Time Immortal

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.

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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.

Once we left the Areopagus, we made our way north toward the Ancient Agora, which in days of old would have been the site of the marketplace (and some residences) of Athens. Along the western side of the Agora rests the Stoa of Attalos, a large covered portico (now converted to a museum) built some time between 159 and 138 BC.

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I took the reciprocal of this image, but didn’t like it as much due to the higher number of people in the shot; this one has almost nobody visible in it. The stoa is impressive, to say the least, constructed as it is of (very finely polished!) marble and limestone. The 2003 European Treaty of Accession was signed there, for those whose tastes run to more recent history.

Edit-wise, I did a bit of highlight recovery and fringe reduction on the shot (especially in and around some of the pillars on the right). The day I took this was marked by a fairly persistent cloud cover, so there are no hints of blue to be found (unfortunately) peeking in between the columns. That said, the image gives the reader a very good idea of just how well-kept this structure is, and how impressive.

The Areopagus was a great place to take yet another panoramic image from.