Sofia and Manos had their ceremony at Agios Fanourios Church and the reception was in Eytyhia Palace near Kolympari.

Manos is an officer in the Greek special forces so a traditional military style exit was to be expected after the ceremony. The rain didn’t stop anyone to do so.

Congratulations guys, I really enjoyed your wedding, thank you for letting me ba a part of it.

Bride getting ready

Wedding Ceremony

The military style exit…

Wedding Reception

The party begins

Two days later, despite the freezing cold weather we went for a bridal photo shoot. We couldn’t do it like we wanted because Sofia already had a cold but we did our best considering it was close to 2-3 degrees or something. Don’t be fooled, this is realy cold in a humid place like Chania. Congratulations to the brave bride!

What a lovely wedding it was… The couple Elias and Eliana, both doctors with a great taste in everything, had paid attention to every little detail in their wedding. Photography and videography could not be left out in this perfect setup.
George Pahountis was doing the stills and me and Kostas took care of the video. I believe that we all did a great job there.
Here is a short teaser Kostas just posted.
Thumbs up Kostas, it was my pleasure working with you again.

Well, one thing I know for sure, to win an award in a competition, first thing you have to do is enter the competition (how genius is that?)

Being a member of the Fearless Photographers group for a couple months now, I decided to enter their monthly competition. The fact that some of the best photographers in the world are members there and submit images in the competition regularly, wasn’t working in my favor so I entered the competition not really expecting anything, especially after I found out that more than 2500 images were submitted from great photographers from all around the world.

I was really surprised when I saw my picture not only featured in the awards but also receiving a “best of show” title meaning that my picture was one of the 5 pictures that all 5 judges voted for.

Getting a “fearless” award is a great honor, getting a “fearless, best of show” award though is an even greater one and really not something I could even dream of.

So here is the image that was awarded:

Image taken at the bride’s preparation in Grecotel Creta Palace Hotel in Rethymnon, Crete.

A Big thank you to the judges of this competition: Ryan Brenizer, Joe Appel, Sergio, Jacqueline Dersjant, and Candice Cusic.

If you want to see some great, fearless photography, check out all the awarded images here or through facebook.

If you like more info about the fearless photographers and the  fearless awards just visit the fearless photographers web page and enjoy some of the finest wedding photography in the world.

If you like what you see, you can “like” the fearless photographers facebook page too

It’s a project about free educational seminars in 13 Greek cities, with 13 different themes. 13 students participate in each one of them and the project is sponsored by OPAP (hence the number 13 on the project).

In the end of the seminar they asked them for a group picture of all 13 participants. But it couldn’t be just any picture, it should be a themed picture with a theme of their choice.

Now lefki organizes every year, seminars for enthusiast photographers and some of the members including my self  offer their knowledge for free in a 3 months photography course. This year we broke every record with more than 100 students attending.

It was in our first day when the seminars started that we were all together at Asotos Yios where our seminars take place, and some of the panopticon seminar participants were there too, talking about that group photo they had to take and at that point one of them, Spiros Zervoudakis looked at me, turned back to the other guys he was talking with and said: “I have a great idea…”, “we will do a wedding photo, Spiros will do it for us”.

For some reason some people when they look at me they think of weddings , I wonder why.

I had no idea what they were talking about but I joined the conversation out of curiosity.

When I heard what it was about I was overly excited. I agreed to do it straight away and since it had to be done within just a couple of days I had to act really quick.

I was in charge to prepare the photo shoot of 13 of my friends with “Wedding” as a theme. Well I was not going to do this in the conventional way. Thank god everyone was just as crazy as the idea was and we ended up with some of the funniest wedding group pictures ever. Everyone of them had to get dressed something odd for a wedding. This was going to be fun.

The organizers at Panopticon had a blast when they saw them. I believe it’s going to be hard for them to forget about those crazy Cretans.

The first one was selected to be used and the second was a runner up

Enjoy…

The “Royal” Wedding

The “Mexican” wedding

The party of course had a D.J.s part as well and Christos “Miller”, George Siras from Athens, and Juliet Sikora that traveled from Germany for Stathis & Ioanna wedding in the decks made everyone go mad dancing on the floor.

Stathi & Ioanna thank you for letting me be a part of your wedding, It was really a pleasure.

Spiros.

The Groom

Here comes the bride

At the reception, EsperosBride And Groom Entering Esperos and first danceThe live band Nostodia

The D.J.s, Christos Miller, George Sirasand Juliet Sikora

The groom with the photo and video guys!!!

This past year I came in a position that I had to choose between running my blog and having a life… and I chose the later.

Everyone was moaning that I was not posting but for me it was a deliberate decision.

Now that the season is over for me and my last wedding for 2011 was 10 days ago, I can now take a breath and try to catch up.

I will start with my last wedding and go backwards, I was lucky enough this season to have shot some really interesting gigs and hopefully I will get to find the time to post about all of them.

Actually I was supposed to start posting today but my plans changed a bit because my cute little daughter wanted us to go to the public garden and play.
She is so good at convincing me to do what she wants…

Cheers

This is quite rare as we are basicaly a photography studio but it gave me the chance to shoot video for the whole day, something quite new and interesting to me.

I regularly shoot “some” video in every wedding but I do so only when I have nothing else to do since I’m usually the photographer. I have to admit that I really enjoy shooting video… actually, I love it.

After this experience I’m looking forward to book another “video only” wedding.

Don’t get me wrong, I still love photography but I like doing something different every now and then for a change.

This is a little teaser we did for their wedding video.

Efi and Avraam’s wedding was my favorite Greek wedding for 2010

Lots of fun with the easy going couple and their enthusiastic guests plus a different photo shoot a few days after the wedding.

I actually bloged about this wedding at the WedPro blog a few months ago but I had to make a blog post on my own blog too.

Enjoy!

Best wishes for Efi & Avraam.

My second favorite wedding for this post is the wedding of Craig and Joanne. A lovely young couple from England that was realy fun to work with. Joanne is very photogenic and that made it really hard for me to choose my favorite pictures. Their wedding was in Koumos restaurant in Kalyves, everything there is self build with stones by the owner of the restaurant. A very interesting place indeed, with very good traditional Cretan food.

They had a very small but also very romantic wedding.

For me it was 4 hours drive back and forth for only two hours of shooting but it was well worth it.

Karen and John are English but they love Crete so much that they bought a house here. John actually comes in Crete for so many years now that he actually considers himself  Greek. They both actually asked me to write their names in Greek in their wedding album.

Their wedding was definately one of my favorites for 2010

Not much talking, just some of my favorite pictures from last year.

First,  Adelia and Donovan from South Africa

They got married in Rethymnon

Adelia looks so much like a Greek TV persona it’s amazing.

The reception was in Avli Restaurant, one of the nicest restaurants in Rethymnon

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The Cristening of Christos in Piraeus was one of my favorite Christenings in 2010