Benz World Blog » Ancient

Petra Treasury

Jason Benz — Tue, 18 Oct 2016 09:09:32 +0000

This is the Treasury in Petra, Jordan. It was made famous by Indiana Jones when Harrison Ford and Sean Connery “discovered it” while looking for the Holy Grail. It has of course been known to everyone in Jordan for thousands of years.

Dedicated to Rowan who loved this place.

Petra Monastery

Jason Benz — Mon, 22 Aug 2016 14:01:52 +0000

This is the Petra Monastery in Jordan. It is know as the rose city due to the colour of the rock. In 2008 it needed to be processed using HDR to get accepted by Shutterstock for Stock Photography. It is available for download here. This time I used standard tone adjustments in Camera RAW and a little split-toning to match the texture to this jungle temple. The RAW file developer in Photoshop has improved so much since this shot was taken it has made using HDR to extract detail redundant.

Esperance Stonehenge

Jason Benz — Sat, 17 Oct 2015 13:04:54 +0000

This is a full size granite replica of Stonehenge in Western Australia. Although it is not as old as the original Stonehenge in the UK, it is complete, and access is better. When we visited the owners let us stay in our van overnight so I could easily photograph it at sunset and sunrise. I experienced an unexpected sense of awe as the sun light filled the stones.

Pyramid Wall

Jason Benz — Tue, 20 May 2014 13:30:50 +0000

This is the great Pyramid on the edge of Cairo in Egypt. I was trying to use the wall to lead the eye and give a sense of scale.

It has been a busy week. We have both been working in the day and moving furniture in the evenings. Tomorrow we hope to collect our fridge which should be the last big thing to move in to our new house. I will then give our van a well deserved oil change and service.

This image has been accepted by Shutterstock for Stock Photography and is available for download here.

Reprocessing Petra

Jason Benz — Mon, 31 Mar 2014 13:17:30 +0000

I took this shot in 2007 with an Olympus E-330. At that time the Adobe Camera RAW and Lightroom software were still in the early stages of development and we would not see highlight and shadow recovery tools for another 5 years.

Back then the best way to get detail across a high dynamic range image was to take several different exposures, and blend them using HDR software, which I did using Photomatix. I then altered the colour in Photoshop to produce this Stock Photo.

As an experiment I developed this image with a single exposure using a later version of Adobe Camera RAW. The advances in software since 2007 have made the recovery of detail across a high dynamic range far easier.

Cairo Pyramids

Jason Benz — Fri, 18 Oct 2013 04:40:03 +0000

I took this shot 5 years ago in Cairo, Egypt before the arab spring. It was shot at full stretch 150mm on a Olympus E-510 on a misty day so there was barely any contrast. This is a good example of the advantage of setting your camera to shoot in RAW if you can. A great deal of detail can then be recovered with careful processing.

The Pyramids are 10 miles from the centre of Cairo. The view from the far side has none of the city in it.

This image has been accepted by Shutterstock for Stock Photography and is available for download here.

New Stonehenge

Jason Benz — Thu, 19 Jul 2012 02:04:29 +0000

This is the Esperance Stonehenge in Western Australia which is a full size replica of the Old Stonehenge. I am posting this now for no better reason that we watched a TV program tonight on stonehenge and it reminded me I had not got round to posting it yet.

Old Stonehenge

Jason Benz — Fri, 24 Feb 2012 01:21:32 +0000

This is Stonehenge in the UK which is believed to have been built at the same time as the pyramids in Egypt. We have been packing our van all day and plan to hit the road again tomorrow morning. I have posted this old image as our first port of call will be the worlds only full-size stone replica of Stonehenge. The Esperance Stonehenge may not be 5000 years old but it does have all the missing stones and you can walk among them. There may be no sense of history but it will doubtless look more like the original Stonehenge did when it was first built. Although opinions are varied I am curious about what a brand-new pre historic calendar looks like.

This image has been accepted for Stock Photography at Shutterstock and is available for download here.

Rose City

Jason Benz — Mon, 01 Aug 2011 14:17:15 +0000

This is the Rose City in Petra, Jordan. To process this image the Recovery slider was set to 100. Normally this adjustment is used to recover detail lost in the highlights. In this image the highlights were not blown out however the Recovery adjustment was used to tone down the harsh brightness of the sun. The other main adjustment was to add some subtle split toning to give the rock its rose colour.

El Qasr

Jason Benz — Tue, 17 May 2011 12:24:44 +0000

This is part of the ancient desert capital of Bahariya which is in present day central Egypt. The scene had a very wide range of tones and looked a little dull. In order to capture the detail one copy was processed using HDR. A second copy was processed using Camera RAW with some subtle Split Toning added to warm the light. The HDR copy is then imported onto a new layer in Photoshop. Its blend mode is set to Luminosity and 70% Opacity. By doing this you get the detail benefit from HDR without getting an unnatural look. A mask of the sky was made using the Color Range tool. The mask was applied to a Hue/Saturation Adjustment Layer so the sky could have its colour restored to a more saturated blue. A stamp layer was made by holding down Shift+Ctrl+Alt+E at the same time. The stamp layer is needed before applying Lens Correction or any general retouch as it stops you from having to repeat yourself on each effecting layer. If photoshop is running slowly you can flatten the image instead of creating a stamp layer. I try to avoid this as it can be useful to having the building blocks of the image on the layers under your stamp layer. Even though they no longer effect the image they can be called upon to make changes later by moving them to the top layer and adjusting the opacity.