stuffAboutHockey

Stuff I Took Photos of When Traveling [Not About Hockey]

Stuff I Took Photos of When Traveling [Not About Hockey]

Some of you may have noticed I have a lot of 'vintage' style photographs. I recently became interested in various types of different film photography [although...
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Some of you may have noticed I have a lot of 'vintage' style photographs. I recently became interested in various types of different film photography [although I shoot digitial], but I love to go through the various different vintage film styles & find 'that one' which gives my photos a certain look & feel. It's more than just clicking a preset filter button in Instagram. I'll flip through the presets of several Film-Effect Plug-ins for ideas, but then modify the pre-set to bring out the specific colors-tones I like or tone down effects I don't like & tweak things here & there to get the [in my mind anyway] perfect coloring & vintage 'look' I want the photo to have.

I wasn't too interested in photography when I was traveling, but took a lot of typical 'tourist' photographs in some of the places I've visited [Travel Photos were all done with Point & Shoot Cameras, I went through a few models of the Canon Elph [They came in PINK and were so tiny! - It was only January of this year I got my first DSLR camera].

Viewbug was hosting a 'travel' photo contest. One of my favorite places to visit was Israel & I remebered taking a few shots of Old Jerusalem & managed to dig them up. Luckily the resolution from my Elph at the time [a Canon PowerShot SD400] was high enough to let me work with the photo in Photoshop. Surprisingly enough the image didn't need a lot of work. I sharpened it up, fixed the lightning a bit and had a beautiful color photograph of Jerusalem that looked nothing like I remembered it looking like.

Maybe it's the influence of other photographs - artwork depicting the Old City, or maybe it's my crazy brain [that often remembers things that never happened] but I had this image of Old Jerusalem [from this perspective] where all the building were the same color. And they kind of sort of were [in the color version] but there was a lot more variation than I'd remembered. I wanted to depict the Jerusalem I remembered or saw in my mind [even if it didn't actually exist] so I decided to do a black & white. And being an ancient city -- went with a vintage black & white style. The preset is based on Alien Skin Exposure 5 "Wet Plate" although I tweaked it a little & removed most of the edge blur to show the building detail a little better.

[For those of you actually reading this . . .]
I started to wonder how many other people [possibly via influence of other photography - artwork of the city] also had an 'image' in their mind of the hillside in Jerusalem consisting of very monotone buildings in nearly the same color & wondered if maybe the enhanced color version would be better to submit for the contest as it highlights the city in a way that ISN'T what people might expect [a lot more color variations between the buildings - at least then I remember -- and I was there, twice in fact].

If anyone is interested in seeing the enhanced colorized version of even the original, let me know. I was just curious to hear what other people imagine of when they think of the "hillside of buildings" that you'd see [through a bus window] while driving past Jerusalem from the main road.

I'm not 100% how accurate the metadata in the image is, as it's been copied-duplicated-moved quite a number of times, but according to the IPTC information, the date I shot this was May 9, 2006 [which sounds about right for my second trip to Israel]
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