"Behind The Photo"

In a few minutes the Behind The Photo - Contest will be over and I will probably be the last one to enter :)

The concept of this contest is to share the story behind a photo you have taken which, hopefully, can be as interesting as the picture itself!

With this excuse I am going to step backwards in time, in a moment that represents a milestone in my photographic path and I always remember with a vague smile on my face!

If you have been following me from the beginning of my steem journey you may have already seen this picture a couple of times before. It is from the village of Naoussa, on the island of Paros, in Greece. I took it in 2009 at my first assignment as a photographer for a Greek travel magazine.

When I got of the boat on the the port of Paros I didn't know that everything will work out just fine and I was going to spend the next 3 years travelling all over Greece discovering my country and getting paid for it! What I knew, was that I took that job with a portfolio based on vacations shots and I had no idea about ND filters, HDR, time blending or any of the knowledge and equipment that a landscape photographer has to have.

On top of that, my editing skills were close to zero and I didn't even had a laptop to see each day's progress. You can imagine how nervous I was when I found out that the magazine was about to publish a feature on Paros and I was the only photographer for all the pictures of the 64 pages of it!

The pictures of this post are a tiny fraction of the 2037 shots that I took during my 7 days stay on the island. But it was the first one that made me believe that I can do it.
When I took this shot "armed" with a canon 40D, a small tripod and a polarizer filter, I was ecstatic with the result :)

Technically it was not something difficult. The camera on the tripod, a relative close aperture for better depth of field and many shots as the dusk light was constantly changing. The whole thing took 5 minutes. It was the first of many dusk time photos that I took ever since and the truth is that all the magic is in the amazing light of the time and the picturesque scenery!