Istanbul

After more than a month removed from posting, here are some new photographs, beginning at the first stop on our two week plus trip to Istanbul and Italy. Both my wife and I loved Istanbul. It was culturally light years removed from what we had experienced before, and we both like to be challenged to make sense of what our new environment is revealing to us. Five days is not enough time to actually get a real handle on a place, but we think we made some headway in understanding something about this city and culture. We stayed in a fantastic hotel, the Empress Zoe in Sultanamet, the area where mosques and many other attractions are situated. The middle photograph is The Blue Mosque in a thirty second exposure taken with my Sony 10-18 wide angle lens. At bottom is the interior of the Hagia Sophia mosque, located across Sultanamet Square from the Blue Mosque. Both places are architecturally stunning. Photographs don't really do justice to the scale and detail of either mosque, but I tried. At top we are enroute to Germany to catch a connecting flight to Turkey. Taken with the Sony RX 100. I took over 500 shots with this camera, and it is especially excellent in low light and night photography. More to follow.