Description
Venice is amazingly beautiful, picturesque, romantic, historical, and sinking: more precisely, the water around Venice is rising. There are contrasting thoughts on this concept, but Venice is certainly influenced by tidal waters and seems to have floods earlier than normal. The day before my departure from this city, the water was already flowing up through the drains and beginning to flood St Marks Square–a regular fact of life for residents there. Regardless of the water, the narrow winding streets, back alleys, and surrounding buildings create exciting subject matter for Straight Up images.
As a city known for its water and canals, of the 400 or so foot bridges spanning these canals, there wasn’t one I could get under to photograph in my preferred manner of straight up. Maybe I didn’t look hard enough and standing in a canal isn’t an ideal option. A boat may have worked, but ensuring a perfectly level camera, free of any camera shake, for a one second exposure, would be really difficult to achieve. So I walked the streets and enjoyed photographing the variety of spaces created by the buildings.
These two arches, spanning opposite buildings, remind me of the hundreds of foot bridges in Venice. Throughout Europe, I’ve seen many arches: single arches, horizontal arches, but never two across a diagonal such as this. This image reflects some of the unique patterns found exclusively in Venice.
