Rome: Siesta

Three days in Rome. Motion blur through archways, a woman reading in dappled grass, a dog on warm stone. A magnolia bud, a flag in a crowded plaza. Light doing whatever it wants. Rome is a city where street photography keeps interrupting itself. You go out looking for architecture and find a woman lost in a book under dappled trees. You point the camera at a magnolia bud and a dog trots through your peripheral vision. You frame a green-painted doorway and someone adjusts their hat in front of it. The set reflects that randomness — it doesn't have a single thread, and that's the point. Rome offers too much to be about one thing. The frames mix color and black and white depending on what each scene needed. A high-rise facade with people visible in their apartment windows went monochrome because it was about pattern and privacy, not color. A market stall overflowing with produce stayed saturated because the reds and greens and yellows were the whole story. The woman reading and the dog on the stone bench are both color because the warmth of that dappled park light was essential. Techniques ranged from motion blur through archways to shallow depth of field on the magnolia bud to wide framing on a crowded plaza where a woman holds a Palestinian flag. The variety is deliberate — Rome doesn't offer one kind of image, and trying to force consistency would mean missing most of what the city puts in front of you. Eleven frames from three days of walking. The ones that survived were the ones that still surprised. "That light through the trees was incredible—she was totally lost in her book, and I just kept shooting while she relaxed in the grass. The green paint on that building really popped too."