Time Immortal

Moving through the Ancient Agora, Grace and I came next to the Temple of Hephaestus, another temple of a similar design to the Parthenon, only on a somewhat smaller scale. I say “somewhat” because, as can be seen here, it’s still a very large building in spite of how old it is.

The temple itself sits atop a hill on the western side of the agora, and the path leading up to it winds around a stand of bushes and trees. I took this photo just below the final staircase one has to ascend to reach the temple, and I think it provided a very good framing for the image to have that one tree on the right.

The similarities and differences in design between this temple and the Parthenon can be noted at a glance, and I won’t remark too much on them. Suffice to say that the Temple of Hephaestus is somewhat more intact than the Parthenon (it was even used as a museum back in the 1930s), although it is in need of some restoration work as well.

Edit-wise, I didn’t do much to this image apart from fringe reduction and some highlight recovery.

The day after we saw the Parthenon and the Ancient Agora, Grace and I set out to see a few more archaeological sites in the middle of Athens. The first place we set out for was an ancient graveyard, and along the way we had to pass down a rather busy, dirty, noisy road.

I couldn’t help but noticing that some of the buildings along the way were in…bad shape.

We saw it on Crete, and we saw it again here: a lot of buildings in Greece look as though nobody has bothered to repair the bomb damage from World War II. This was just one more example.

That said, I managed to capture the building from a pretty appealing angle. Edit-wise, I had to do some highlight recovery (clouds can make for a very bright background), as well as some fringe reduction. That was all in Lightroom. I then tried to run the iPhoto ‘Enhance’ option on the picture, but nothing really changed. It’s rare when that happens, but when it happens I usually take it as a sign that I got the post-processing almost exactly where it needed to be.

In due time, we had to bid farewell to the Parthenon — Grace freely admits that she could have spent several days on the site, but since we weren’t going to be in Athens for several more days, and because there were other fascinating historical buildings to take in, we elected to move on.

Still, I captured this shot as we were leaving, and it really — I think — sums up Grace’s enthusiasm for this ancient temple. There she is, pausing to take one last, parting picture of something which has captured her imagination for years, which she has finally been able to see up close.

This is one of the last shots I took before I managed to get the white balance on my camera straightened out again; every once in a while, it’s like my brain refuses to properly process exactly what my eyes are seeing, with the consequence as a result being that the colour balance in the picture is just a bit…”off”. Mind you, it was cloudy that day, so using the ‘Cloudy’ white balance setting seemed like the sensible thing to do. Of course, with all the smog and haze from the recent (well, then-recent fires hanging in the air, the air itself was tinted in such a way as to force the colour temperature back closer to that of sunlight.

Edit-wise, then, I had to adjust the white balance on this shot, in addition to correcting for a bit of chromatic aberration in Lightroom. Then, in iPhoto, I once again used the ‘Enhance’ feature to bring the picture out even more, correcting the colour once again and…I don’t know what it is, but that ‘Enhance’ feature really brings out the copper in Grace’s hair.

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.

I’ve been mentioning that Grace was just so taken with the Parthenon, so I suppose it’s only to be expected that I’d capture a picture of her taking in the historical treasure.

Ahh, my beautiful wife. After a certain point, I couldn’t say I was sure what I found more fascinating — the 3,000 year old piece of history that had captured Grace’s attention, or Grace herself. (In retrospect, though, I think watching Grace brought me more enjoyment — which is saying something considering how very awesome the Parthenon actually is).

When I initially edited this photo, I cleaned up the white balance a bit and adjusted the colour saturation for skin tone (and of course did some de-fringing, given that I was still using the 17-85 mm lens). However, when I selected it for the Pic of the Day, I ran a couple more edits on it, this time in iPhoto, using that program’s seemingly magical “Enhance” feature. To this day, I’m not entirely sure what blend of algorithims it runs to effect the changes to the image that it produces, but it usually works very well, which is all that really counts in the end. It brought out Grace’s hair a bit more, including the (natural) copper accenting in her hair. And it cleaned up the white balance a bit as well, more so than I had initially.

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.

We spent, as I may have previously mentioned, several hours at the Parthenon site, just taking in the beauty of the structure. Grace absolutely loves the Parthenon, and is fascinated by it. I’m wasn’t quite as transfixed by it as she was, but I did take a number of photos…and even attempted a panoramic image. Put simply, I just didn’t have the ability, with my 17-85 mm lens, to take a wide-enough angle photo to capture the structure in all its majesty.

But I did have Hugin.

There are, if memory serves, a dozen images comprising this picture. The pronounced angle is not quite true-to-life, but is not destructive to the image; it’s the result of the particular stitching scheme I selected in Hugin, which maintained the straightest lines possible on the Parthenon itself (as opposed to other schemes which would have introduced unacceptable and ugly curvature to the old temple). And, to be fair, I wasn’t shooting the pictures from straight-on in front of the Parthenon itself.

As usual, the joins are seamless, and I think this image communicates quite nicely just how majestic, and how very larger-than-life, the Parthenon really is. It is such an impressive structure to behold, and humbling too.

I wanted to get a closer detail on some of the carvings visible on the interior structure of the Parthenon, but this required taking a series of pictures and then employing Hugin to compose a panoramic image.

As you can see, though, it worked out nicely:

The carved artwork on the Parthenon is breathtaking to behold, precisely because it is so incredibly detailed. The ancient Athenians had some immensely talented artists.

Edit-wise, apart from a bit of fringe reduction, the only edits made to the photos comprising this panoramic image were the alignments that are a part of the stitching. As usual, Hugin performed flawlessly.