Project 14: Cropping

Alrighty, onwards and upwards so to speak.   Final project of Chapter 2 and then I can move on to the next chapter in this photographic odyssey.    As with the previous post, i’m writing this whilst sat in a hotel room in Tel Aviv without my notes, which are up the hill in Jerusalem, and having supped a couple of glasses of dodgy complimentary red wine…..so sorry about the rambling.

A relatively straight forward project to finish off with really; cropping.   For this project I have decided to use one of my first attempts at HDR photography and then do a bit of cropping around that.   The picture is taken from the Jewish cemetary on the Mount of Olives, looking across to the Dome of the Rock on the Temple Mount.   The Dome of the Rock is a hotly contested site and is the third holiest site in Islam.   Its importance stems from the belief that the rock is the spot from which the Prophet Muhammad ascended to heaven after his night journey from Mecca.   In Judaism, the site of the stone is venerated as the holiest spot on Earth; the site of the Holy of Holies during the Temple Period, although the exact location of the Holy of Holies is not known, hence the Western (Wailing) Wall now being the holiest site in the World to Jews.   The Dome of the Rock was completed in 691, making it the oldest extant Islamic building in the world.

The original HDR shot is actually 5 shots merged with Photomatix.   Basically I took one shot and then bracketed it with two shots either side, each one at 1 stop difference.   I am still finding my feet with Photomatix, so the final result looks somewhat over-processed, but I think looks pretty dramatic.   Not really something I would usually publish, but given that this project is all about trying different crops, I didn’t think the image itself would matter too much.

A good project which made me think more about cropping.   I’ve do a lot of cropping of my images, but have never concentrated so much on one image with a view to looking at how different crops work  – its good to try and find which is the best layout and to look for images within an image.