The Monomagician

Introduction

2008 was a special year for my wife Karin and I as we celebrated our 25^th wedding anniversary.

We knew we wanted to do something special to celebrate and came up with the idea of a ‘mini grand tour’ of Italy, taking in Rome, Florence and then a couple of days in the Piedmonte region.

Having taken to heart the notion of trying to reduce our impact on the Environment, we decided to avoid using aircraft and make our way by train where possible.

Our trip had the hallmarks of being quite an adventure and planning started in earnest in the previous October, when we signed up for a GCSE Italian evening class!

In addition to learning a little of the Italian language, we also started to work out just how feasible it would be to travel from our home in Swindon to Rome by train. The answer, it transpired was ‘eminently feasible!’ There is a daily sleeper train from Paris Gare de Bercy to Roma Termini called the Palatino. We booked our Eurostar tickets on-line. Whilst we could have done the same for the Palatino tickets, we opted to let a travel agent sort this out as we wanted to make absolutely sure we got what we wanted.

As we were celebrating a very special occasion, we decided to travel first-class on the Eurostar. It wasn’t cheap, but we would be wined and dined as we made our way through Kent, the Chunnel and Northern France. Now that the high-speed rail link from St Pancras to Folkestone has been completed, the journey time from London to Paris has been cut to about two and a half hours. I think it would be difficult, if not impossible to do the journey in the same time by air once you factor in check-in times, baggage collection and subsequent travel from the airport to the centre of Paris.

Equipment Decisions.

With travel arrangements and hotels booked, it was time to think about luggage and above all, camera equipment. We wanted to travel light, not wanting to have to lug huge suitcases and heavy camera bags through station concourses or on the underground. So we decided to restrict our luggage to a single airline wheeled carry-on sized case each.

Karin had already made a decision to take her Canon G9 digital compact camera rather than her EOS350D . The G9 was until recently, Canon’s top of the range compact digital camera. It’s quite small and light, very well made and has a 12MP sensor, so can produce excellent results. I originally wanted to take a Leica M8 digital rangefinder with 2 or 3 lenses. But in the end, I too opted to take a G9.  It’s much lighter and from a purely practical perspective, it meant we could save space and weight by having just one battery charger for the two cameras. In addition to the two cameras and a single battery charger, we each took a spare battery and eight 2 gigabyte SD cards. We could have saved a tiny amount of space and weight by using higher capacity SDHC cards, but we both felt that 2 gigabyte cards were large enough. Entrusting around 115 raw images to a single card is plenty in my book! For backup, we shared a 40 gigabyte Jobo Gigavue hard drive. Each outfit fitted into a Lowepro ‘bumbag’.

Any initial misgivings about not bringing my Leica outfit were removed when we arrived at Roma Termini. It was 30 degrees and there was a transport strike. Any hope of getting a taxi to our hotel before we melted was dashed as soon as we saw the queues. So we decided to walk to the hotel. It was only about a mile, but it made me very glad that I didn’t have my Billingham bag to carry as well as drag my suitcase through Rome.

Out and about in Rome

Rome is a fascinating city. There is so much to see and do and it was impossible to do the city justice in the three days we spent there. Thankfully, there is a very good underground system and most of the main sites of interest are close to a Metro station or are easy to get to by foot.

The entrance to the Palazzo Barberini - home of the National Art Collection

Apart from the heat, which was often oppressive, the down side of travelling to Rome in July is the harshness of the light. Many photographs were spoiled by hard directional lighting and it was often impossible to capture the full dynamic range of a scene. Many of the best shots were taken in shade.

A couple of things to watch out for were the hawkers around the Spanish Steps and students wanting signatures on petitions. The hawkers would usually approach couples, offering a rose, saying it’s a gift. Then when you’ve taken it from them, ask for money. Another trick was to offer to take a couple’s photo with their camera -  for a fee of course.

The students were everywhere!  They all wanted us to sign a petition and it got very wearing.  We soon learned that saying ‘non grazie, ho gia fatto’ (No thanks, I’ve already done it) was enough to get them to move on to some other unsuspecting person. (more…)