture i was going for.
As you can see in the photographs above the GND wasn't straight but tilted, you can see little lighter areas.I do not really mind this as long as it is not too obvious. It produces a slight halo effect, increasing the contrast between the building and the sky, without blowing out the sky.
However you can make mistakes really easy. The most important thing, according to me, is that it looks true. One thing you should pay attention to is that you do not darken the buildings. With the photo below I messed up. But due to the darker part of the colloseum at the top it isn't really disturbing, even with this flaw i like this photograph. I particulary like the colours, how the blue makes a great contrast with the colours from the buildings. And that the colours from the colloseum kind of come back in the houses in the background.
In the evening i got back to the colloseum. This is something i certainly recommend when you visit a city, cityscapes look very different in artificial lighting. And most of the times there has been done some thinking about how to light important buildings. I found a small square which was a bit higher than the street. The street caught my attention when i was in the daylight at the colloseum because it made a turn just before it.
The traffic was fairly unpredictable because there were traffic lights just behind me. So i closed my aperture down to f/16 to get a shutter speed of 30 seconds. This way it wouldn't show up in the picture if there weren't as many cars as I hoped for. This approach did quite a good job, but if you look closer there's a traffic light in the middle of the picture as well. It turned out that I had to do 6 exposures before i got the picture i was going for.
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