If there is one post I owe to someone, this is definitely my Teacher; mr Dimitris Chliveros.

As a young man, all I wanted was to study photography in some kind of School. I have been surrounded with many cameras all my life, thanks to my father, but he was self-taught, so not much I could learn from him. Nothing wrong with being self-taught of course, but my dad is like “if it’s sunny, you go ISO 100, 125 and 16 and you’re good” (the infamous sunny 16 Rule).

I was keen to dive into the new and old techniques, famous masters and their work, assignments, experiments, all of it. Well, not all of it, I wasn’t really interested to learn all the "important” dates of the history of photography for example, but you get the point.

So, the biggest problem I had to deal with was to decide which School would be ideal for me. Not an easy task back in the day, I tell you that.

The thing was that there were quite a few really big, good Schools, offering all kids of wisdom, but not for me.

Why?

At that time in Greece all private photography schools had at least three years of study.
They were paying too much attention -in my humble opinion- for lessons like the beloved “History of Photography”; sorry, I wasn’t ready to study this for 6 months!
The program in most of the Scools was nothing really impressive. Basics of photography, things you could actually learn by yourself with some good books.
I was already taking photographs for some 6-7 years, so it was no terra incognita for me.

I wanted something more advanced and specific.

And that summer of 1997 I met a girl that was studying in a School I never heard of.

I loved it from the name: EMEF (Ε.Μ.Ε.Φ. in Greek). In a somewhat freestyle translation, this means Laboratory of Study and Applications of Photography. I entered the building and there I met a man that shaped my photography:

Mr. Dimitris Chliveros.

EMEF was founded by mr. Chliveros back in 1978. It was the second School of Photography in Greece.

A pioneer in Greece in the technique of aerial photography with balloons, has also been the director of the photographic laboratory of NTUA since the 60's and production director of the film of Roussos Koundouros "In the footsteps of Alexander the Great" (the Teacher here, in his youth, at 00:08’).

Mr. Dimitris was the best Teacher a student could ever dream of. Every student. A lover of photographic art, a noble, tough but fair and above all one of the sweetest, honest people I have ever met. Always willing to talk to his students, to solve any possible (even trivial) questions with endless patience and always with the right advice.

Personally, he instilled in me values related not only to photography, but also to life itself.

A good example of his integrity is the very first lesson we did with him.

We had just received our program for the whole year and one of my classmates asked him

_”Why our first lesson (you guessed it? History of Photography) will be only 3 hours long?

Our Teacher said

_”I will teach you just the basics and if you want it, you can find me afterwards and I will suggest bibliography to study in your spare time. I will not waste your time and money to teach you things you can learn on your own” (and that probably none of us will ever need, I would complete).

From this moment on, I knew I was in the right place.

The program he had build was just unbeatable for the 1997 standards. Each lesson was a terrific journey into the fairytale universe of photography. Landscape photography, portrait photography, advertising photography, street photography, photoelasticity, stereoscopic photography, you name it; even a lesson on Kirlian photography and of course Advance Adobe Photoshop lessons (Version 4.0!) on Macs.

Amazing stuff for a young man back in 1997.