When I say one of my all-time favourite shots I really do mean

one of my all-time favourite shots

As in taken by me. 

To be fair Duomo is such an absolutely stunning piece of architecture to take a bad photo would almost be a crime!

Even so I love this shot. 

One of the hardest things to do when trying to capture such a magnificent structure as this is to truly convey the sheer scale of the building. 

And the presence this structure has. It is massive and imposing. 

So how do you convey this scale?

Include people.

Now I will be completely honest with you. I try to not have people on my photos. I guess I prefer buildings more than people. But people do bring buildings to life. Buildings are designed in the main for people. And people are a familiar, known size and scale to us (within reason), and people can therefore give scale and perspective to something as large and imposing as Duomo. 

Plus, I don’t want to spend days removing people from shots in Photoshop. Which is possible if rather time consuming. And a subject for another blog post.

Removing people by layering.

I will take a shot just to demonstrate this magical art. 

But back to Duomo. Firstly, the technical stuff

Shutter speed – 1/2500th of a second

Aperture – F8

ISO – 400

Lens – 17-40mm F4 L

Focal length – 17mm

Camera – Canon EOS 5D

The shot was handheld, and involved quite a bit of waiting for the people to be in the right places. And not in the wrong places. Which never actually happened to be honest.

Processing – mainly done in Lightroom, with some minor removal of people in the foreground!

Oh yes that reminds me – another technical issue is the direction of the light. The sun is on the face of Duomo, the shadow in front is cast by the adjacent Baptistry.

So that was the only time I had to make the shot on that day. And I might have said it before but I will say it again

I love this picture of Duomo, Florence

Thanks for reading this post – please check out my website at

www.rickmcevoyphotography.co.uk

where you can see more of my architectural photography work and images from Tuscany

 

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#Italy

#architectural photographer

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#picture of Duomo, Florence