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The entry to 2nd edition of Behind the Photo Contest, which You can find HERE

Today we are going to visit ancient City of Caesarea Maritima, also knows as Caesarea Palestinae, which is located at the coast of Mediterranean not far to the North from Tel-Aviv, Israel
That was out first trip to Israel back to Februaty, 2015 and that was actually last day of a holidays, when we still had plenty of time before evening flight back home

This day weather finally seemed to be improved finally, after very cold and rainy week, but still was quite windy and nor really hot anyway, but at least mostly sunshine.

The history of the City comes back to the the times of Herod the Great and was built during 22-10 BCE. The site itself was awarded to Herod the Great by Rome and was renamed initial pagan city name to Caesarea in honor of Roman emperor Caesar Augustus. Along with most usual attributes of a Roman city like amphitheater, temples, wide roads, baths and markets, the most important part of course appeared to be a deep-sea harbor Sebastos, which at its height was one of the most impressive harbors of its time.

Later in 6CE, Caesarea Maritima replace Jerusalem as civilian and military capital even and became official residence of Roman Empire governors. While during the Byzantine period it became the capital of the Palaestina Prima province. It was finally lost to the Muslim conquest in year 640 and the history of passing over to Crusaders and back continues for centuries until final lost to Mamluk in 1265 when city was completely destroyed in order to prevent its re-emergence as a Crusaders stronghold

So presently we can see mostly only the ruins of the city which shined for centuries, but still a lot of interesting to come there and to "touch the history"

So let's the visual story begins with some short commentaries still. And starting with quite good survived part of outer defense wall

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The general view to the part of the Harbor from further distance. Though the storm have actually passes, the sea was still very rough and this strongly hitting wave was spotted at once.
Some closer look to this wave will be at the end of the story with some short shooting technique description

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At the cape there is a nice place with a restaurant and museum. Very nice to walk around and have some rest looking into the endless sea. Museum contains some nice visual presentation (the description is below)

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Continue with walk around the territory (which is pretty huge by the way) looking into some interesting fragments of the ruins

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And here we had some fun with a good friend of mine... lifting this small stone.. :D

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OK, now after a bunch of visual from this amazing location, lets go back to some technical details for catching this amazing wave hitting the pier. Visually sea was not really rough too much, but actually the wave appeared to be still long and very strong. So as result was hitting the pier at this particular place very heavy and spreading very high with perfect rounded pattern. Here is the look from quite far away

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Well, presently I do bring two bodies with different type of lenses to my trip. While 4 years ago that was only one. Standard 6D Full Frame camera with 24-70mm pretty bright 2.8F lens. It is still very handy and brings very workable focal distance, while allowing to shoot portraits and fashion, as well as decent wide angle landscape and cityscape shots.
Since I do live at the seaside and definitely I do know how dangerous this kind of wave could be. And not only for your photo gear, but generally for your life as well. Even if You do think visually nothing is dangerous, the actual hit of such wave could be real issue... So I wasn't coming too much close still, obviously you dont need some serious problem just few hours before flying home :) But still coming closer.... enough...

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Well, normally I would use tripod and maybe even filters, but travelling conditions dictates own rules often. So all those were done just handheld. Only the point was to get correct shutter speed to catch this wave in a best motion. And then just wait and push the shutter. Have in mind, anyway in any certain case the spid of wave is different and you have to make some trials to get right shutter speed. In this case 1/750 sec worked perfectly. Counting sunny daylight conditions was no any issue with brightness of the scenery in general

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That's all for today and next part to come later on, stay tuned....

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CategoryTRAVEL/LANDSCAPE

CameraCanon 6D / Canon 24-70mm f/2.8L

All photos are for sale in HQ digital format, please contact if interested at discord axeman#3904

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