Glad you appreciate these photo essays, Antoun. I used a variety of cameras, from a Pentax handheld with slide film in the 1990s, handheld digital cameras, a Nikon D80 with a 200 mm lens, another Nikon digital camera, and for the 2019 photos, an iPhone. I don't normally pay attention to depth of focus with landscapes. Mostly, I think, the effect lies in the perspective and framing, e.g. the picture with the long shadows. Another example is the distorted Dome in the picture of my daughter, which was taken from a low angle with the camera near the ground. Several other scenes from which I had erased my daughter's image were similarly photographed from below.

Al-Aqsa, and Jerusalem's Old City, is like a living museum. Almost any direction you look is a shot worth taking. Such changing perspectives is what makes it an architectural gem--one that "to an unsettling degree" has become historic, as you note.