A few nice image site images I found:
Turkish Delight VI
Image by Frederic Mancosu
The evening happened to be a great one and the roof terrace gave me the shot I had been looking for all night. This was where our exploration would end on this first day, on a roof, around a beer, happy and tired. We had arrived at a deserted airport, in the middle of the night, had made our way through the outskirts of a city of 17 million, had mastered local public transportation, found the best hostel in town, slept in a Starbucks despite hang found the best hostel in town, explored the city, tasted its delicacies and followed destiny all the way up onto this place, to have this view and a pint of lager. It was quite a a fulfilling experience I must say.
Aside from that, we had been able to overcome all of what we had expected and be humbled in our naive a-priori of what we would find. This place was as little "cliché" as any other and trumped in cheesiness by any European capital's tourist attractions. This place was real. And yes, there were a lot of tourists, and yes there were a lot of cheap cheesy tourist shops, and yes you could buy counterfeit fashion and watches on every street corner. But between all this lay a couple million people's every-day life, the economical nodal point of two continents and last but not least, one of the oldest centers of civilization and religion known to the western world. And that is what made Istanbul so vibrant, so fascinating and so unlike what anyone of us could have imagined. There was no more religious frenzy than around the vatican, there were no more burkas than in the center of Geneva and when the Muezzin sung, it filled the streets with a magical atmosphere that was in no way the menacing demonstration of power certain political figures at home would've liked us to be afraid of. It became more and more apparent that we had been mislead by what we had been taught by the media, politics and as of recently, our very Constitution. This was a city of islamic majority and it was noticeable all across, it had however no more mosques than an average Italian town has churches and chapels and people went about their lives just as we usually do. Why do I mention all this? Because my visit of Istanbul was my first visit to asia and at the same time, my first visit to a place of mainly islamic belief. Even though I do not have and never had a particularly polarized opinion on the issue and like to think of myself of an open-minded individual, I did notice that all my growing up in central Europe had left its mark. I arrived in Istanbul with an apprehension of what I would come across and even though I'm not necessarily proud of it, I did feel quite surprised at the deepest of me, regarding the entirely different reality I had found. The fact is that I could live in Istanbul every day with having to learn nothing more than the language. The cultural differences, although existent, are minute to the point of being mere nuances when you come to think about it. I guess one only really can see up to the horizon. Whether we want it or not, our image of what lies beyond will always be colored by those who report it. It is therefore essential not to leave it at hearing the stories. If the enlightenment won't come upon one's head, one has to bring oneself closer to the light.
This is what we had inadvertently done and while contemplating the sheer beauty of the golden horn's entry that night, I was seeing that much more.
View from my flat.
Image by Stew Dean
An image stitched together from iphone pictures on an iphone 3G. The app used is called autostitch. The view to the right is Chiswick.
Abstract photography. (Groundwater and sunlight in a sedimentation tank)
Image by wwwuppertal
I saw this at a construction site. The original image is rather dull. I upped it a bit in photoshop. Converting it into a negative was one of the manipulations.
