timeimmortal

I’ve been waiting for a good couple of months to get to the point where I could post this one! If ever I’ve made a masterpiece panoramic image, this is it! A little under a month ago, I posted another panoramic image of this, the Odeon of Herodes Atticus, which is the westernmost of the two odeons found below the south face of the Acropolis. It is also the one odeon that has been more or less fully restored (and it is even used for productions at certain times of the year).

This is, as I say, one of my masterpiece images. It comprises, if memory serves, as many as sixteen pictures arranged in a matrix. As has become standard for me, I began by balancing exposures in Lightroom, although with a bit of a twist in that I had to manually tweak the shadows and highlights for the top two rows of pictures in order to not only balance the exposures of the stonework with pictures from the bottom two rows, but to bring out as much detail as possible in the sky.

Suffice to say that it was a tricky process.

Once that was done, and once I had cleaned up any chromatic aberration in the images, I exported the pictures and began working with them in Hugin. Finding points to line up wasn’t difficult, but I still wound up using as many as 20 control points between just two images, just to make sure every detail lined up properly.

And once again, Hugin worked beautifully. A few tweaks to the finished product in Lightroom brought the image to life just that much more.

Just for reference, the full-size image dimensions are 5575 x 3171 — not quite a 3:2 ratio, although the picture does print nicely on Legal-sized paper.

One of the last sites we visited in Greece was the Theatre of Dionysos, which is one of two odeons situated at the bottom of the south face of the Acropolis. It is also the one that has not been restored. The actual site, however, is quite large, and the paths tour you not only past the theatre itself, but through a lot of the parkland surrounding it. There is also a bit of a palisade that overlooks both odeons.

This is a picture taken from the steps leading up to said palisade.

The staircase here leads to a path back down to the Theatre of Dionysos (which will feature in a Pic of the Day presently). There’s not much else to say about it, except that the way it’s all built out of rock looked, visually, quite appealing to me, and I thought it was worth a picture. A bit of editing in Lightroom later and it was even suitable for the web.

This is a panoramic view of the Roman Agora. As the Reader will note, it sits in the shadow of the Acropolis, visible here in the middle of the frame. The Acropolis is located to the south of the Agora, just for reference.

As the Reader can see, the Roman Agora is basically just an open market square. There are a few interesting bits of stone relics along the southern side, and the Tower of the Winds is in the eastern part of the Agora. A former mosque — now converted to a storage area — sits in the northern part of the Agora, and I took the photos making up this picture from just south of that building. The Tower of the Winds is visible on the left, behind the trees.

As is usual for my panoramas, I began by editing each photo in Lightroom, balancing exposures and getting rid of any chromatic aberration in the shots. I then exported them all as TIFFs and loaded them into Hugin. After defining a generous set of control points, I rendered the shot and cropped it down too what is seen here. It’s becoming a pretty straightforward, almost “seamless” (pun!) process for me, which I like.

The Ancient Agora used to be the marketplace of old Athens, more or less. There were any number of residences there as well, and quite probably temples, but the majority seems to have been taken up by shops and plazas concerned with the sale of various things. It’s also a fairly large area, covering a substantial majority of the area of the park in the middle of Athens wherein the Acropolis, Areopagus, and Temple of Hephaestus can also be found.

Another bit of Hugin magic, this panoramic of the Agora is comprised of four or five images, arranged horizontally. These are unusually quick to compose in Hugin, and render very quickly as well. As usual, there aren’t many (any?) visible join seams.

Edit-wise, I did some chromatic aberration reduction on each image prior to exporting it for use in Hugin, and also did some highlight recovery and exposure balancing between shots. My typical Hugin usage is six to eight control points between two pictures, and I forget which rendering view I employed when I finally accepted the output. Not that it matters, I suppose. I had to crop the image a bit, but fortunately there was no need to scale it — the image was not wider than the maximum 10,000 pixels that Lightroom tolerates.

Just west of the Acropolis is a hill called the Areopagus (’Hill of Ares’). It’s a rather large, nondescript piece of rock (very smooth rock, I should note — in many places, it’s hard to find good footing) that apparently served as the homicide ‘court’ for the ancient Athenians. It offers a pretty commanding view not only of the Acropolis, but of the Ancient Agora and the Temple of Hephaestus nearby.

And it made the perfect setting for another picture of Grace, with the Acropolis in the background. (she’s so pretty, isn’t she?)

This picture didn’t need to be processed using iPhoto’s ‘Enhance’ feature; its colours and white balance were fine after processing in Lightroom. It was a pretty straightforward shot, and the camera handled it very well — the only adjustment I really needed to make to it in post-processing was a bit of chromatic aberration reduction.

We eventually wandered to the “back” of the Parthenon (its western face), which is where the Acropolis Museum is situated. Said museum was closed at the time (pity!), but the old fortifications at the western tip of the mountain were still intact and open to the public.

I took this panoramic from that vantage point. It’s a big file on my laptop (10000×1792 pixels), so it is presented here at 1200×215 resolution so that details are reasonably visible in it. That’s a bit wider than the usual Pic of the Day.

Our hotel is somewhere in the middle-right of the image. I very much doubt it’s really visible at this resolution, though.

Athens is a staggeringly massive city, which is odd considering how small it looks from its aerial view. But everywhere in the picture here that is a) white or grey, and b) obviously not sky, is the city in all its expansiveness. And the same view can be found looking out from the Parthenon in every direction.

I can’t remember exactly how many images were woven into this one picture — six or eight, if memory serves (but there’s no counting on that). Edit-wise, I did some basic noise reduction, fringe reduction, and white-balance adjustment in Lightroom before attaching all the pictures together. Then, in iPhoto, I ran the ‘Enhance’ feature on the photo, which really brought out a lot of the detail you’re seeing here. The thing I love about ‘Enhance’ is that it seems to be particularly good at dealing with foreground smog and windows in many pictures…it just brings out the stuff in the background as though the haziness wasn’t even there.