We returned from Greece a few days ago, and I’m just now beginning to sort through my photos. There’s so much to unpack there—and I’m not talking about laundry (although there was plenty of that too).
We spent most of our vacation on Crete, staying in a little seaside village near Chania. Kalyves is a pretty, relatively quiet, and walkable village, with plenty of lovely outdoor restaurants for the evenings we weren’t out touring other areas. We especially enjoyed relaxing on our little balcony after a busy day while sipping raki—Crete’s deceptively potent pomegranate liquor—and listening to the soft hum of the waves.
Slowly, I’m making my way through my photos—the good, the bad, and those that might have been good had I not struggled so much with exposure. The sunlight in Greece was relentless.
Harsh highlights, deep shadows… The Cretan sun was completely unlike the soft, gray sunlight filtering through the forest that I’m used to, and I was wholly unprepared to deal with it.
Crete’s bright sunlight rendered my LCD screen useless. Even reading the exposure meter in the viewfinder was nearly impossible.
And yet, I couldn’t imagine Greece without its cloudless blue skies, its azure seas, its rugged mountains. There was so much to capture the eye—shady lanes, colorful flowers, bold murals, pink sunsets…
As a photographer—particularly one with a fair amount of travel planned—I have a lot to learn if I hope to capture it with my lens.
But… maybe with a different camera…?
I hate to admit this, but as much as I love my full-frame camera with its 24-105mm f4 lens, it’s a beast to travel with. From lugging it in a heavy travel backpack on the plane, to deciding how to best carry it on day trips, to hours of wearing the behemoth around my neck, by the time we ended our vacation in Athens, I was soooo over hauling it around.
Wanting to leave my camera behind made me wonder what it might be like to have one that is lighter and more compact—a travel camera. The idea feels like… well, a luxury. Do people do that? A simple internet search confirms that yes—yes, they do. Travel cameras are a real thing.
And let’s face it, traveling with a camera that’s so cumbersome you’d rather leave it in the hotel doesn’t make a lot of sense. My research continues.
In the meantime, I’m piecing together my stories of Greece, photo by photo, and word by word: next up—a remote village, an ancestral home, and the help of kind strangers. Stay tuned…
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