Time Immortal

Walking back from the Odeon of Herodes Atticus toward the Theatre of Dionysos, I stopped to grab this image. It’s just a picture of sunlight filtering through an archway, but I loved how fiery the colour was.

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.

Here’s another view of the Odeon of Herodes Atticus.

Looking south and west from the Parthenon, it was actually pretty easy to frame the Odeon against an appealing backdrop. There’s another large park/archaeological site to the south-west, the primary feature of which is a hill covered in thick foliage.

This was a pretty easy photo to edit; out of the camera, the exposures between each image were pretty evenly matched, and colour was good, so all I really had to worry about was cleaning up any chromatic aberrations and white balance issues.