Benz World Blog » Petra

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.

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.

Three Camels

Jason Benz — Sat, 21 Dec 2013 01:23:06 +0000

It has been a couple of years since I posted anything from Jordan so I processed this old shot of three camels in Petra. Jordan is a gold mine for the photographer. It is no wonder films like Lawrence of Arabia, Kingdom of Heaven and Indiana Jones The Last Crusade were shot here. I was only there a week but it produced 20 stock photos at the time and 7 blog posts years later.

This image has been accepted by Shutterstock for Stock Photography 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.

Petra Siq

Jason Benz — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 15:12:24 +0000

This is the siq on the way to the Treasury in Jordan. To process this image I used Photomatix to produce an HDR image. I then layered the HDR with copies of the original image using various blending modes. I then used the clone tool to remove the area where the sun light had blown the highlights.