Benz World Blog » Cairo

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.

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.

Hassan Rifa’i

Jason Benz — Sun, 07 Aug 2011 00:46:18 +0000

These are the Al Hassan and Al Rifa’i Mosques of Cairo in Egypt. The image was created from two separate exposures stitched together in Photoshop. A mask of the sky was made to add some blue however it clashed with the warm tones of the buildings. By changing the blend mode to Exclusion the blue sky layer added a soft brown which looked like a dust storm and balanced with the other colours in the image.

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

Swimming Pyramids

Jason Benz — Mon, 18 Jul 2011 15:12:00 +0000

This was created by compositing three separate images. The Pyramids of Egypt, The Seas of Dahab and Rutland Water. Many adjustment layers and masks were needed in an attempt to balance the shot as each component was taken with different lighting conditions at different angles with different cameras in different countries.

Nile Boats

Jason Benz — Thu, 07 Apr 2011 12:10:14 +0000

This was shot on the Nile in Egypt. Instead of using Split Toning Actions in Photoshop I used the split toning in Camera RAW. The advantage of this method is it gives you a lot of flexibility over the controls. Not only can you fine tune the Hue of the Highlights and Shadows you can also adjust the Saturation and Balance.

Liberation Square

Jason Benz — Sat, 19 Feb 2011 04:35:08 +0000

This is Tahrir Square in Egypt. This part of Cairo saw the start of the Pro Democracy marches which ended Hosni Mubarak’s reign and started a chain reaction which is now sweeping across North Africa and the Middle East. When I took this image in 2007 I was spotted by someone in the government building on the right. A short while later I was politely asked to stop taking pictures. Hopefully the new regime will allow greater freedom for the Egyptian people.

Nile Skyline

Jason Benz — Tue, 04 Jan 2011 11:07:03 +0000

This is the Nile skyline in Egypt. To create some extra sparkle you can use a high pass layer set to hard light blend mode. Sharpening also works well to make the lights stand out. It works best if you sharpen at the very end of the process, after you have resized. If you sharpen an images at full resolution the effect will be reduced once you resize to a low resolution needed for web output.

The High Resolution version of this image was accepted at Shutterstock in a surprisingly fast 7hrs.

Pyramid Panorama

Jason Benz — Mon, 20 Sep 2010 12:50:05 +0000

These are the Pyramids of Giza in Egypt. This image began as five separate shots. Instead of developing each RAW I stitched them together as jpegs. Once stitched and cropped the resultant image had a low dynamic range. To fix this I used levels layers and in some cases individual channel levels to keep the sky blue. Finally I used a Fractalius layer to add some glow to the image.

Pyramid Lightning

Jason Benz — Sat, 07 Aug 2010 15:25:10 +0000

These are the Pyramids of Giza in Egypt. Lightning is hard to shot during the day. You need a very long shutter speed to stand a chance of catching a strike. But when you point at the sky it does not take long to overexpose even with the smallest aperture. This shot was taken through the window of a moving bus so I relied on this technique to get my lightning. I discovered this image has sparked a debate on the bitcoin forum between physicists and the alien theorists.

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

It has also been used on page 33 of The Sun Despite me telling the news agency the lightning was photoshopped the daily mail claimed it was real.

Cairo Museum

Jason Benz — Sun, 07 Mar 2010 05:58:10 +0000

This red building is the back of the Cairo Museum in Egypt. I took the shot from the street looking up. I used Photoshops Filter>Distort>Lens Correction to restore the perspective. Making the verticals vertical.