Florence 3: Metal Heads

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Crowds begin to form at around sunrise. They queue up outside of the medieval palace and office building for the Medici – which is now the Uffizi Gallery home of one of the world’s greatest art collections. Scalpers sell reserved tickets to people who will frequently wait five hours in line.

I don’t know how many of these metal headed guys were scattered around Florence last month. There were two nearby to the crowds waiting here outside of the Uffizi, and later in the afternoon I found two more some distance away.

You know photographers have a lot in common with sculptors. Unlike, say painters or poets who start with nothing and then build up an idea – sculptors and photographers start with large hunks and then whittle stuff away. Alfred Stieglitz almost a century ago wrote about how photographers, “… depict life in scraps and fragments.” And we do it frequently, he went on, by preserving a sense of setting for our subjects while using the picture’s edge to slice off whatever distracts from our mood.

GEEK STUFF: Canon EOS 20D, 10/7/07, 9:21 AM: Lens 17-85mm, Focal Length: 26mm, Exp 1/15@f/4.5, ISO 100, Metering Mode: Average, Exposure bias -1, Camera RAW