Veniceblog

Campo San Vidal

I used to think of Campo San Vidal as the landing zone on the other side of the Accademia Bridge in San Marco. A place to be rushed through, not savored. An artery. I never paid much attention to it, nor its deconsecrated Chiesa di San Vidal, with its nightly, tourist-targeted Vivaldi concerts hawked by girls in handing out leaflets wearing poofy period dresses with Nikes peeking out underneath.

But after spending a couple weeks there last summer, I've formed a real affection for it.

I came to love the fakey latecomer, the Palazzo Cavalli-Franchetti, with its giant, nearly Las Vegan, over-the-top turn on gothic ornamentation, all added in the 19th century. It's got a chipper little garden, a beautiful well-head, and all in all, a kind of immodest sincerity that has won me over. Now that an insurance company moved out and the Institute of Arts and Sciences has moved in, it's going to be a proper exhibition space and a fresh cultural force, something Venice can always use more of.

We were up on the second floor (or first floor, if you're Italian), directly across from the Cavalli-Franchetti. We looked out of a wide bank of large windows that I speculate once led to a little loggia, suggesting that the apartment was situated on the piano nobile, the main and fanciest floor in Renaissance-era homes in Venice and elsewhere.

From this perch, you had a military-grade command of every square centimeter of the campo, including the foot of the bridge and the Accademia vaporetto stop across the Canal Grande. Accordingly, people-watching was first rate. You had your teams of singing drunks at 4 AM. Lovers on the steps of the garden. Streetsweepers with those gnarly fairy-tale brooms. The  gondoliers, chanting for a fare as they stood at the foot of the bridge in contra posto poses. Every form of tourist minted. Street musicans. Serious looking city officials. Carabinieri duos (looking like 15 year olds in costume).  The whole parade that is Venice seemed to pour into a human canale that ebbed and flowed with the moon.

In the painting by Canaletto below, you can see Campo San Vidal as it looked in the 18th century. Across the way, you can see the church of Santa Maria della Carità when it still had its campanile and before it was morphed into the Accademia di Belle Arti. The bridge would have to wait another hundred years or so. The site of the Cavalli-Franchetti, on the left, was filled by an older palace, remnants of which, I understand, are still behind today's facade. While the painting is called The Stone Mason's Yard, what you really see is the restoration of the church of San Vidal in progress (the church itself is not visible).

And on the right, I speculate, is the house we stayed in, with the missing loggia in tact. Great people-watching back then, too, no doubt, though the sound of hammers would have gotten old.

HDR photography in Venice

In photography, "dynamic range" essentially refers to the range of brightness and darkness in an image. Take an indoor picture of a person standing by a window on a sunny day. The picture you get either has the person looking perfectly exposed and the window overexposed and "blown out", or the window is perfectly exposed and the person in way underexposed and dark. I'll bet you have dozens of these shots in a shoebox less than 100 feet away.

The problem is the limited dynamic range of film or a digital camera's image sensor. In contrast, our eyes, have an ability to see an astounding range of lights and darks. And that's where so many casual photographers go wrong. When they trip the shutter, they expect to get back what their eye saw. Problem is there eye is usually seeing much, much more in the way of dynamic range than their cameras can record.

When I was in Venice in July, I experimented with a relatively new form of imaging called HDR (high dynamic range) photography. The basic concept is simple: take a series of shots of a scene at varying levels of lightness and darkness, then combine them together. There's a wonderful program called Photomatix that radically simplifies the process and works ideally with digital cameras.

My first go at HDR photography was inside the place we rented in Venice last July. The apartment was amazing. Venetian antiques. Six windows that overlooked  Campo San Vidal, the Franchetti and the Accademia bridge. A bedroom that looked on out onto the Canal Grande. A sweet terrace, Murano chandeliers (if you like that sort of thing), great kitchen, air condo. Perfect.

Here are 4 HDR images of the apartment. It seemed like a good application of the technique because the magic of the place was both indoors and outdoors, and conventional photography would totally miss this context.

Here's our bedroom. You see a hint of the Accademia bridge and a palazzo across the Canal Grande.

Here's a shot in the living room, with the Palazzo Cavali Franchetti in the background, across Campo San Vidal. (This is the first shot I ever made with the HDR method ... darkish but has a nice mood.

Here's the room my 4 year old son, Miles got. It's a space where the HDR technique shines. The room is rather dark, as it is covered with that shiny green fabric. It's mainly lit by a single light bulb and any natural light. This is a scene that would have a huge amount of pure black in the shadows. With HDR imaging, however, literally every corner of the room has detail   -- even under the stool.

Here's another one, looking from the study onto the terrace (and the Dutch consulate). That's a cool print of Joseph Brodsky on the wall.