Around (Again)
Another shot of the merry go round in Florence.
One of the main things I missed having on my meander around Europe was my trusty camera tripod. Long exposure shots are great for revealing the movement, light and detail in places by night, but they're near impossible to take without a tripod.
You can get mini tripods (or gorillapods) all over the place, especially in Rome (which was littered with street vendors selling tripods and African wood carvings — go figure) but apart from the larger ones they never deal with the weight of a SLR camera and chunky lens. Either way, carrying a tripod around is a bit of an inconvenience unless you only carry it for dedicated photo excursions — but since we only spent one or two nights in each place there wasn't much time for return visits just for photography.
So I made do with sitting the camera on the ground or my shoe (if the ground was wet) and either gently tapping the shutter or using the timer to try and reduce camera shake.
The end result was usually a slightly blurred photo, but occasionally it worked well enough to get a nice clear shot like this one.
Posted on Sunday, January 21, 2007 and filed under Europe 2006-2007.
