The whole staff here in Administration is still recovering from the most recent excursion. While my sleep schedule has finally righted itself, the magnitude of the catch-up sessions (paperwork, inventory, requisitions, etc.) has loomed large and kept me from my usual contemplations, not to mention it’s played merry hell with my day-to-day schedule. Mentally, I’m still in Greece.
I took a lot of photos while I was there. Between myself and Janice, we’ve got nearly a thousand of them. As I’ve mentioned before, hers are uniformly much better. I used to be a decent photographer. Camera phones have ruined that for me. There’s no depth of field, the lens tends to distort in a kind of fish eye manner, and you can’t make any adjustments as you go. You have to dump them into an editor, so good luck on finding the “just right” lighting and f stop. Do they even do f stops anymore? Ugh. Computers.
As a result of my self-handicapping what was once a serviceable skill, bordering on an art, my photos fall into three broad categories now: Selfies, reference photos, and the occasional attempt to present a photo as I see the subject.
Selfies don’t count. You can’t mess those up. The photo reference is usually boring, because what is fascinating and necessary to me is just a janky old staircase to you. The reference photos are the one thing that camera phones are actually useful for; you can grab one quickly, shoot a bunch of stacked photos in a second, and you can zoom in close enough to better see what you were shooting. The last thing, you know, actual photography? For me, it’s real hit-or-miss. For every shot with a glancing attempt at composition and artistry, there’s a dozen pictures that are blurry, tilted, framed badly, have someone’s dumb head in them, or are just plain shitty, rendered flat and inert by the technology we can’t seem to live without these days.
Despite having the deck stacked against me, I did manage to snag a few photos that were “of the moment.” They aren’t necessarily pointed at big-ass ruins, but they were an integral part of my Greece trip. Maybe if I show them to you, I can get this all out of my head and we can get back to Bunker Business as Usual. So, if you’ll be so kind to indulge me, I’m going to post some of the more interesting photos I took, along with context for you.
You should have your own travel TV show where you describe in your narration all the great places of the world like you do with Greece in this column.
It is awesome that the Tomb of King Agamemnon is a real place on this planet that you can go to.
I *just* watched "Big Trouble in Little China" last night. Synchronicity is weird.
Thank you for sharing the photos.
Except that last one. I could've done without that last one.