I’m pretty sure it’s no secret, but I love to travel. And I mean, I LOVE to travel. Traveling for me is like a drug. (Am I allowed to say that?) I start to crave it. I get such a rush from traveling & if I go more than a month or two without getting on an airplane I get restless. I start googeling cities, flight schedules and hotels into the wee hours of the night. And more often than not at any given moment I have at least 5 international trips on my radar. It’s bad. Or great. However you want to look it. All that to say, I love that I get to choose where my job takes me. BUT….there is a downside to it. Part of my responsibility when we go abroad is doing whatever it takes to ensure I’m getting the shots & images that I need to go home with. Especially if I have clients requesting specific images. Sometimes that means forgoing something touristy, staying up late, or waking up in the middle of the night to go out and shoot in unobstructed streets.
While in Rome a few months ago I knew that I needed a night shot of the Coliseum. However with it being such an iconic figure of Roman landscape, it’s pretty much a zoo at all hours of the day. Except between the hours of 3am and 5am. So, what do we do but set our alarm for 2:45am, have our hotel concierge call us a cab, and off we go to shoot in the pouring rain!
The tricky part about shooting in a downpour is not keeping your body dry but keeping your equipment safe! In the case of our predawn Coliseum shoot, I’ve never seen anything more hilarious & I so wish we had a photo to capture our madness: My sweet (and completely soaked!) husband holding the umbrella over my head, my camera & tripod for an hour just so his crazy wife could get her one shot. What love. And yet that’s what makes it an adventure & one of the many reasons this shot was worth the treck through the soaked streets of Rome.
