From the Archives: Snapshots at Giza

In December, I took my mom to the Giza Plateau to see the Great Pyramids and the Great Sphinx. Despite the fact that it was a really windy day, with sandstorm conditions, the Giza Plateau was jam packed with tourists and Egyptian schoolkids on field trips.Egyptians pay one pound to get into the park — roughly twenty cents — and foreigners pay about fifty pounds for each attraction, or ten dollars. It's cool that the Egyptian government tries to make Egypt's treasures financially accessible to the public; it's a lot easier than weeding corruption and nepotism out of Egyptian government and business, which might allow for a greater dispersal of wealth across social strata, which might allow for Egyptians to pay as much as anyone else to get into their parks.

I didn't bring my big camera; instead, I brought my little tiny Nikon Coolpix that I bought about three years ago and have almost never used. Turns out the thing takes pretty cool pictures if the conditions are just right, but this one doesn't hold a candle to my original 3.2 mp Coolpix that I carried for four years, through thick and thin, before it finally conked out.

Schoolgirls hanging out alongside the Great Sphinx. I imagine the two girls on the right are making fun of the Japanese tourists taking fifty photos of the Sphinx's head.

Descending the long walkway between the Great Pyramids and the entrance to the Great Sphinx's chamber. Egyptian girls love to get decked out in super colorful outfits. It makes otherwise beige and grubby Cairo a pretty photogenic place after all.

A camel-mounted Egyptian policeman looks down on the Great Sphinx and hordes of tourists from his perch on the Giza Plateau. You can see the city of Giza in the background — it runs all the way up to the gates to the Pyramid park. The Giza Plateau is a great place to get a sense of how huge — and how polluted — Cairo actually is. You can see a brown haze of smog sprawled across the city even on days that seem clear from below.

In this last photo, I played around with Photoshop a little bit, trying to use the Duotone feature to make a nice black & white. I added some orange and it made the camel practically pop off the page, while leaving the background gray. I love playing with Duotone and Tritone, but as with so many things on Photoshop, every new tool is a blessing and a curse — there are too many options, and I waste my life trying to decide which of the four million colors to add to my black ink when no one will notice the difference, including me.

P.S. I can't figure out how to change the copyright watermark so it doesn't say copyright twice. Oh well.