Jerusalem

A Street View of Israel

Hi all.  Today's post is brought to you by the letter "M," the letter "T," and by the number 12.  Now that we've gotten that out of the way, let's look at some pictures.  It took a little over a week, but I've finally gone through all my photos from Israel, got rid of the ones I didn't want to keep and post processed all the keepers.  Just to give you an idea about what that process was like, I came home with around 1,000 photos.  Now I did a lot of culling while I was on vacation, so in total I took a lot more than that, but when I got home and downloaded the photos to the computer, there was about 1,000 of them.  So then I started going through them.  Keep... keep... toss... keep... toss... keep... well, you get the idea.  Bad composition... toss.  Too over exposed... toss.  The person in the photo was really ugly... toss.  I just didn't like it.. toss.  I got down to the ones I thought I wanted to keep and share and that number was about 550.  Now this includes a  bunch of photos that aren't going to be interesting to anybody other than my family.  You know, family photo in front of the hotel, family photo in front of a restaurant, family photo at the beach, etc.  They're not the best photos, but you've got to keep them cause my mom... uh, I mean, somebody in the family may want to print those and put them in a drawer never to be seen again.  So of the 550 keepers, there are probably about 50 or so like that.  The rest I really like and want to look their best, so those were the ones I processed.  That took me a little over a week, but I'm really happy with the results.  So now the question was what to share on the blog.  All of them?  None of them?  Some of them... but which ones?  Well, Israel is really beautiful and has some really nice landscapes and some beautiful architecture, but it's still the Middle East, so the landscapes start looking really similar after a few pictures.  I mean, you're not going from beautiful beaches to lush forests to canyons with flowing rivers... it's a desert people!  And although there is a lot of really cool architecture, let's be honest... you've seen one three thousand year old wall you've seen them all.  Okay, not really, but I didn't want to post a bunch of pictures of old walls.  The thing that really makes Israel special is the people.  They're some of the friendliest people I've encountered on a vacation (just ask the guy who walked me back to my hotel after I found myself lost and wondering the city by myself), so I thought I'd post some pics from ground level.  Up close shots of the people, foods and things that I thought really represented the places I went.  All of these shots were taken with my Canon 5D and most of these were taken with the 24-105L lens.  I really love that lens for walking around a city.  It's really versatile and takes great, sharp photos.  Maybe I'll post some landscapes, architecture or beach shots next week, but for today this is what you get!  Most of the pics are from Jerusalem, Tel Aviv and areas around the Dead Sea.