Window to Hezekiah’s Tunnel
I was going through my archives the other day looking through my images from my trip to Israel in 2010. I’m going back to Israel next week and I was trying to remind myself what I shot the last time I was there. That trip took place before I started this blog and when I was just starting to learn about HDR. This was one image that I was never happy with. I had shot 3 brackets handheld but it was very dark and the longer exposure image was blurry and the HDR never came out the way I wanted it to. Of course that was before I was using Lightroom so I decided to process one of the brackets on its own in LR5. All I did for processing was to bring out the shadows and darken the highlights slightly and cloned out part of a railing.
This was taken on the walk down to Hezekiah’s Tunnel in Jerusalem which was dug underneath the City of David. The tunnel dates back to the reign of Hezekiah of Judah in the late 8th and early 7th century BCE and was designed as an aqueduct to provide Jerusalem with water.
Walking through the tunnel itself is an amazing experience. It’s dark, very narrow and you walk through water that comes up to your knees. Yup that’s us in the picture below. Our tour guide took this shot…
Subway Love
In this age of email and Facebook and instant messaging I still get excited when I get a package in the mail. Nine times out of ten it’s something that I’ve ordered online. The package that I received last week was very different. It was a book. Not just any book, but a yet to be released copy of Subway Love by Nora Raleigh Baskin. Why is this exciting you ask? Because the cover image is mine.
Last July I was approached by the publisher about using my image of a Rome subway car for a new book they were publishing. They had found the image online and asked if I could send them a high resolution image so that they could see the quality. After some back and forth with the publisher they created a mock-up of what the cover design would look like and we negotiated a licensing deal. To say that I was thrilled would be an understatement. Here’s a quick iPhone image of the book.
And here’s the original image. Click on “The Words of the Prophets are Written on the Subway Walls” to see the original post.
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Weekly Photo Challenge – Abandoned
My contribution to this week’s WordPress Weekly Photo Challenge are some images that I took on my trip to Italy back in the summer of 2011. I originally process these as HDR when I first got back and was not at all happy with the way they turned out so I never posted them. Since that time I’ve started to use Lightroom and when I saw this weeks challenge I went back to my archives and decided to process just one exposure of each image solely in LR5. I was quite pleased with the end result. Let me know what you think.
Oh…we were driving from Florence to Amalfi on this day and stopped just south of Florence and came across this abandon farmhouse. What character this place has. It would make a great fixer upper 🙂
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A Walk in the Judean Hills
When I first go through images from a shoot I mark the keepers (and the ones that I’m going to process), delete the technically poor ones and then there are the ones that are technically ok but just don’t jump out at me. Every so often I go through my archives and see something in an image that I didn’t see before. This was taken a few years back on a trip to Israel. We were in the Judean Hills not far from Jerusalem. It was mid-day and the sun was very harsh so the original image was washed out but when I looked at it again I really liked the way the tree was shaped. It almost looks like its going for a walk. I re-processed the image with a vintage monochrome look and really liked the way it came out. What do you think?
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Just Another Bicycle…in Rome!
Happy Monday! 🙂 I hope everyone had a great weekend. Here’s another bicycle image taken in Rome. I actually re-processed this image using Topaz Clarity and I’m really pleased at the end result.
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Trastevere
It’s been a while since I posted any Italy pictures and there’s still a few that I had meant to share and haven’t had the chance. This image is from a lovely afternoon spent in Trastevere. Trastevere is in Rome located on the west bank of the Tiber. This little enclave with it narrow, winding, cobblestone streets is best explored on foot.
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Edith Levy Photography 