I recall:
The day before, I took pictures of the crossings from the roof. As usual, I developed the film, chose a frame from the contact print and enlarged it to 30*40 cm. When I looked at the picture I said to myself, "how cool will it be if the building would rise up high." Came back in the next morning and I went up to the roof to take a standard panorama, when I looked down I felt I was too far from people. So I went down two floors and put my "emergency yarmulke" on my head (this is an ultra-Orthodox neighborhood), knocked on the door and when the tenants opened and asked me, "What do you want?" I replied: "I have to take pictures of the wonderful view you have." After shooting the crossings, I wanted to continue taking the panorama but I was too high and didn't see the front of the building properly, so I asked the tenants to help me get into their neighbors apartment which is two floors below. The neighbors from the second floor welcomed me. I took a photo of the building's facade and then went up to the roof to photograph the distant view (Of course at that time I had no idea what I was doing and what adventure I was getting into ...). I went back to 'Bezalel' and developed the films. In the evening, I removed them from the dryer and went for the first time in my life to scan them (I actually sneaked in to use the new Imacon scanner that only fourth year students were allowed to use). At the time I didn't have my own computer and for the first time I went into the computer lab to work in Photoshop (it is important to understand that most students were very suspicious of digital photography). The file in the working stages reached a very large weight - close to two gigabytes. The computers at the time were the Mac G3 type and every time I hit "save" it would take me out for a 20 minute break. At the end of the evening at 11pm, I would start with the burning saga: I would divide the image into sections not exceeding 600 megabytes so that I could burn the parts of the image to discs (this process took about an hour). The next evening at about 5pm, I would sit down again at the computer, upload the image parts and bringing them together so I could continue working on the picture as a whole. That's how I worked day after day for two and a half weeks. After 150 hours of work the file was ready. When I printed it I knew I was facing something amazing. |
List of photographs |