New Mosque, Istanbul

New Mosque (Yeni Cami) is an Ottoman Imperial mosque in Istanbul, Turkey. It is one of the most popular tourist spot in Istanbul. The construction was first began in 1597 and completed in 1665. The interior of the mosque is spectacular. The central dome is supported by four large piers. On the corner of each pier are calligraphic plates with the names of the first four Khlifahs - you can see them all in this picture. This is quite common for Ottoman Imperial mosques. The wall is decorated with blue, green and white Iznik tiles, as you can see on the left side of this picture, although it is considered as inferior quality for the earlier imperial mosques.

There are plenty of opportunities to photograph beautiful mosque interior in Istanbul. However, the low light and high contrast scene render the shot difficult. What I use to do is to set the camera in higher ISO, bracketing (depend on the light, usually +/- 2 or 3 stops is sufficient), and fire using the high speed mode. 

This picture is resultant of manual blending of 2 pictures (0EV and -2EV) in Photoshop, and subsequent detail enhancement using Topaz Adjust. If you are really care about the noise caused by high ISO, take more shots and reduce the noise in Photoshop by using median blending (I will talk more about this in later post).

Enjoy the best of Istanbul!