One of the disappointments for a tourist and photographer is to arrive at a famous site and find it cloaked in scaffolding and canvas under restoration. Why couldn’t they wait till next week to work on this?

There are basically three ways to deal with this problem: (a) pretend it isn’t there and take the same shot you would have anyway; (b) frame your shots to minimize or eliminate it; (c) try to make it a key element of the composition.

I don’t like option (a) too much, but often you have no other alternative, at least as a record of the scene. Option (b) can work well in many situations, and may force you focus on details that might otherwise have been ignored; if done well the viewer may not even be aware that it was necessary to crop so tightly. Depending on the situation, option (c) can be interesting; here are a couple from the Duomo in Milan, with restoration work going on both inside and outsde.

The image of workers descending the scaffolding after working on the stained glass at Milan’s Duomo is one I would never have expected.

And while we’re in Milan, there’s also a shot of some scaffolding around the upper tower of the Duomo and one of the interior of the Galleria Victorio Emanuele for good measure.