Holocaust Memorial, Berlin

It’s a few years ago since I visited Berlin, and a few months since I posted a shot from that trip.  This image is a photo taken at the Holocaust Memorial, more accurately called the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe.  It’s the kind of place that you could photograph (and I’m sure has been photographed) in a million different ways.

I’m sure therefore that when I photographed it I did the same as many others before me in using a reasonably long lens (my 70-300mm lens at about 120mm) to frame tightly and compose a slightly abstract composition.

In particular I was choosy about my vantage point, and opted for one which allowed me keep strong diagonal lines in the frame to lead the viewer from the bottom left corner through the scene.

In recent weeks I saw a print of another’s photographer of the same subject, taken on film and processed in the darkroom, and they had similarly approached the shot from a more abstract point of view, and produced a very contrasty print.  That encouraged me to try some heavy processing which results in the look you see here.

The shot was taken as a JPEG and the original shot straight out of the camera is on the right.  Because it’s not from a RAW file it’s not as tolerant of the heavy processing and some areas of it have been blown out as the contrast was increased.

All the same there’s some nice texture in the surface of the concrete blocks which is enhanced by the processing and the final image is an improvement on the washed-out look of the image from the camera.  I’m posting it here as an example of how processing an image can alter it, and in particular how it can be important to an image which might start out from the camera looking a bit flat, as this was.