All Things Come to those Who Wait...

My wife Anita loves to travel. I love my wife. So I spend a lot of time traveling. But occasionally, I’m able to combine her love of traveling with my passion for landscape photography.

For example, back in 2008, we visited Athens. We had some extra time so on a lark, we took a daytrip to visit the Temple of Poseidon which we heard was worth a look.

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Well, it was worth that and more. Frankly, I was dumbstruck. There might be a more perfect symbiosis of location and architecture somewhere else on Earth, but I hadn’t seen it.

Just a 14 year-old tourist snapshot, but even so…

The white marble temple stands perfectly perched on a 200′ cliff overlooking the Aegean Sea at the southernmost point of Attica. Erected by the Athenians during the Golden age of Greece, its magnificent setting and graceful elegance have stirred souls for nearly three millennia.

I had a crappy camera and maybe the slightest hint of future photographic talent, but even so, my old snapshots provide a glimpse of the site’s magnificence despite my shortcomings.

In the years since, I thought about the temple now and again. And as my love for landscape photography developed, I began to think about returning. Maybe with modern equipment and newly honed skills, I could craft an image that would do it justice.

Second Chances…

Last month I got that opportunity. Anita and I were on a cruise that docked overnight in Athens. We jumped off the boat, rented a car and made the 40-mile drive from Athens just in time for sunset.

A dozen or so tourists were milling around but for some reason, they all seemed to want to stand at the edge of the cliff with the temple at their back and photograph the sun setting over the ocean. Now granted, it was a cool sunset, but I couldn’t understand why none of them wanted the Temple in their composition. People sure can be a mystery to me sometimes…

Sunset photography at the Temple of Poseidon at Cape Sounion Greece. — My original thought was to climb into the temple and shoot the sunset thru the columns with the floor as a foreground. Unfortunately, there is a fence around the perimeter of the temple so that idea was out. Next, I tried this spot. But it didn’t really show off the breathtaking setting and failed to capture the wonderful orange glow on the marble as it reflected the sun’s warmth.

I continued to scout around and knew I found the right spot when I stood in the location below. The image I wanted to capture was nearly a 180° perspective. That was far too expansive for even my widest lens, so I made a 7 frame panorama on my tripod.

The scene’s dynamic range was too extreme for a single exposure. To address that, I took an exposure bracket for each of those 7 frames (five frames with a 2 stop difference between each one). I combined the 35 resulting images into an HDR Panorama in Photoshop (and used Content Aware Fill to eliminate those clueless tourists).