Rhodes

I was reading earlier this week about some of the terrible things going on in Greece as that country faces their economic disaster. It got me thinking about all of the things I'd seen in Greece, and just how much of our cultural heritage we stand to lose if things there go really south. I went back to the immense task of labeling my pics from that trip (man, I'm SO far behind, have so many pictures from, like, my last four trips to label, over the past 3 years...how did I get SO far behind? Time just flies!)

Anyway, I tackled the first set that looked interesting and like I could label it pretty quickly: images from Rhodes!

Rhodes is an ancient and beautiful city, and unlike most cities in Europe, still looks much as it has for hundreds of years.



This is a very typical view of what a street in Rhodes looks like. Some are wider, some narrower; some have tourist shops and restaurants spilling out in to the street, but all of them are of the same stone, and many have overhangs, arches, and connectors across the street.



There are also kinds of nifty little architectural touches - ancient looking lamps, plaques dedicated to Orders and governments and all those who had a presence on the island.

The ancient walls are still standing, and they command fantastic views out towards the ocean.



And then there is the ocean and the sky...



Yeah, it really looked like that. It was absolutely gorgeous, I liked Rhodes, despite the tourist-y atmosphere.

Greece Photographs

It's been an interesting few days. I've come down sick, and I finished reading the book on Optimism that I was reading, and promptly moved on to a book my dad loaned me nearly a year ago - his copy of "The Artist's Way" by Julia Cameron. I'll admit to being VERY put off by the introduction, she spends a lot of energy on talking about how SHE views creativity, and it's just...not how I do, at all. Not even how I WANT to. It's not just the way she discusses God - I could get past that, she makes it clear that she understands that not everyone shares her religious beliefs, fine - it's her attitude that creativity is something that comes from outside of us and flows through us. I don't think that at all, and I actually find that discouraging. I think of creativity as something that resides within us that we learn to accept, channel, and encourage. What's interesting, though, and that I only just realized is that in the end, perhaps the process is okay - she's talking about "letting" our creativity happen, and that's definitely how I view it too, it's about getting out of my own way and letting that creativity that resides within me...out. Anyway, despite my differences of opinion about things thus far, I've decided to give it ago. She says do one chapter a week; I read the first chapter last night, and I started tackling the "activities" in the chapter today. It's gonna be work, and I imagine I'll write more about it as I go - already, having read the sample activities, I've realized some interesting things.

What have I done so far? Well, she talks about doing "morning papers." Basically, wake up, pick up a pen, and immediately write three pages. She says to take half an hour. First discovery: I write small and fast, so I can only write two pages in a half hour. And I don't want to take longer. So, I was a bit skeptical, but I did it this morning. Last night, I set a journal and pen next to my bed, and this morning, I just opened my eyes, flipped the light on...and wrote. And it was interesting. What I really noticed about it wasn't just that it cleared a lot of crap out of my head right off the bat, but that it was invigorating. It wasn't invigorating because of the crap getting cleared out; rather, it was invigorating because, having spent a half hour sitting in bed accomplishing what felt like virtually nothing, as soon as I was done I sprang out of bed and immediately stared getting things done, and I've been getting things done ever since. Found that very interesting, and if it's the least I accomplish, I'll go with it. But tomorrow, I think I'll set an alarm, I think, I hate feeling like I've frittered the morning away (though, having just written that, I just realized...I don't feel like I HAVE frittered the morning away, which is interesting too, and maybe because I've been up five hours and have already gotten a lot done...but I can't credit the Morning Pages with that, since this morning has been a mirror of yesterday morning, before I read that stuff.) ...anyway. Yes. A bit rambling today.

Anyway, the cumulative effect of everything that I'm working on is that, while I wouldn't say I'm feeling inspired, I'm definitely feeling okay about just doing what I'm up for. I don't feel like "I MUST!" or "I WILL!" but I do feel a sort of quiet, resigned feeling of "I CAN!" It's been building for the last three weeks, starting when I started playing with my photographs again, and...I still feel that way. Anyway, over the last three days, I've gotten through labeling three or four more sets of my Flickr photos, and pinned a handful more of my better photographs. They're still all from the Greece vacation in September.

Santorini

Do you know about Santorini? OMFG, I LOVED IT THERE! It was probably my favorite stop of the trip, except maybe Istanbul. I would LOVE to go back to Santorini and just relax there for a week or two. It was stunningly beautiful, and breathtaking. When I got back to the ship after my day there, I joked to my mom that CLEARLY, I have to become a geologist. The volcanic caldera that is Santorini CLEARLY needs to be extensively studied. Sure, there's always the chance that the volcano will erupt again, like it did 3,000 years ago, and blow us all to kingdom come, but in the interim, there's all that sunlight and beauty and hiking and SCIENCE to do. It'd be a sacrifice, to risk my life that way, but someone has to do it... :)


This is the first view I got of Santorini, coming out of the ship looking at the biggest city in the island cluster, called Fira. See that switch backed path? I climbed up and down that. Yeah, it was damn hard...


My main goal on Santorini was do a hike - I walked from Fira to Ia and back again, about 7.5 miles each way. I was REALLY happy when Ia finally came in to view...


It was very common to find small shrines with rocks stacked against them. I have no idea what the religious significance of this was, but it was neat...


There was a spit of land with a huge spire atop it that I decided to climb. Hundreds of years ago, the Venetians had built a castle on top of that spire, and the ruins are still there - it was mostly destroyed by earthquakes. The most fun/scariest/stimulating part was when I had to free-climb up the last 15 feet. I was going to chicken out, but there were a few other American tourists there too, and we all stared at it, and finally one by one we decided to take the chance. Alone, I wouldn't have done it, but I'm glad I did...


Like every where else I've been in Europe, graffiti was every where. I fell in love with this one - Love, To Be Announced. They'll get back to us when they've figured out whose name goes in the heart...


There was no where in Santorini where you looked and didn't see a breath-taking view.

Athens
The other set I labeled was the pictures I took in Athens. This was ONLY the "general" pictures, and doesn't include the Acropolis, museums, etc. It was mostly graffiti, actually.


Like this guy...


And graffiti-Cthulhu...

But the real highlight of these shots is this one:

I adore this shot. I think it's one of the best photographs I ever took. I remember when I was standing there I was even thinking, "if I get this shot the way I want it, it's going to be amazing." I took several minutes just looking at the statue, walking around it, taking a few shots...and it worked. It turned out just the way I hoped. And I love it. Thank god for all that sunlight!!

So...I've just got to keep it up! I'll write more about "The Artist's Way" as I go, and post more photographs. And I'm still doing other crafts - I just didn't make enough progress this week to think it'd make a very interesting post. Maybe by Friday. :)

New Ways to Sort Through My Photography

Last week, my friends on Ravelry told me about Pinterset.com. Have ya'll heard about this? Well, I'm not yet sure what I think about it overall, but I'm finding that it's particularly useful for organizing things that I'm working on related to my Ravelry activities and my crafting business. My most recently thought-up use for it is for sorting through my Flickr photographs. See, I've got 10s of thousands of images up on Flickr, and while I'm going through and labeling them or looking for specific shots, I'll often spot one and go, "hey, that might be nice enough to put on a card or print as an 8 x 10!" ...and then I promptly forget all about it. But no more! Now, I'm just going to pin them to a board in my Pinterest (my username is Claire P Houck, or unforth, if any of ya'll are on there...). Before, I would do this sort of thing but assembling lists of links. The problem with this was that I'd have to then open every link in order to look at it. Or sometimes, I'd make a temporary file on my computer, but this is also a pain - I have to go from Flickr to my local storage, find the shot, and copy it over to the folder, then label it - and I STILL have to click the file to know what I'm looking at (or use a photo-editor/browser...)

But no more! Now I can just pin it, and go to the board, and look at them all at once!

I decided to test how this would go by going through one of the smaller, unlabeled sets I had up on Flickr - in this case, the pictures I took during the one day I spent on Crete during the cruise I took last September. There were 29 pictures in the set, I labeled all of them, and then I went through again and just pinned the ones I thought might be nice enough to consider making in to cards/prints.

It's awesome, cause now it's so easy to do things like...write this post and include the four images I singled out!

We visited this nifty castle overlooking an arm of the Mediterranean...




Our group then went to this small town in the middle of no where. Just as it started to rain, I spotted this...


Then, mom and I got sick of traveling with the main group and broke off to do some exploration in Chania.

There was really cool graffiti all over Greece and Turkey...

Will all of these get made in to prints? No, almost certainly not. But now, I can find them again easily, compare them to other shots as I identify them, and keep stuff easily organized. And, also nice, other people can Like or Pin my pins - so I can also see if I manage to post something that other people respond to very positively! Which will be very helpful (and, in fact, one of my shots got a "like" while I was writing this post!)

This'll be a big job in the long run, but I think it'll be fun. :)

National Archaeological Museum of Athens (Part 1)

As I work to get back on track, I'm starting by working on labeling the many still unlabeled pictures that I've got on Flickr. Right now, I'm tackling one of the bigger sets, those that I took at the National Archaeological Museum of Athens. Last fall, I visited Greece and Turkey, and it was fantastic, and I took a ton of pictures, but I still haven't gotten most of them labeled. I took about 800 total at the National Archaeological Museum of Athens, which was the most spectacular assemblage of ancient Greek art that I've ever seen. Now, that includes all the labels, so it's really closer to 400 - 500 pics. I've only labeled about 50 of them so far, so as I proceed through the labeling, I'll post some more that I particularly like or found interesting. (normally, I'd wait til I'd done the whole set before doing a post like this, but I'm determined to get back on track posting in the blog, so sacrifices must be made... :) ) The marbles are definitely the highlight of the museum. They have thousands, and many are very, very fine, from throughout Greek history. This is a Kore. Kore are a traditional type of female sculpture from the ancient Greek empire. This one is the most beautiful I've ever seen. Some of the pigment is still left on her chiton, and the detail work is spectacular. When I see a work like this, I wonder how ancient sculptures must have looked when they were fresh and new and hadn't been buried, weathered, and otherwise damaged by the past two millennia. This is the base of a funerary sculpture, showing four people betting on the fight between a dog and a cat. The details are just breath taking. I think that dog is in trouble... Speaking of dogs... I just like this one. The most interesting thing I've already labeled are the shot I took of the remains of the Antikythera device. The Antikythera Device is one of the amazing remains of the ancient world. Found in a ship wreck off the island of Antikythera, it's taken a century of research to figure out just what it might be. As far as we can tell, this complex construct of gears and bits and pieces was a mechanical astronomical clock, which used the movements of the moon and stars to tell the time. Workmanship of it's like doesn't appear again for 1500 years. It was made in the 1st century BC. The one I most wanted to share on this blog is this one... Not as remarkable as the others, but take a closer look! That lady, sitting on he left, is holding a spindle in her hand! Yes, she's a spinner! This gravestone dates to the 5th century BC, but some things really haven't changed that much. :) That's all for now!