A Gondola in Berlin

I live near the river Spree, which runs through Berlin the way the canals run through Venice. That is what gave me the idea of taking a Canaletto painting of a gondola (from the Gemäldegallerie in Berlin) and placing it in the river.

Gondola on the Spree

One of the challenges with this composition was to make the gondola appear to be in the water, and not merely to be floating artificially on top. To do that, I used the clone tool to have the water lap lightly over the bottom edge of the gondola, as the water would if the gondola were moving.

Note: The photo has been updated thanks a friend who noted that the sun on the gondolier was on the wrong side.

Welcome to PhotoGalleryM

This blog displays and discusses photographs and photo compositions that I have taken or created. The goal of the blog is to discuss how the works were created and to put them into their social and artistic context. The photographs were generally taken for their intrinsic artistic quality, but my interest in visual ethnography will also be clear from the context.

The images here are in low resolution for display purposes, but higher resolution versions and print copies are available. Enquiries should be sent to photo.gallery.m@gmail.com.

Please note that all images and text are copyright protected. Some images may have a "Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License" that applies to that particular version of the photograph or composition. 

The composition below is called Vermeer Twins in London. Women in seventeenth century clothing hardly seem out of place in contemporary London.

The base photograph was taken during a business trip to Kings College London in June, 2013. The figures of the women drinking from wine glasses come from a Vermeer paining in the Gemälde Gallerie in Berlin. I used Gimp to cut them out and invert one of them. The flower pot and the shadows also needed adjustment.