Addendum to Noise

On the subject of noise, there's also plenty in the real world to photograph. I took two relevant pictures in Orvieto: one was of a tiny bit of carved ornamentation in the duomo that was protected by glass, and the other was of a mirror on the street. In both cases, shooting through something made the photographs feel less like photographs, which, again, is an interesting effect.

Noise

I really like photos that look noisy. I've worked a fair bit with film, and film grain gives a really distinct feeling to a photograph; it makes a photo look more like a thing in itself, rather than as a representation of reality.

It's a lot harder to get that sort of graininess in digital photography, but not impossible. High ISO settings don't necessarily look as good as film grain, but they do still make a photograph feel warmer. It's also much easier to manipulate colors in a computer than in a darkroom. Here's a photograph from Rome, manipulated a fair bit to make it look worse; I wanted to make it feel kind of like a bad vacation Polaroid. It's not a beautiful photo, at least not conventionally, but the digital and physical noise gives it a feeling of authenticity that really works for me.