Pellele sails to Santorini

Santorini here we come! Saddening to leave Anti-Paros, such bliss here. But a wedding charter monetarily dangles enticingly before our depleted treasure chest. So south it is, for a little graft, then back to lounging in secluded anchorages, maybe the beautiful Crete for the winter? Anchor hauled, sails unfurled and hauled, sheets ground, pennants fluttering, the needle slowly spins to 180, where it will quiver for the rest of the day. It’s always glorious sailing here, between Paros and Anti-Paros, a funnel of wind, flat turquoise sea, white sand sparking past, less than half a metre under our keel, water so clear you can watch the octopus hunt.

It’s going be challenging someone says, all those rocks and currents, and parking is going to be a nightmare.

Have some faith, another answers, we’re in the Aegean, the Gods will look after us.

Pellele is 55 tonnes with a 40 year old engine, a yacht designed for oceans rather than fishing harbours or rocky anchorages. Manoeuvrability at slow speed and stopping were not a design criteria in 1972, parking her is not for the faint hearted in a windy port. A sandy anchorage was our style, far from the noise, heat and bustle of even the quaintest harbour. It’s safe and easy parking, using the rib for sorties to land. But Santorini has deep water and rocks... not an anchoring kind of place.

A call goes up to Eurybia, Help us Please! Conjure some divine celestial aid!

The cloudless Aegean sky hazes, cirrus forms halo above us, cumulus dawns the horizon, and altostratus bubbles around us, and slowly the densities of ice crystals far from us define the path. Thank you Eurybia.

Actually, the original photography was taken is July 2006, the islands ahead are Kefalonia and Ithaca. I had it filed away in my Candidate folder, a place of aide memoire for future projects. Waiting for some inspiration of how to use it in an art or photography project.

If you sail, then you might appreciate that from the sailing aspect, it is a near perfect scene. Steady Force 4 wind on the beam, flat calm sea, a normal Greek day of stunning light and warmth. The sails set near perfect, beautiful islands on the horizon, with the promise of cold beers and a souvlaki supper await.

The image did however present some problems.

First, it was taken on a circa 2004 compact camera, it lacked resolution required for print, and would limit any photography project, since it looked terrible when enlarged to a workable size..

Second, although it is a lovely image of Pellele sailing in beautiful place, most of the photograph contained only cloudless Ionian sky, and flat azul sea, the only features Pellele and two hazy islands. There was little art in the image, so it stayed collecting digital dust on a hard disk.... awaiting inspiration.

Recently, shore bound for a while, and having some time, I started to play with post image processing, it’s vast capabilities invoke all kinds of creativity from the vast collection of digital dust. An idea formed for this one, originally called Pellele@Sea.

Now I could enlarge the image and disguise the jittering pixel corruption transforming it through an artistic filter. The Sponge filter gave a result that looked hand painted. Good start. But still nothing more than blue yacht, blue sea, blue sky. Recently I discovered an 1874 nautical chart of Santorini, very simple black graphics a white background; perfect to merge into a project and easy to make masks with. It needed a hint of perspective distortion to stop it looking entirely flat. I wasn’t sure which way to stretch, but choose to make the writing at the top larger than that at the horizon and then masked it to put it behind the foregrounds. It didn’t look good on it’s own, so clouds were made to blend the chart into the sky. First layer of clouds was a standard pattern, they gave the perfect result, however the repeating shapes were zoomed to maximum and still recognisable. So I layered another cloud image behind, by changing the sky to green it was possible to make greyscale changes without altering the values of the sea. The density of map and clouds was finalised by fine-tuning opacity and blending modes. Finally a Black&White filter set to bring through the red of the flags and a hint of blue, then a Sepia filter at full throttle, and last a vignette by blending a radial gradient of sepia hues.

I hope you enjoy it.

See the full size image in my Sea Gallery

LorZ
08 Mars 2015

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