Nostalgia

Heraklion is a small island located a bit more than 200 miles from Athens, with an ambience so tranquil it has the power to make one finally feel like the air inside their lungs is exactly the same as the air outside their body. We had spent the fourth day of the trip wandering around in sweltering heat until it was cool enough to eat. So, well-fed and giddy we decided to take an explorative drive, stumbling upon a quaint fishing village. While the sun began to slumber and the sky became a palette of serene pastels, the Hunters full moon created a potent cocktail thought by the natives to bring energy and the courage to squash the psychological chains that hold us back, into our atmosphere. With the car window down and my head on my arm, I lazily watched the world go by like a cat at a window, lulled by the heady contrast in sensations. I was charged yet relaxed, free yet settled, content, but still curious. I took my phone out and quickly snapped the scene as the car drove at a leisurely pace, beautifully capturing the complex simplicity of that perfect evening. Looking at the picture the eyes move from unfocused branches to the needlepoint clarity of the moon, and finally to the stillness of the boat and sky.

This image submerges me in the feeling of freedom from my earthly ego. The blurring of the trees reminds me of the moment I became aware of the passing of time while also realising, that like the clarity and serenity radiating from the boat on that moonlit lake, It’s inside that realisation that tranquility lives, everything slows down, and everything becomes clearer. This image is my visual breathing exercise and when I look at it I’m reminded of the movement of time, not it's passing.This picture is simple but rich, needing only the most basic of seasoning. I merely increased the brightness by 9% and the contrast by 14%, decreased the shadow by around 17% and added a pinch of warmth.

I had actually bought a few disposable cameras for this trip in efforts to avoid a browsing binge and be more present and mindful of my surrounding, making the impulse to take that picture on my phone a fairly strange one. The raw beauty and spontaneity of this picture are reminiscent of working with 35mm film cameras. Where so much of the reward is felt in the exercise of patience and there is no way to pause the process by swiping back and forth between dozens of pictures, evaluating our work before it’s even ready to be born. We all know that memories don't just fade and disappear they become distorted, soft and identifiable by feelings we just can't place, this is where the romance lies in our hastily taken pictures full of grain and marks of low quality.

The constant advancement of technological devices, even outside the world of photography has swayed us away from the whimsical nature of picture taking. It’s this co-dependency with technology that makes us more likely to use our phone cameras for daily social interaction rather than emotional gain. Resulting in the frequent capturing of memories, like ten-minute snap chat stories of our gigs or pictures of our food, becoming void of nostalgia.

Without the immersive ritual of squinting through a lens, it became difficult to capture the nuances of our environment and the feelings they evoked at the time we took them. However, we have reached an amazing era wherein which we’ve become familiar with the technology we live with and novelty can no longer keep us at a distance from authenticity. Mobiles have truly become extensions of ourselves and not just unusual gadgets, reawakening the association between picture and nostalgia. This picture proved to me that just because we're now knee-deep in the digital age, doesn't mean we can't capture the romance and nostalgia that we associate with the past.