The Venetian Carnival

There is a long history of those beautiful ten days that celebrates life it self at the end of winter.

The earliest written documents of the carnival are from 1094 AD. In medieval Europe the church filled the old pagan festivity with Christian meaning.Venice got the „City of the Carnival” title in the XVIII. century. After this, political reasons and the depression of the city put this tradition to a forced rest for 200 years. Only thirty years ago the happy masquerader came alive again, since then every year it has more and more participants.

I feel very lucky becouse I was part of this colorful swirl in the 2009 season. Originally I am from Hungary and me and my husband visit my family several times a year in Budapest. Venice, the place of the carnival, is only 8 hours of driving distance away from Budapest, so we started our journey to the City of the Carnival.

If I had the wrong settings, I lost a picture of a nice costume. I learned this lesson on the first day and from then I used shutter priority and manual settings accordingly. I tried to keep my ISO as low as possibile in the hope of large prints on canvas and I also carried a tripod. I took two cameras with me, both Nikons. The one was a Nikon D80 with a 70-200 zoom lens that I used a lot for candid shots in the crowd. My other is a Nikon D300 with a 18-135 zoom lens and a SB-800 flash. I used this setup most of the times. Every time I traveled on the ferry I used shutter priority settings and I underexposed the pictures . During our long walks on the streets I took close ups of the costumes with manual settings and flash. I lowered the strength of the flash and again I underexposed a little.

In the magical blue hour at the edge of water I used the tripod, flash and often the lowest ISO settings. The lights at Saint Mark Square stayed after dark and they painted the buildings with beautiful colors, perfect for late night images.

During the last year we have been showing my images on the east coast of the USA from Main to Florida. Every week we are traveling to different art shows to exhibit and sell my photographs. I feel that with this colorfull carnival swirl I can put together a really interesting and exotic exhibition material for the next art shows and festivals. I hope that with my photographs I will be able to recreate the feeling, colors and happiness on the American continent of the Venetian Carnival.