Saturday photo edits

Agios Demetrios, Thessaloniki

Since it's a lovely Saturday, I've spent the better part of the afternoon working on editing my (extremely long) backlog of photos. What do I mean by "editing?" Most of the time, very little. I usually do simple crops, basic color correction, and the occasional conversion to black & white. For example, above is a photo of the interior of the Church of Agios Demetrios, the patron saint of Thessaloniki.

I'm not sure how I managed to miss this church on my previous visits to Thessaloniki. It's one of Thessaloniki's oldest churches, its first inception dating to the 4th century AD. The crypt below the church, now a museum, is said to be the place where St. Demetrios was martyred in 303 AD. The five-aisled present-day basilica has undergone a number of transformations since it was first built: first a small oratory (4th century AD), then a three-aisled basilica (5th-7th centuries AD), then conversion to a mosque in 1493, then nearly destroyed in the great fire of Thessaloniki in 1917. 1949 saw the rebuilding and reopening of the church that we now see today.

I shot this image from the central nave, looking back towards the narthex, because I was quite taken with how the light was softly filtering in from the clerestory above. And, while I thought the original color image was quite beautiful, I wanted to see how it looked in black & white. A few slight modifications to the angle - I shifted the image 0.5 degrees to the left to make it more balanced - and I'm calling it a finished image.