When in Rome… don’t wear flip-flops

How driving rain turned Rome into reflected heaven and why David discovered that flipflops don’t work for travel photography

- DAVID CLAPP

Ponte Vittorio bridge and the Vatican, Rome, Italy. 18:52pm. 17 April 2007

I can’t believe it’s 15 years ago when I took this sequence of images. That’s vintage digital, for sure. In the future, will anyone care about my beloved Canon 5D? It was a landmark camera that made professional-level digital imagery accessible to the public for the first time. It even had better dynamic range than the waning flagship Canon 1Ds and was £5000 cheaper. It changed everything for me and I gave a triumphant two-fingered salute to the hell I had suffered shooting and scanning film.

My global travels were just beginning and after a disastrous start in Bali the year before, this was a reboot – my first major European excursion. Rachel and I were flying into Rome, taking the train to Prague and then onwards to Berlin before returning home and hopping over to Ireland. Three interesting capital cities over two weeks would keep us very entertained. Travel photography was still in its digital infancy, but I had a list of big-hitters: the Colosseum, the Vatican and the Romana Forum.