I took this photograph on a holiday in Crete a few years ago on one of those days when the weather was lovely – there wasn’t a cloud in the sky, the sun was shining – which is perfect when you’re on holiday, but photographically not so good, translating into boring skies and either squinty-eyed or underexposed faces in many photographs.
On this particular day we should have been on Santorini for a friends wedding, but out at sea a swell meant the ferries weren’t running. The four of us who were travelling together decided instead to rent a car and make the most of the day by touring around Crete. I believe this photo was taken in Rethymnon which is one of the island’s larger towns, and was about 80km from where we were staying, and ended up being our first stop on the road trip.
The town is dominated by the Fortezza castle, a 16th century fort built to protect the town from pirate raids. The Fortezza affords visitors impressive views over the town, and this shot caught my eye on our walk around the castle. I deliberately excluded the sky from the photo for two reasons – firstly, it wasn’t a very interesting sky, and secondly, by excluding it the shot creates the impression that the buildings could go on forever. The bright sunlight, which was challenging for any shots that I took of my fellow travellers, proved useful here as it added nice highlights and shadows to the buildings and brought out the texture in the roof tiles.
It’s a nice record shot of the town, with no primary subject in the frame other than the entire picture itself. Sometime I’ll try a monochrome conversion of it also – with the contrast between the sunlit parts and the shaded parts of the image it would be a good candidate for a black and white image.
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