…like this:
This is a black and white city. It is gorgeous in black and white.
The places…
…the people…
…its all beautiful. And beautifully complex.
Now, for the nerdy ones out there – and this is a photoblog – I have gotten a few questions concerning how I do some of these black and whites. Honestly, its all done in Lightroom2. I don’t even have Photoshop on this computer right now because I had to pick up this computer in Dubai last week after my crappy plastic Toshiba got smashed. You pay for what you get, and at $300 you’re not paying for much.
But now I’m running on all cylinders again with my native platform – Mac OSX on a MacBook Pro.
ANYways… all these black and white photos are being processed as close to “film” as I can envision it. I really would love to shoot film, but this trip would be impossible to do that way.
But, the irregular vignetting is usually due to the use of big prime lenses like the Sigma 30/1.4 on the Canon 7D with the vignetting correction turned off. Its pretty, I think, and pretty real! Sometimes its the zoom lenses I’m using on the Nikon D300 and if I shoot open with them, they vignette under certain lighting conditions and with certain filters – polarizers and such. Except the Nikkor 17-55/2.8 and the Tokina 12-24/4 – which are SPECTACULAR lenses – many of the rest of them you can vignette them.
Like this:
But anyway, geek-out done. Now to the images:
The Blue Mosque is quite incredible. Ya gotta see some of this stuff. I mean, you can’t really go to cities with this much world-changing history and not see a FEW touristy things, right? 😉
But in amongst the throngs, there are incredible snapshots of real-life.
I love things in pairs.
But I guess I shouldn’t have made that statement before that photo. I was referring to the other photo of the painters. Promise!
All this history of Blue Mosques and Hagia Sophias and enormous cisterns…
…and really great markets. And the people in them.
That’s where I see Istanbul. These same people have been walking the streets for eons.
The clothes have changed…
…and often the only animals are going to be of the domesticated sort…
…but the places are only as good as the people who inhabit them and continue to give significance to their existence.
These are just a few of my favorite images from the day. I was walking around with the Canon 7D and a Sigma 30/1.4 or the Nikon D300 and the Nikkor 85/1.8. That’s all.
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Oh, and some street photo just HAVE to be in color…
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But the internet is a bit slow at the moment, my posts are getting laborious…
Never fear, though, I will be getting them up as fast as possible!
For that, stay tuned…
-Noah D.
