It was the fall of my junior year when I was finally given the opportunity to explore Greece & Italy with a group of 17 there students, two professors, and one resident counselor. As an art history major, the chance to finally go to Greece and study the ancient art and architecture was a wonderful and treasured experience. It was even more special for me, as I'd been studying Ancient Greece for as long as I could remember. It was my favorite unit in sixth grade social studies, and had been a personal interest of mine since I could remember. I was so excited, and could not believe I was finally given this opportunity.
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Originally, the plan was to go to Greece and then Turkey, but with the political climate and potential unsafe environment, our professors last minute changed our plan from Turkey to Italy. Though I was looking forward to exploring and studying some of the Ancient Greek sites still in Turkey such as Ephesus, I had no problem with spending the last final three weeks of our trip in Italy. I had just finished my Italian Renaissance art history course, so the architecture and history of the gorgeous country we were now going to visit was very exciting to me.
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We started on campus, spending two weeks learning how we would be traveling, where we would be traveling, and spend a couple days learning about the Greek and Italian language. We were given sketchbooks to carry with us at all times, and did a once-over of all our camera gear to make sure we would all be properly equipped to take the pictures we were assigned throughout our trip. We flew out of St. Louis, and had a direct flight to Athens where we landed after 15 hours only to find that my bag had accidentally been shipped to London instead. So for the week we were in Nafplio, a small little romantic Greek town along the coast, I had to share clothes with the rest of the girls not eh trip - which was good bonding right off the bat.
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We first visited the ancient site of Mycenae, where the infamous Lion Gate stands. This was first of many sites we visited throughout our time in Greece. We also visited Ancient Thera, Akrotiri, Palamidi Fortress, the Acropolis - obviously - and multiple other smaller sites throughout our trip. While in Greece, we frequented museums daily and hiked wherever we went. We even spent a whole day hiking the largest gorge in all of Europe - The Samaria Gorge. there was of course quite a lot of time to spend out on the beach, but most of our tan came from the times we spent out among the ruins sketching and photographing the sites throughout the day.
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Once our time in Greece came to an end, we flew over the Swiss Alps to get to Italy where we quickly hopped off at Rome and made our way by train to Velia and Paestum in Italy. Here stood some of the most in tact Ancient Greek ruins to date among a large site that is still under excavation. We were given permission to walk about the site and spend the entire day out under the sun sketching, photographing and writing about the site. Our time in Italy was far shorter than our time in Greece, but we went straight from Paestum to Venice, where we stayed on Lido for a week and commuted to the floating and sinking city all week long. We were given quite a lot of free time in Venice where we were tasked with taking so many pictures a day and exploring as much of the winding city as we could. It was quite the amazing experience.
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Florence was after Venice, where we were given passes to visit as many museums as we could. Florence is the home of 72 museums, so we obviously couldn't visit all of them. We took pictures of the street life and the famous Duomo from the ground as well as being able to climb to the top. After our week in Florence, we stayed in Rome for two days where we visited the Vatican city for one of the days, and then explored the Coliseum, Roman Forum and Pantheon the second.
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Overall, the trip was a fascinating learning experience all-together, but as for my photography I definitely learned quite a bit. I don't think I changed much of how I composed pictures or what I found interesting to shoot. Personally, I tried to take as many pictures of my classmates in the elements we were in instead of our surroundings unless it was unique to our experience. You can Google as many pictures of the Parthenon as you'd like, but it's the people I was with that made the experience so wonderful. As for editing, my process changed quite drastically, I believe, through the whole trip. At first, I was very clear on trying to make the picture look as normal as possible, only highlighting colors if I needed to. But as the trip continued, I started exploring more on Lightroom with the exposure and different settings to see how it would all turn out. The look and aesthetic of my pictures I believe changed quite a bit looking at the pictures I took in Nafplio at the beginning and then the ones I finished with in Rome.
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I have continued to use that technique of really exploring with my editing in my future photography endeavors and have found that it's better to treat a picture as replaceable, something you can edit over and over instead of something valuable that you can't make one wrong move on. You can always reset your settings, and so why not have a little fun with it and see what you can make?