Artistic License

If you been to Venice you know it is everything it is cracked up to be and more: historical, vivid, smelly, crowded, colorful, exotic, old, and most of all, romantic in the sense that just around the next corner is something wonderful you’ve never seen before but always imagined.

Such was the case in 1971 when my wife and I crossed one of the 100s of narrow bridges that lock together this storied city and espied this water taxi taking its Venetian occupants to their next destination. Lucky in timing, I caught the gondola as it moved out of the shadows of a narrow canal and into a sunlight water thoroughfare. Pictured below is what I saw.

But the next picture is what I imagined: with the filtering controls of Photoshop CS3, specifically the Pixelate>Pointilize tool, an “impressionist” rendering of Venice springs to life. Maybe this is not the picture I took, but it is the picture of my “mind’s eye” at that moment. Could Seurat or Monet have done any better?