Benz World Blog » Luxor

Single Balloon

Jason Benz — Sun, 07 Sep 2014 11:36:20 +0000

This photograph was taken before sunrise in Luxor, Egypt using my old Olympus E-330. To process this image I used Photoshop masks to independently adjust the exposure of the sky and balloon.

Today I fitted my steam punk solar controller to our van and wired it up to the solar panel and batteries. I will find out if it works when the sun comes up tomorrow.

New Valley

Jason Benz — Wed, 19 Mar 2014 20:16:20 +0000

This shot was taken with my old Olympus E-330. It is Qesm Al Wahat Al Khargah in the New Valley Governorate Egypt. At least that is the address Google gave after I spent half the morning searching for it. This is one of the drawbacks of digging out a 7 year old photo from a balloon flight over Luxor.

We are in the UK now and looking forward to a weekend in Nottingham. The flights have been booked to Australia now and we fly out on the 9th April.

Nile Fishing

Jason Benz — Sun, 08 May 2011 11:32:45 +0000

This was taken near Luxor in Egypt. The image was processed using Photoshops Camera RAW developer. The effect was created using the inbuilt split toning feature in Camera RAW. You access the panel by clicking on the icon which looks like an = sign after you open your RAW file. It’s useful to know when adjusting the saturation slider it acts just like an opacity slider. You can blend it between original image colour and the hues you have set for the highlights and shadows. The balance slider is really a midpoint. It defines the crossover between highlight and shadow. In this case a warm hue was added to the highlights to give the effect of sunset. A subtle blue was added to the shadows. Finally a vignette was added.

Luxor Sunrise

Jason Benz — Sat, 05 Mar 2011 03:35:10 +0000

This sunrise was taken on a balloon flight over the west bank of the Nile near Luxor in Egypt. In order to compensate for the cameras White Balance Guess a colour balance layer was used to bring back the sunrise colours. An advantage of using this method is the Highlights, Midtones and Shadows can be adjusted individually. This means you can control the colours in the dark foreground and the bright sky separately.

Above Luxor

Jason Benz — Sat, 05 Feb 2011 09:37:19 +0000

This was taken from a balloon above Luxor in Egypt. Split Toning was used to create a number of layers. They were then blended back together using a varying opacity and blend modes in Photoshop.

Advent Calendar

Jason Benz — Wed, 01 Dec 2010 11:06:21 +0000

This is for anyone who does not have an Advent calendar. Please feel free to print this out. It’s in A4 ratio 1:1.4142.

This Obelisk from Egypt pre-dates Christmas by quite a few years but at least its from the same part of the world.

Fractal Hieroglyphics

Jason Benz — Thu, 09 Sep 2010 11:25:26 +0000

These Hieroglyphics are from Luxor in Egypt. To process this image I took an existing stock image which had undergone HDR processing then I used the Photoshop Plugin Fractalius. I took a while for me to locate the Plugin in the first time I used it. Then I realized it only ran on the 32bit version of Photoshop. I guess it is too much to expect a third party Plugin to run in 64bit.