Roadtrip Images

So, we decided to take the road trip international. We went to Italy. First stop was Rome and the Vatican.

So Karen and I had been discussing this for some time and we finally decided to just do it. After two years of full time travel we wanted to expand the road trip beyond North America. We still have plenty of places planned in this continent like Alaska for the summer so we’re not changing that. We’re just adding to it. Photographically though, there are a lot of international locations I’d like to visit and the time seemed right to start adding those now.

One of the places we’ve always wanted to see was the Vatican. I had been to Italy many times on business but never had the time to make a side trip to see it. Being Catholic, the Sistine Chapel and St. Peter’s Basilica were high on our must see list. The Vatican Museums were also something we wanted to experience. And so this expansion is still in keeping with the theme of this lifestyle. Experiences rather than material possessions. We’ve been the full route of material possessions and that was unfulfilling. And so off we go collecting experiences rather than things.

Cityscapes at night, or nightscapes, have been a recent interest of mine. We recently did one of the New York City Skyline that you can see here from our Facebook page. So when we decided to go to Rome, naturally I wanted to do some nightscapes there. Normally, you just make a long exposure of the scene to capture the lights on the buildings and that looks nice. But I wanted to go a step further. I wanted to capture the entire experience you get when viewing the scene from sunset through dark. It’s called time blending and I learned this technique from a talented photographer named Elia Locardi. You can see his work here.

The idea is to make numerous exposures from sunset through late blue hour. This is when the sky is almost dark but still has some blue tone to it. In post processing these moments in time are then blended together to make one image that has elements of the entire transition. The trick is to make it look real and not an obvious composite of many photos. It’s a fair bit of work in Photoshop.

The vantage point for this photograph is the Ponte Umberto (Umberto Bridge) in Rome. The Tiber River makes a nice leading line into the Vatican Dome along with the walls that line the river itself. When the street lights come on along with the lights of the Vatican it provides a beautiful scene by itself. If you’re lucky, there will also be a nice sunset. The problem is the peak sunset color occurs before all the lights come on. But if you watch the entire event you experience the sunset and the night scene with all the lights. The time blended photograph captures this experience. The first photo below is the scene at peak sunset color. As you can see there are no city lights on. The second photo is the scene at late blue hour when the buildings are nicely lighted. But the sky is pretty drab.

The composition includes enough of the river to form a nice leading line into the Vatican but not too much. The river is not the subject. The Vatican Dome is placed using the Rule of Thirds so it falls on one of the vertical third lines. This requires finding the right spot on the bridge to make things line up. I also wanted to include enough sky since we had good clouds and it looked promising for sunset color.

To make the photograph I made many exposure bracketed image sequences from sunset all the way through late blue hour. This obviously requires being set up on a rock solid tripod so that the images line up when we get to blending things in Photoshop. I made exposure brackets to capture the high dynamic range of the scene. From the bright sunset sky to the deep shadows under the bridge during the early stages. Then later during blue hour the bright points of light from the street lights to the almost black shadows. Both of these are high dynamic range situations and very difficult to capture with one exposure. In this case I used a five exposure bracket with each exposure one stop apart. Typically this would be one normal exposure with -1 and -2 stop under exposures along with +1 and +2 stop over exposures for a total of five. I rarely need the +2 over exposure frame so I offset by one stop using the exposure compensation control. This results in a -3, -2, -1, 0 and +1 stop exposure bracket.

The post processing is a little involved so I’m only going to give an overview here. There are actually three blends that need to be made to create this image. That’s why I made so many exposure brackets in the field. It’s also a bit of insurance since you can’t recreate the shots you didn’t take. The first blend is for sunset. The high dynamic range of the sunset scene needs to be tamed with two exposures. One to preserve the bright highlights of the sky and the second to bring in the details of the foreground and Vatican buildings. The second blend is for early and late blue hour. The late blue hour shot adds the nice lighting on the buildings but the lights themselves are then blown out. The early blue hour exposure allows you to tone down these points of light so they are not so distracting.

The final blend is to combine the previous two blends into one image. All of these blends require multiple degrees of luminosity masking and are beyond the scope of this blog post. There are are some tutorials available to guide you through the process. As I said, the post processing is a bit tricky but very rewarding as it creates an image that is impossible to capture with one exposure but still holds true to the actual experience.

Visiting Rome and the Vatican was a memorable experience for Karen & I. The tour we did of the Sistine Chapel and St. Peter’s Basilica was very inspiring. The nightscape photography opportunities were incredible and I’ll definitely being doing more of this style of shooting. And although we both came down with a nasty cold during the trip we powered through and got in as much sightseeing as we could handle. So stay tuned as there is more to come from our road trip in Italy.

As always, you can see higher resolution images on our Facebook page. Please give us a like while you’re there.

Nikon D850 with Nikkor 24-70mm at 70mm. Too many exposure settings to list.