#7

How The HECK Did We Get This All To Ourselves?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?

I'm not sure if you've ever been to any tourist location ever... but it is always different in one major way from the pictures... Whatever the attraction, it will be FILLED with tourists!

On one of our trips to Rome, we had an idea to create a photo with the most iconic building on earth and though we had several ideas our initial thought was to go at sunrise as we figured there would be fewer people there. We were wrong. We got up super early, got on the subway, trekked across the city for 6:00 am only to find there were people EVERYWHERE!!?? I mean who gets up that early? So in reality we sort of dropped our plans for the Coliseum and went to photograph elsewhere, and we were pleased. However as we never drop ideas quickly we said let's go try sunset. If it's a bust, no worries, we will go do some touristy stuff... So we packed up ALL the gear we would need which was fairly heavy and trekked back across the city with NO expectations.

We get to the square and of course, it's filled with people and the disappointment was real. The sun sets on the building perfectly and lights it up in an incredibly daily showpiece with the shadows gently crawling up the face until the sun finally sets and we had front row seats to this wonder of nature and human effort. We loved it.

But... as soon as the sun set EVERYONE LEFT!!!! As the building is illuminated from the inside and the sky turned the dark midnight blue of happy hour as it's known in the photography world we had this iconic building pretty much all to ourselves. Well then the floodgates of creativity opened and it was all I could do to capture everything that was in my mind until we had no light left. Sherry was running around making sure dresses were flying, flashes were in the right place, and I was laying down on the sidewalk with my camera dangling just above a dirty puddle with garbage in it (I actually had to pick out the garbage to get a clean reflection) and after much effort we captured this.

It's actually a 20mm 6-panel vertical panoramic stitch in order to get the photo wide enough to have the building and the reflection while still maintaining a pleasing composition.