Dawn in Venice

Venice has a lot of moods. My favorite is dawn when the sky is cobalt blue and the thousands of tourists are still in bed. Only costumed models and photographers are out, enjoying the magic of this amazing medieval city. Here, I used an off-camera flash held at about a 90 degree angle to exaggerate the texture of the beautiful costume my friend Myriam was wearing. Many clients come on my Carnival in Venice workshops who are uncomfortable photographing people. I tell them this isn't like photographing people at all. Instead, we photograph fantasy creatures. Facial expressions aren't part of the equation because most of the models wear full face masks, and all of them know how to pose perfectly. My settings for this shot were 1/60, f/4.0, and 1250.