After spending two weeks in Italy and shooting over 3,500 photographs, it is going to take a long time to review, select, process and upload some of the photographs to my Website. I shot all of the photographs using Nikon’s RAW format, which requires post processing to convert the raw digital data captured by the camera’s senor to JPG files for viewing on the Internet or printing. That is the very brief, non-technical explanation.

Last night, I found myself wandering around through the thousands of images stopping to look at the many beautiful cities and sites we visited and reflecting back on the experience without making much processing progress. Therefore, I concluded the best approach was to focus my review and processing in the order of the cities we visited. So, I started with Venice, where we began our two week tour. We were there for four days and three nights, so I have many Venice images to process.  The following are a few of my favorites so far. (In case you have not discovered this yet, you can click on the images to increase their size.)

The above image of the Piazza San Marco was taken from a boat that we took to the island of Burano. The Piazza and surrounding streets were very busy with thousands of people. However, when I went out at 5:30 AM to shoot the sunrise on the day after arriving, I practically had Venice to myself–only people cleaning the streets and making deliveries were out. That is when I shot the below photo of the clock tower in the Piazza San Marco.

The above image was taken on the next morning’s sunrise, which was overcast and foggy. The gondolas were covered and moored making for a colorful setting to the otherwise colorless view across the Grand Canal.

Above is a view of a canal with a church clock tower that I could not pass up photographing because of the reflections in the water. Below is the famous Rialto Bridge late in the afternoon with one of the many gondolas coming out from under it.

Below is another gondola moving along a canal with late afternoon sunlit buildings in the background. Venice is a very colorful city!

The weekend begins tomorrow afternoon, and I am looking forward to reviewing and processing more images. Saturday is my day to inspect 15 bluebird boxes on the 300 acre Merrimac Farm Wildlife Management Area. I am also looking forward to spending the day on the farm in the fields and forest shooting early summer landscapes and hopefully some young bluebirds. It will be quite a contrast from the scenery in Italy.

All of the above images and others are also located in galleries on my Website at:   http://stabone.com/f90458637

To all of the Nutbush people that Angela and I traveled with in Italy, we enjoyed traveling with you and have been enjoying following your post travel comments and seeing your photos on the Nutbush Facebook page.  As you probably have figured out by now, it will be a couple of weeks before I send you the CDs with the above and other photographs. Arrivederci!