Greece

A picture with a story I took this picture in the mountains of northern Greece on the border of Albania. It was a photographic journey that I carried out for ten days with a large 4 x 5-inch camera and a heavy tripod and black and white negatives and... a black cloth to cover the head when focusing... in short: a wonderful adventure at the end of which the photos were shown in an exhibition called Land of The Gods in various places in Israel ... One day I was driving on a narrow and winding road north of the town of Ioannina in dense forests between the mountains in torrential rain including tremendous lightning and thunder (scary) and as the poet said..."you can't see rain" so I had to stop the car on the side and hope that no lightning would accidentally turn me on. When suddenly the rain stopped and sun rays began to penetrate through the clouds. I remember that a strange feeling pushed me to get out of the car quickly. I grabbed the (heavy) camera in one hand and loaded the tripod on my shoulder and started walking into the wet forest (including several splits with all the gear...) but there was something about the sun's rays peeking through the branches that pulled me forward (almost running until I suddenly came to a small clearing And right in front of me the rays of light broke through the branches perfectly... I remember that I quickly placed the camera on the tripod, I didn't want to waste time measuring the light (and of course, I also forgot to take the light meter from the car...) so I set the aperture and speed according to intuition (and experience. ...) and I managed to take only one photo before the rays disappeared and the rain started to fall on me again with tremendous force... I arrived at the car already wet and shivering with cold... The Photography Forum magazine published a global photography competition called Best Photography 2016 in collaboration with the Sigma company Nearly 12000 photos were sent to the competition from around the world by thousands of photographers and I sent this photo... The judging team comprised editors of photography magazines and directors of photography trends at American universities... A few months ago I learned that my photo was chosen among the winning images of the competition to be printed in a fancy and high-quality book published in the United States. Today when I finally received in the mail the package and the book in it I suddenly remembered that time before the era of digital photography, when in our lexicon (the photographers) there were magical words like... negative, exposure, light measurement, development, darkroom and more, I also remembered my mythological photography teachers in the early years The 1990s at Witzo College in Haifa (Eli Gross, Aryeh Landzet, Morel Derfler and others) and I realized once again that our generation got to experience "analog" photography and "digital" photography one after the other and get a fascinating and special perspective on this whole wonderful field called photography.