A Local Character in a Cretan Village
Many years ago, in 2002, I visited Crete for a sun holiday. It was the first sun holiday I’d ever been on, so quite a shock for this young man from Cork.
The photo above was taken in a small village above the resort we stayed in. The tour operator had shared ominous warnings that we weren’t insured if we went on tours with anyone else, but one of our party spotted this in a local shop, and it was booked.
I don’t remember much from the night, but there are photos, and I remember everyone got a shot of Raki after we disembarked from the bus. Bottles of the stuff were on sale too. They obviously used the good drink for the taster, because the bottle I bought tasted like it would strip paint when I got home.
I had my trusty FinePix 1300 digital camera. It was my first digital camera, and it was a great camera for the time. Here’s someone else who loved it. Lightroom tells me I took 628 photos with it. It shot 1MP images. The original photo above is 640×480. That’s all. It’s been in my TODO collection for literally decades, until modern resizing came along. I tried Topaz Photo AI, and that did a pretty good job, but then the latest beta of Photoshop has improved the “make everything gigantic” functionality, and this is what you see before you now. It’s far from perfect, but here’s the original, in all its 640×480 glory.
Don’t pixel peep at the photo on top and it looks pretty good. IMO, anyway.
I took 4459 photos with my next camera, the FinePix 2800 Zoom. I haven’t stopped since!
Apertureƒ/4.5CameraFinePix1300Focal length5.8mmISO125Shutter speed1/60s
