Day 98

2:8
Santorini:Greece

Title: Black Sand #1


Alright, this was our first really relaxing day of the whole trip. By this time our sleep schedule was becoming regular (although we were waking up by 7, we were still getting plenty of sleep at night), and so we went down to the beach to just chill under an umbrella and read. All of the umbrellas are owned by the restaurants that run along the beach, so you have to pay for most of them. Ally and I found a set of free ones, and only ever used those our whole time (all 3 days we went to the beach). The same cute, sweet girl waited on us (like I said, they're a part of a restaurant) each time, and she came to know us and "our spot" since we kept going to the exact same umbrella each day (primates are creatures of habit, after all. Side note/random memory: Jane Casey turned me on to the the notion of humans being creatures of habit while we were at the UNSW study abroad orientation because our whole group [and all other groups at the orientation] sat in the same seats the whole time. It's funny how angry you get in elementary and middle school when you get assigned seats, but then in high school and college you always pick the same spot to sit every day. Chem 140 has what? 450 seats? I always sat in the same area whenever I had class there. Anyway, back to the cute beach waitress...). I thought that she had an Australian accent that had been marred by some other languages or accents that she had picked up while abroad, but Ally thought that she was a native German speaker (she spoke fluently to some other tourists nearby) that had learned English in Oz (when we lived there, we met plenty of non-native English speakers that had learned it as a second language in Australia. It was funny how our Italian teacher would speak in an Italian-Australian accent. The blending of accents is one of the most intersting things in the world to me. Accents in general are. Think about this: approximately 200 years ago, the British, Australians, and Americans all had the same accents. We all came from the same place, after all. But within that short period of time, all of our accents have branched significantly from one another's. Also, the American accent has further broken down into sub-accents including the Boston, Southern, New Yorker, and Minnesotan. When movies portray old school English people and speak in modern day British accents, they're probably just as inaccurately portraying their true accents at the time as if we were to portray a Southern accent by saying "Eh, mon" like a Jamaican. Again, back to the cute beach waitress...) We never did ask, nor did we ever learn her name. I'm actually pretty sad about that. She really made our time on the beach rather pleasant.

Anywho, enough tangents. I found the black sand to be one of the most beautiful (and photogenic) things I've ever seen in my life. I loved it to the point of obsession. I told Ally that if I ever did a themed book like SoFoBoMo (link takes you to the daily photoblog of Andreas Manessinger who participated in SoFoBoMo), I would have done it on the black sand. Now, if I were to do that, I would also try to get the tonal qualities as consistent as possible, and perhaps evaluate what specifically about the sand I was trying to portray, etc. But, alas, I only had a few days on the beach and just snapped away like a happy...snapper? I was pretty indiscriminate. If it looked good (which most things did in the sand), then I took a picture of it.

Therefore, I have decided that this is not a series of unified images. They are a set of images with the same subject taken over three separate days (Santorini days 2, 3, and 5), all posted at the same time. Not one of them has been touched by photoshop other than to resize them. I have decided to do this to show you how photogenic it is by itself; it doesn't need a computer to make it look beautiful. Plus, by not streamlining the look of them, you get to see how different the sand actually looks under different lighting conditions and such. They are presented chronologically with #1-4 having been taken on 7/22, #5-9 on 7/23, and #10 & 11 on 7/25.

These are my favorite 11 pictures that I have posted on this blog so far. The only ones I'm not super ecstatic about are numbers 7 and 11, but I still really like them for their own reasons.

Black Sand #2
Black Sand #3
Black Sand #4
Black Sand #5
Black Sand #6
Black Sand #7
Black Sand #8
Black Sand #9
Black Sand #10
Black Sand #11