The age of this blog is both old, in the sense of the fast maturing of the internet and IT technology in general, but also very young if we are counting human age in the old-fashioned way. When we first visited Thassos Island a dozen years before, the internet and social sharing technology were about to enter their unstable teenage years, so to speak. It was the time when I bought my first digital camera, the HP PhotoSmart C850, with its state-of-the-art optics and digital technology from the time. Pictures from Thassos back then in the summer of 2003 were probably my first attempt to take more artistic landscapes from our Greece vacations, and today is perhaps the time to compare both what changed in photography gadgets and also Thassos itself after a full 12 years.
Let's start with images first. After 12 years in time distance, I decided to choose the same number of images for this post—half of them shown above, all taken with the HP Photosmart C850 with a 4-megapixel CCD sensor, and half below, taken from this summer vacation with the Nikon D5200 and CMOS sensor with approximately 20 megapixels more than in the old HP. It is insufficient to say that 12 years of maturing of technology in optics, hardware, and software is easily noticeable.
As for Thassos Island, very little changed over the years. Local people are still the same, very hospitable and friendly; beaches are the same as they probably were hundreds of thousands of years before; the Aegean Sea is still crystal clear, just like in the time of Zeus; the company and the sun are the same hot, like in all Julys in previous millenniums and eons.
What is a little different are the people who are visiting Thasos—this year there were more tourists from Eastern European countries, like Romania, Bulgaria, Moldavia, Ukraine, and Russia, and fewer from Western Europe, which is probably the result of the anti-Greece media campaign due to the political conflict between the Greek government and the EU and the financial crisis in Greece these years. I have to say that at least during our stay on Thassos I couldn't notice any crisis or any problems whatsoever. Man-made crises are always like that; they always have profusely enhanced exposure in media, and the truth is never on either side in conflict and never in media. I know it is a cliche, but you have probably heard the phrase "trust no one", and if you ask me, it is always the ultimate truth when it comes to raw propaganda and news in media, especially if it is related to some political affairs like the current one in Greece vs. the EU (and by EU you can freely read Germany).
http://www.thassos-island.com/
Let's start with images first. After 12 years in time distance, I decided to choose the same number of images for this post—half of them shown above, all taken with the HP Photosmart C850 with a 4-megapixel CCD sensor, and half below, taken from this summer vacation with the Nikon D5200 and CMOS sensor with approximately 20 megapixels more than in the old HP. It is insufficient to say that 12 years of maturing of technology in optics, hardware, and software is easily noticeable.
As for Thassos Island, very little changed over the years. Local people are still the same, very hospitable and friendly; beaches are the same as they probably were hundreds of thousands of years before; the Aegean Sea is still crystal clear, just like in the time of Zeus; the company and the sun are the same hot, like in all Julys in previous millenniums and eons.
What is a little different are the people who are visiting Thasos—this year there were more tourists from Eastern European countries, like Romania, Bulgaria, Moldavia, Ukraine, and Russia, and fewer from Western Europe, which is probably the result of the anti-Greece media campaign due to the political conflict between the Greek government and the EU and the financial crisis in Greece these years. I have to say that at least during our stay on Thassos I couldn't notice any crisis or any problems whatsoever. Man-made crises are always like that; they always have profusely enhanced exposure in media, and the truth is never on either side in conflict and never in media. I know it is a cliche, but you have probably heard the phrase "trust no one", and if you ask me, it is always the ultimate truth when it comes to raw propaganda and news in media, especially if it is related to some political affairs like the current one in Greece vs. the EU (and by EU you can freely read Germany).
http://www.thassos-island.com/