Greece Travelogue, part 5: the epilogue

[michiexile]

Once we went to Delphi, travel and tourism and spending time with the two beautiful women in my entourage took up so much time no more photo blogging was done - there was one additional rant on cars in part 4, but all our fantastic photos were put on hold.

Now I've been back to Sweden almost a week, and it's time to wrap up this Greece thing with some more narrated photographs.

We went, as I mentioned above, to Delphi and watched the Apollonic temple grounds there. We also met up with Erica, amerikabrev's colleague from Michigan, who was spending her summer in Greece taking language courses and attending conferences as much as she could possibly get away with.

Thus, my entourage consisted of these:

who both joined me in the Alfa Romeo to swoop down the Greek roads at speed. After a while of driving, amerikabrev took to chastising me whenever the speedometer'd drop below 120km/h or so.

The apollonic temple had reconstructed treasuries


mystic tunnels




an apollonic temple


an amphitheatre


and a stadion


After Delphi, we spent some more time in Nafpaktos before driving through the Langhada pass, past the point where the Spartans'd sacrifice their infirm and unworthy babies...


and through roads that had just barely been carved out from the rock that supported the asphalt


down to Mystras, just outside Sparta. A teeming city in Byzanthine Greece, Mystras had houses EVERYWHERE. A whole hilltop was covered, littered, swarming with houses and housing, not an inch left unused. Then it fell into disuse, disrepair and finally ruin.




We walked through the ruins. We frolicked among the overgrown stones. And we marveled at the beauty.






Quite definitely a favourite was the Hagia Sophia; with halfway preserved paintings inside, and a well-preserved architecture.




I made sure to take some more technically experimental photos - and am rather proud of my two Mystras HDR photos. Both of these photos were produced by taking handheld bracketed shots at exposure, +2ev and -2, and then processed into HDR images with judicious help from my father and his Photoshop CS5.


This is an archway in the Hagia Sophia, with a view out over a sunlit column and then the Spartan plains behind it. Each of the component photos was completely hopeless, and not a particularly inspired view in itself - precisely because the extreme dynamic range from the shadowy side room in the archway to the blindingly bright sunlit column behind the archway; but in the HDR version, we see everything - possibly at the price of slightly less blinding feelings from the sunlit portions.


Again, an inherent dynamic range that makes it completely unusable in any single exposure. Behind the ivy-clad wall ruin, the sun burst through the clouds in that magical way it does sometimes; and the composition looked gorgeous in real life. And again, if the foreground was to be recognized, the sky blew out, and if the sky was well-exposed, the foreground vanished. HDR to the rescue - we stacked three bracketed exposures, and then added a masked exposure lift to the foreground, just to get rid of remaining murky tones.

After Mystras, we went to Sparta, where we slept in a hotel just next to an outdoor movie theatre

and looked at the Leonidas statue


And after Sparta we went to Mycenae, with its Very Mythical ruins, its beautiful windblown olive trees

and the dazzling, fantastic, impressive, magic grave chamber of Agamemnon


After Mycenae, Epidavros; known for its still in use amphitheatres, and its old Ascleipos sanctuary:





As a final stop, we went to Athens. We saw weird signs (IllegalSigns.gov.gr? WTF?!), the Acropolis, cute alleys, the Acropolis, the new olympic stadion (from 189x), the Acropolis, weird little pubs and the Acropolis.


I'll leave you with the panorama we did. Again, the judicious and extensive editing help from my father and his CS5 came in handy as we stitched up 5 handheld photos to capture all of the Parthenon's east façade. Stitching made it extreme fisheye, and also weird perspective, so we straightened it as best as Photoshop would let us, and then erased some blank wedges, and a poor tourist guide who had moved too much for the stitching to handle it.

Quite probably the most heavily retouched photo I've done so far.

Comments

[turnberryknkn.livejournal.com]

Thank you very much for sharing your travelogues! I've really enjoyed them, and appreciate the time you've spent bringing them to us. :-)

[michiexile]

I'm very glad you liked them - they seemed to be the best way to showcase these pictures; much like my previous picture-showcasing posts...