Today's Throwback Thursday goes back 16 years, to the 2005 Fordham Honors Program trip to Italy, which was led by Joseph Perricone and the late and wonderful Father Joseph Koterski, S.J.

21-year-old man in a red sweatshirt and peacoat. Background: interior of the ruins of the Colosseum — Me at the Colosseum.

Photo credit likely goes to Pat Farmer, Kevin McKenna, or Tiffany Smith.

Tourists looking over the rail in the Colosseum. Low, warm sun visible through a window above. — Getting some sun into the building.

Spruced this up last night in Lightroom. If you zoom in, there's a good amount of pixellation (this is a 1.3 MB file), but it took the edits better than I expected.

Tourists looking over the rail in the Coliseum. Low, warm sun visible through a window above. A bit dark, with a lavender cast to the image.

Here’s the same shot as above, albeit straight-out-of-camera, no edits. I guess my intent for this shot was to, in addition to catching the sun through the window, have the railing intersect with the lower-right corner of the frame. It’s a reasonable choice, but as time has gone on I’ve grown less happy with canted shots.

I didn’t do extensive post-work on this, but (as may be evident in the previous photo) I did want to increase the contrast, and reduce what I saw as a lavender cast to the image. Lighroom’s auto toning button did most of the work, as it brought up some of the shadows, and the rest was fussing with the contrast slider and some selective color work. I tried to amplify the saturation of the spots on the top of brick wall, and amp up a bit of warm color saturation in the bricks.