Sabancı Mosque

On the weekend me and a buddy (whom I just turned onto the Darkside with a Nikon D90) rented a car for a day to visit some nearby sights. The Sabancı Mosque is probably the largest attraction to be found in Adana. It is the largest mosque in Turkey and can accommodate 28,500 people at one time!

The accompanying park has got to be about 3 km long and is very ornately decorated with all kinds of statues, fountains, gardens, playground equipment, and plenty of places for a picnic.

There were a lot of people out when we first arrived, and let me tell you about being a foreigner rolling up to a park in Southern Turkey… You become the center of that world. Everyone wants to look at you or talk to you to practice their English or just find out what in the hell these 2 white boys are doing in Southern Turkey. I was a little apprehensive about rolling up with all of my photo equipment because I already knew what to expect, but I was totally surprised to find that when they see all the equipment, especially the 70-200 hand cannon, they immediately want you to take their pictures.

Almost none of them even wanted to ask if they could see the picture, instead they were totally surprised when I offered to show it to them on the camera LCD. They didn’t even try and ask me to email them a copy of the shot. So basically this is like free practice for someone timid about asking to take portraits.

Hell yeah! This kid below was so excited that he literally wet himself. Well, maybe he did it before he saw me, but I didn’t even notice until I got home and looked through my shots. I had to cut out about half the picture and clone some extra shirt to spare the poor kid some embarrassment.

This last shot isn’t the most interesting shot in the world, but what is interesting is that this was taken at ISO 4 million (4,000 for non-sarcastic types) and still looks pretty damn acceptable and let me take this at 1/60 hand held in the middle of the night @ 105mm! I did run this through Noise Ninja, another great little program.

Anyways, I need to keep going back to practice portraits because I have learned it is a lot more difficult than I thought it would be, especially when using my external flash. I have figured out that the exposure meter is basically worthless and trial and error or experience is what you really need to just get the exposure right.