Time Immortal

As Grace and I walked back to our hotel from the Roman Agora, we passed down many streets not unlike this one (although this was the only one I thought to take a picture of). Many of the streets in Plaka (that’s a touristy district in central Athens) are approximately this narrow, and yet one sees cars whipping along them with what could almost be termed reckless abandon. The sidewalks are hardly a place to feel completely safe from traffic.

This was a good walk overall, a fine end to another day of touring. If memory serves, we stopped at a little jewelry store called Plaka’s Agora, where we bought a nice pair of earrings for Grace that feature an ancient Greek symbol for eternity. We also bought a couple of icons while we were there — let’s face it, the Greeks do beautiful icons.

But back to the image for a moment. It’s a fairly straightforward shot, and all I really did edit-wise was clean up some chromatic aberration.

Just outside the Roman Agora, Grace and I stopped for a bit of a rest (we’d been walking non-stop since just after breakfast, and it was mid-afternoon by then). I noticed the ruins of a building across the road, and decided to grab a picture of them.

I don’t know what this building was before it…er…fell into disrepair (in truth, it looks like it got bombed and was never repaired), but something about it suggests that it might have been a church. Regardless, it’s a husk now, but it’s interesting that the doorway has survived while the walls have all toppled. You see ruined buildings in the oddest places in Athens, but none of the others that Grace and I noticed had parts of them in such relatively undisturbed condition as the doorway here.

Edit-wise, I tried to do some highlight recovery, but there wasn’t much I could do against the sunlight washing out in the clouds. A bit of fringe reduction was also necessary, as there are some fairly high-contrast areas in this picture.

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.

My beautiful wife, Grace.

I took this picture of her as she was wandering around some ruins at the Roman Agora, a bit west of the Ancient Agora in Athens. Unlike at the Ancient Agora, the security at the Roman Agora is rather lax — one is left with the impression that while it is a mortal sin to disturb even the gravel on the paths at a Greek archaeological site, it wouldn’t be all that frowned upon if one was somehow able to make off with an entire pillar from any ruins dating back to the Roman occupation of Greece.

(And don’t even bother looking for Persian ruins.)

Anyhow, Grace was looking at a pile of rocks that might once have been a wall, and I was mostly looking at her through the lens of my camera, and she turned and gave me this pose almost without warning. I normally hate posed shots, but this one turned out really well, and it’s now one of her favourite pictures of herself.

She really is so pretty, yes?

Edit-wise, I had to do a bit of fringe reduction, and some saturation adjustments to get her skin tone just right. But I think it would be fair to say that I’m very happy with how this picture turned out. It’s easily one of my favourite pictures I’ve ever taken, mostly because I dearly love the subject, but also because it’s just a darned good photo in general. So good, I thought, that I made it one of the pictures that rotates randomly through the left half of the site’s header.