Everyone loves the Old City at night

I'm just warming up and trying to get back in the blogging mindset. I noticed on the Living Jerusalem 2011 blog there was a header photo of the Old City at night, taken from the Mount of Olives.

It just so happens that I took a nearly-identical shot back in 2009. It was an interesting evening, as while I was setting up my tripod and composing the shot, a local kid was trying to beg money from me. Either my Arabic was off (which is entirely possible, as at the time my colloquial was virtually nonexistent), or the kid wasn't Palestinian (also possible, given that there was a nearby apartment building that looked to be all Jewish settlers), but we were having communication difficulties. Eventually the kid got through to me that he was willing to stick olives up his nose for money. I politely declined, but he stuck the olives up his nose anyway. And then, of course, he wanted money for the show.

I should've taken a picture of him and given him a NIS or two, just for fun.

In any case, in the spirit of friendly competition with the Living Jerusalem blog, here's another look at one of the images from that night. It's a HDR composite of several exposures, with some
additional tweaking in Photoshop:



Looking at the image I've produced, the colors are a bit unrealistic (though that's one of the styles you can achieve with HDR photography). In the end, though, I think that it's a fitting metaphor for Jerusalem. No one can be objective when it comes to Jerusalem (being something of a post-structuralist, I'd argue against the notion of 'objectivity' in regards to anything, but that's another story), and so our personal histories, biases, and preconceptions color how we look at Jerusalem, and many people end up idealizing it.

I am not immune to this tendency--I just spent a good long while compositing the HDR image, and then playing around with it in Photoshop, all to produce a 'perfect' snapshot of the Temple Mount. A snapshot that doesn't reflect the reality one would see when standing on the Mount of Olives and looking at this very same scene with her/his eyes.