Foto Friday 02 – Nea Kameni
Then and Now.
Kalispera, dear reader and welcome to the year 1991. Enjoy the August heat, a cool evening breeze and the taste of sea salt on your lips while looking out at Nea Kameni, burning—I mean bathing in the summer sun on Santorini. I raise my Time Machine, compose the shot, and the shutter clicks. It will be a month before I get to see the result. I don’t mind.
We were there. The seven of us, in our early twenties, island hopping from Archangelos, Rhodes, to Santorini, then Naxos and back to Athens by ferry. It was so cold on deck. We bought the cheapest tickets, of course. My face went numb, and the wind was wet with freezing foam from the rough sea, rocking the boat. At least I didn’t get seasick.
Looking back, it was one of the best trips, except for the bit when Boris, our big guy, freaked out during a visit to the Valley of Butterflies, realising that he had Lepidopterophobia, or that other time when we got stuck in the Pitch Black (Vin Diesel) Tunnel at Seven Springs because someone in front found out the hard way that they suffered from Nyctophobia and refused to take another step. Lucky for us, someone had a lighter, which we passed to the poor person in front, and after a few hectic attempts, there was light, a tiny shaking light. We were moving again.
Fast forward to 2017: I enjoy doing long exposure (night) shots with my DSLR, using a B+W ND10 Big Stopper. Makes for a nice effect and colour tones. What do you think? Which one do you prefer? Past or Present? Analog or Digital?
Fleeting moments, the sun yields to the stars, one last glimpse at the horizon, the promise of tomorrow, the eternal cycle between light and dark, for the earth to bear witness time after time, long after we’re gone, and in between, we do our little dance to the song of life’s marching band, ushering us along, step by step, beat by beat.
Islands in the stream – that is what we are… Before you start singing along with Dolly and Kenny—that was 1983. Wrong year, and besides, John Donne wrote in his Meditation XVII from Devotions upon Emergent Occasions1 in 1624:
No man is an island,
Entire of itself;
Every man is a piece of the continent,
A part of the main.
Powerful prose, undiminished by time. Add 399 years, and here’s a tune from 1991: Massive Attack – “Safe from Harm” from their debut album Blue Lines.
"This album is chill music for me – music to write to," said author
. "I'm writing short stories to this right now. I put this on repeat, something Andy Warhol used to do: He'd put singles on and play them unendingly to the point where the language would break down, and he would paint to that trancelike repetition."I hope you enjoy this Foto Friday edition, and please let me know your thoughts in the comments below.
I’m really enjoying this series!
Very nice, Alexander! I like the digital for the color but prefer the analog. I definitely like the older analog music to today's digital. "Nyctophobia" - cool word. Thanks!