Color Capture: Venice February 2026

LOL, the hubris of trying to capture colors in Venice... So many colors, beautiful on their own, in stunning juxtaposition, in reflections and layers. Also the nuances - a white grey, a blue grey, a green grey, on and on. What struck me most, beyond the colors themselves was their placement - the mobile, ever changing water against solid stone, in making glass the brightness of pigments against the neutrals of salt, the intricacies of intertwined threads in fabrics.

Venice understands luminosity - from the glow of glass to the textures of layers upon layers of weathered paint to the use of muted colors against true tones.

Experiment:

Capture 100 colors from Venice

By Time/As a Palette

By Tone

By Value

Notes:

In sorting the colors, definitely found some tension between light intensity/value and color intensity/chroma.
Venice is the first place I think I've felt the real impact of a true white - it's so strong on the boats against the changing water.
As ever, even a little bit of texture makes it challenging to determine tone, but I can't give it up because it gives the colors so much depth.

Plus:

Helped me think through what was so different and spectacular about color in Venice

Minus:

Had to remind myself that the goal if this is not to be "perfect" but to do the work of thinking about and looking at colors!

Colors in the fog could be their own study
Also all the tones in image 5079 could make its own study.

Color Captures

Overview