Image 1 - Venice Carnival is certainly an event event where it is particularly easy to photograph people. Many of the masqueraders are professional performers, or people with many years experience of the carnival, who want to be photographed. The problem is that huge crowds assemble to see the exotic costumes and it can be difficult to isolate the subjects from the tourists. Some of the masqueraders are willing to co-operate with serious photographers because they want copies of good photographs. The couple in this image agreed to come with me to a quiet spot where they posed on a bridge over a canal, allowing me to use the sky as a backdrop. The power of the image comes from the limited number of colours white, black, mauve and blue. A cluttered and multi-coloured street background would have destroyed the simplicity of the idea.
The image was easy to compose because the two performers knew exactly what a photographer is likely to want, and moved effortlessly from on e pleasing pose to the next. All that I had to do was position the two figures in the frame in a balanced manner, add a bit of fill-in flash to reduce contrast and preserve detail in the black costumes and eye sockets, and release the shutter.