An alley in the old town of Chania  - 9th June 2008

The title "An alley in the old town of Chania" sounds so casual. As if I was just walking around and happened on this image.

Well, sort of... I was walking down this alley (sans camera) going to a shop near Splanzia (that's the square where the church with the minaret is located) when I noticed that in about one hour's time the sun would be perfectly aligned to illuminate both sides of the alley equally. So after I did my stuff in town I drove back home, grabbed a bag of equipment and drove back down to town. It took just about an hour so the time was just right. I then took about 60 photos with and without polarizing filter and moving the position of the camera slightly back and forth to get different perspectives, bracketing the exposure for extra safety margin. Drove back home, downloaded the pictures to my computer, chose one which I post-processed in RAW then applied lens correction to straighten the angles of the houses on the left and right (a wide-angle lens will inevitably alter the vertical lines, no matter how good the lens is). Et voila!

Anyway, this was a little story to show you that there is a lot of effort going into this "Daily photo of Crete" business. But I enjoy it a lot.

PS: That minaret is the one you can also see from the "other side" in quite a few of my photos. The latest was last month.

You can click on the picture to enlarge.