Recently I decided to take another stab at some of my photographs from my trip to Italy this past summer (Rome, Florence, Volterra, Lucca, Cinque Terra).
The buildings in the ancient cities of Italy seem to scream out for a Pen and Ink treatment. Maybe its from my childhood years when my Dad was stationed in Heidelberg, Germany and we lived in a small town named Rot. My parents bought a lot of artwork in a pen and ink style.
The first image from the Italy collection of photographs I worked on was this classic view of the Ponte Vechhio bridge in Florence. In the original, taken around mid day with harsh lighting, the water below the bridge was green and not very inviting. I played around with some high dynamic range techniques to bring out the shadows and used an inky black and white conversion to make the image as sketch like as possible before using some settings in Photoshop to extend the blacks into pen and ink like markings.
I thought the over all effect came out rather nicely with this subject. So I turned to another of my favorite images from my Italy trip. This shot of a bike on the ancient cobble stone streets. Bikes and old Fiats were some of my favorite things to shoot in the back alleys of Rome, Florence and Lucca.
The original shot took a lot of finessing to bring it to life because of the big difference in lighting in the alley compared to the bright lit street beyond. My new pen and ink technique really helped to even out the scene.
Here is the color version:
And the black and white pen and ink version:
You can see more images from my trip to Italy in my Italy gallery here.