Pinhole Polaroids by the beach

I’ll be at beautiful Atlantis Books in Oia, Santorini, until Monday.
If any of you happen to be nearby, drop in the shop to have a look at some prints from my first book, along with some from my soon to be released second (pinhole landscapes) book “Spirits of the River”… there’s also music and drinks…

As I was packing my bags on Monday, I remembered some polaroids I shot in Santorini last November…

Which brought to mind a couple of pinhole polaroids I shot in the beginning of Summer in Cyprus… this been nearly the end of it, it seemed appropriate to scan then—it was also an excuse to delay packing… procrastination and what not…

I planned to post them before leaving for Santorini, but I didn’t have the time to do so…

So, I’m posting this from the back room of the out of this world (more like Peter Pan’s) Atlantis Books… enjoy…

Hunting for the Perseids – part two

Went back to the field on Sunday too, to give it another go…

Even though we saw again quite a few, was unlucky in capturing one in a picture… still, I like these two even without meteors in them…

Better luck next time…

Hunting for the Perseids

We went a bit outside the city limits yesterday, looking for a darker sky, to catch a glimpse of the Perseids meteor shower… sadly, light pollution is omnipresent in tiny little Cyprus…

Even though the eight of us saw an average of a dozen bright ones and several dozens of dimmer meteors, I wasn’t lucky enough to catch anything spectacular with the 5D which was mounted on my Celestron C8… I also shot a couple of 40 minute exposures on Ilford HP5, but it’ll be some time before I develop them, so I’ll just post the digital ones for now…

Here’s the best capture of a meteor that I managed…

On a regular base, we had airplanes flying through our field of view on their way to Larnaca airport…

Here’s a picture of the Andromeda Galaxy… the farther away from the horizon, the darker the sky…

A picture of my telescope setup…

And here is a part of the gang, lit by the moonlight and shot a few days ago, on the same spot we were yesterday…

The boyfriend’s ghost

I took these pictures this past Summer at mountain Troodos…

July and August are usually unbearable in Nicosia, with temperatures reaching 45C oftentimes for days in a row… this particular Summer was even worse than usual since, for reasons I won’t get into in this post, we had regular power cutouts nationwide in the middle of the hottest period of the Summer…

Thankfully we were invited to spend a few days at a higher altitude, where at night it was even a little bit chilly, and we got to spend some time wearing (light) jackets under the stars…

Portraits of self

A few years back I wanted to test a used Mamiya 645 with an 80mm f/2.8 lens I had just got, to see what kind of portraits I could expect taking with them.

So, I set up the camera in the beautiful afternoon light in our bedroom and asked my girlfriend to help me take a few self portraits—accurate focusing with the lens wide open is one of the difficulties of shooting a self-portrait.

But she, being a photographer too, instead of following my explicit directions of “just make sure I’m in focus” went on and shot a bunch of portraits of me anyways…

So instead of the clinical self portraits I was aiming for, just for testing a new setup, we ended up with a few interesting actual portraits…

Lesson… go with the flow…

Polaroids – Aimee and I

Back in 2008 I was hunting on ebay for some polaroid film to shoot with my 4×5″ Speed Graphic…

When I stumbled upon a seller offering bulk quantities of expired polaroid film at amazingly low prices, my first thought of course was it’s too good to be true, but still the deal was too sweet to pass… about 120pounds (shipping and taxes included!) for a sealed box of 500 exposures… so, I crossed my fingers and ordered a box…

The film even though very expired was/is still alive—the chemicals haven’t dried up—so, in the past few years I’ve gone through two thirds of the box, shooting on and off just for fun…

I’ve started scanning a selection which I’ll be posting here in the coming months…

Let’s start with a portrait, shall we…

Family Album, part one…

In the summer of 2009 the Thessaloniki Museum of Photography participated in Athens Fringe Festival with a group exhibition featuring 8 prints from my Nicosia in Dark and White book project… At the time I was looking for funding for the production of my first book, so I ended up spending a month in Athens…

I was recently going through some contact sheets from a bunch of films I shot during my stay in Athens with my parents… in there I re-discovered a number of pictures I took of my family… after several months of hiatus I returned to the darkroom to print from these negatives…

Some of the pictures in these films could be categorized as environmental portraits, but their main feature that interests me is that instead of describing how the people in them look like, they mostly contain elements and clues about who these people really are… portraiture is not my strong suit but I find these pictures compelling and I can already see the resulting book containing 30 or 40 of this kind of pictures… stay tuned…

Summer’s End

Here in Cyprus Summer lasts for about 7 months…

The past few days I’ve found myself reaching for a t-shirt for the first time in months… Today I even put on socks… So, it’s time to call it… Autumn has arrived…

Saying goodbye to Summer with a study of waterlilies from 2006… in our little pond we have some goldfish and a bunch of waterlilies which flower from late spring to early Autumn…