Carnival

Please visit our website at www.bowater.fr to see more of our work. 

Most of our images are available for sale as prints/fine art prints, mostly as limited editions.

 

If you love history, art and architecture, you'll love Venice.  If you have a predisposition to nostalgia or melancholia or a susceptibility to romance, you'll love Venice.

 

Our February trip was only our second visit to Venice and, despite the crowds and the commercialism, the cold winds and the relative expense, we still love Venice.

 

A magnificent and relevant costume seen at the Carnival, with the Bridge of Sighs in the background.  The reference to ships and ship building and one of the world's greatest maritime traditions adds greatly to an intriguing costume.

Somehow, Venice lends itself to melancholia.  

     

A pair of clowns and the Rialto Bridge. 

Carnival in Venice

Please visit our website at www.bowater.fr to see more of our work. 

Most of our images are available for sale as prints/fine art prints, mostly as limited editions.

"All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players:
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts"

Shakespeare. As You Like It

It seemed a good idea to go to Venice again after our fruitful trip last year.  So why not go for the Carnival?  There are several reasons why we would think seriously about doing it again but that is not an expression of regret.  There are lots of people and, for photographers, it is a competetive environment.  We're not competetive photographers and don't shoot sport or news, so it's a long time since we worked on a project like this.  The weather isn't at its best in February but we were lucky again and apart from very cold days the light was generally good and interesting.

The costumes are spectacular.  The imagination, skill, work and sheer artistry that go into these outfits shame a lot of professional theatrical productions.  The best of the characters added dramatic skills to their costumes turning the area around St. Mark's Square into a huge stage where anything could happen  -  and it did.

Many of the costumes were superb, many just good or amusing or interesting.  And of course a welcome smattering of the ridiculous.  Despite the crowds, the atmosphere was good natured, almost without exception.  It's rare to see so many people enjoying themselves in spite of frequent biting winds from the Adriatic.  
For us, this was something of an experiment and the pictures on this blog posting were taken with just two lenses which we were using almost for the first time:  a Canon 300mm f2.8, which we bought very recently, and a Canon 135mm f2 kindly loaned to us by Klaus Bothe at Isarfoto.  Neither lens had the convenience and ease of use of the zooms that almost everyone else was using but we have been delighted and, in cases, astonished by the technical quality and resolution and we probably benefited from the discipline of having to compose and frame and think more than usual.  The presence of so many other photographers with everything from phones to Hasselblads sharpened our reactions.  At least, given the cheerful atmosphere, there was hardly a need to sharpen our elbows.

As usual, we shot too much and shot with several other lenses.  We're still working on the majority and will post them later.  Some of the photos above should also lend themselves to different interpretations -  we just have to find the time.