Posts filed under 'Photography'

The dunes within the dunes of Zagora are here lit with a flashlight in the dead of night. The fascinating textures ripple across the larger dunes to form miniature landscapes.

Light beams filter through slats to illuminate the smoky air of the Marrakech Souks where you can buy everything under the Moroccan sun. The smoke from grills cooking succulent meats mingle with the exhausts of motorbikes speeding through alleys far too narrow for vehicular traffic to create a hazy aura in the market.

If the city of Fez originated in a design, it was designed to confuse. Each road shoots off into another narrower alley that branches into ever more constricting passages to eventually lead a new visitor into a state of bewilderment.

Couple that with the general pummeling your senses take at the hands of the masses of people and their wares and the city takes on the character of a dream.

In a city like this, open spaces are a rarity. For kids that want to have a game of soccer, there aren’t a lot of wide areas where a game can take place. So, they make do and you get a scene like today’s photo where kids kick around a ball in while being closely hemmed in by the walls of one of the medina’s wider avenues.

As with this recent shot, today’s photo of the day comes from Chefchaouen, Morocco.

Chasing the light through the narrow, blue alleys was good fun and sometimes resulted in nice backlit shots like this that give a nice rim light to the people. I love both the weathered walls and weathered, character filled faces.

This shot is from an enormous crypt located below the Koubbat as-Sufara in Meknes. Though it might look like a dungeon, it was actually used for grain storage.

This is another of the images lit with multiple speedlite bursts in multiple shots. Using the lights in this way ended up giving a lot more depth and texture to the shot than I might have gotten otherwise.

This is the last of my little experiments at Volubilis of lighting the ruins with a number of bursts from a speedlite.

This one was taken during an overcast day which allowed me to stop down and overpower the ambient light with my flash. Again, a moody, atmospheric image is the result.

I took a number of other images at the ruins, but no more of this type. I do, however, have another of these multiple-flash composite shots for tomorrow from another location.

As with yesterday’s photo of the day, today’s was taken at the Roman ruins Volubilis, Morocco using the technique of lighting various areas with a speedlite and then compositing them together in Photoshop.

This one turned out even more surreal than the last. It’s difficult to visualize what whole will look like when you can only see a part at a time, so half the fun of creating a shot like this is seeing it come together.

It would have been easy to let a magical sunset do all the lighting work at the Roman ruins of Volubilis in Morocco. The light was as perfect as could ask for, but I felt like I wanted to do something a bit more.

So, in addition to the light of the sunset, I decided to light the ruins myself. I ran around with a speedlite popping of flashes and after assembling about 20 or 30 shots in Photoshop, we have a slightly surreal view of the place that couldn’t have been seen otherwise.

I’m actually quite pleased with this little light-painting experiment. The scene takes on a dramatic, strange feel that wouldn’t have been there had I not run around like a crazy person in the few minutes that the light was perfect.

Perfectly-preserved Ait Benhaddou and its lack of electricity made an ideal location to try out a half-hour exposure to capture some star trails.

The Moroccan village keeps its UNESCO world heritage status by maintaining a way of life similar to what was present hundreds of years ago when the group of forts was built. That means no electricity lights up the buildings at night. There are a couple of lights visible in this image, but one is either a lamp or a candle and I think one is a flashlight. At a half hour exposure, they look like someone snuck a generator inside the complex.

This shot points directly North, so the stars appear to revolve around Polaris to create a nice swirling effect in the sky.

It took me a little while to warm up to Meknes. It wasn’t immediately apparent to me what it had going for it that might be different from the other cities I had already visited.

Eventually, it revealed its charms and one of those was the Medersa Bou Inania where intricate stone carvings hosted a gorgeous dance of sunbeams one fine morning.