Blog Header Roundup - Winter of 2009-10

Bacino Orseolo at Night
I shot this one evening with a tripod and long exposure. Waiting for the right moment, making sure nobody was stomping by my tripod, I used a remote trigger to keep from shaking the camera for each shot. As usual, I took dozens of images hoping that at least one or two would come out half-decent. This was one of my favorites.



Returning from a Row
One afternoon at the GSVVM I was enjoying refreshment with some club members when the club's newest gondola rolled in, fresh from a row.
If ever I could just "borrow" one of the club boats for maybe a year or two, I think I'd nab that one.

This photo was originally featured in my post from September 13th of last year. More images of the boat are also there. I think you'll agree - she's a beauty.


Silhouette of the Four-Man Team
Dawn Reinard took this great photo during the Huntington Harbour Christmas Boat Parade. Her husband Tim planned and executed a fantastic row using one of his boats from Sunset Gondola. Four gondoliers pushed that gondola through the course at a "voga forte" speed - leading the parade the whole way. The parade ran Saturday and Sunday nights, and I had the honor of being one of those four on Sunday.

The whole adventure was chronicled in the following posts:
Adventures of the "Lead Boat" - the First Night
Adventures of the Lead Boat - A Very Successful Night
Adventures of the Lead Boat - Gettin' Ready
Adventures of the Lead Boat - Big Band and the Strap-Cam
Adventures of the Lead Boat - the Row

Smiling Gondolier
Standing on a bridge in San Marco known as the Ponte de la Cortesia, I shot this while watching the afternoon gondola traffic. I ran this as a header photo for about two hours and decided to pull it down after people kept asking me if the guy in the red stripes was me.
Not all readers of the Gondola Blog know what I look like, and while I like the photo, it was just confusing things.



Ingo in the Snow
Bavarian gondolier Ingo Stahl sent me this masterpiece of a photo and I knew it had to live at the top of my blog for a while in January and February.
Ingo runs his gondola service on a lake in southern Germany known as Wörthsee.
To view more posts on Ingo, check out:

Ingo the Traveling German Gondolier
Ingo Writes from Wörthsee


Remo in Action
Phil Arroyo shot this during a training session in preparation for the Huntington Harbour Christmas Boat Parade.

The blog post Parade Rehearsal follows the events of that evening.

Squero San Trovaso - Wood to Weather

I remember hearing a story once about an old American Indian elder who went into the forest with his grandson to choose a tree branch that they could carve into a flute.
After selecting the right one, they cut the branch from the tree and brought it back home. The boy prepared his hand tools, eager to begin crafting the branch into a musical instrument, but the old man stopped him, saying:
"wait, we need to let the wood rest a while".

When I heard that story I was much younger, and to be honest I just figured it was one of those Native American spiritualism things. Over the years though, as I've spent some time getting to know wood and it's many personality traits, I've realized that there was a much more practical side to what the tribal elder said to his grandson.

Wood grows, solid and strong as part of a living organism.
It is well hydrated, maintaining a certain amount of moisture.
Then, when the tree comes down and the wood is cut into boards, the whole world changes for those tightly knit cellulose fibers.

When wood comes to Venice and is delivered at a squero, the boards are laid out carefully to "season". The squerarioli who use them want to make sure the boards have gotten any movement out of their system. When wood is immediately used, it can sometimes do strange things. It can have a mind of it's own, bending or splitting in ways that could affect the bouyancy of a vessel.

Visit any squero in Venice and you're likely to see wood "resting", before it finds new life as part of a beautiful boat. In english speaking circles some say "let's allow the wood to weather a bit first".

The wood you see in this stack may very well be the same wood you see a few years from now - fashioned into different parts of a magnificent gondola, all black and shiny as she glides down the Grand Canal.

I wonder if it will miss being part of a tree then.
perhaps I'm attributing too much personality to the wood.
Or maybe it's that tiny sliver of Chippewa Indian in me coming out from high up in my own family tree.