Florence

There are only so many Madonnas col Bambino (I'm not talking about the singer on an adoption spree here) you can look at without your head exploding as I found out during a recent trip to Florence, Siena and San Gimignano with my wife.

Florence is one of the architectural and cultural jewels of the western world and the amount of art on display is just bewildering, almost too much really - luckily though I had my holga at hand (as well as my Nishika N8000) and alot of films of all different types to keep my sanity intact.

Overall I was abit disappointed with alot of the photos I took and I the limitations of the holga's fixed lens did become apparent......the Tele and Wide Lenses I had ordered on ebay a few weeks before still hadn't arrived which was a shame - I am not a huge fan of the tele lens but the wide angle would have helped my capture some of the architecture.

However, I did get some shots I was pleased with and here are my particular faves.
This first image was taken in the Pitti Palace. The film is Fuji Realia (expired & bought on ebay) and I like the angle and the strong colours. I did think about cropping out the buildings but that would have necessitated cropping out alot of the sculpture's outstretched arm and I didn't want to lose the sense of drama in it's pose.
The Ponte Vecchio in Cross process Kodak E100G. Not my favourite film at all for cross processing. The film has a yellow caste when xpro'd that is far to strong for my liking and the yellow just drowns out the image. This shot took alot of Photoshopping: I set the blue on the colour balance to 100, darkened the highlights and thumped it with alot of gamma before getting the picture to look any where near interesting.
A detail of the Santa Croce - can't remember which film I used and I can't be @rsed to dig the film out so let's call it Fuji Realia again. Actually my favourite shot of all; this image has a nice strong sky which contrasts well with the stone work. I was going for an off centre view of the church (just like the way the holga gives off centre images if you don't compensate for the lens being to the side of the view finder) and it came out well.

I'll post the images from Siena and San Gimignano separately. You can find the full gallery of travel photographs here and feel free to leave comments or exchange links with me