I grew up with a camera in my hand. Not as a hobby I picked up later in life, but as something closer to a first language. Before I knew what a business was, I knew what it felt like to hold a frame steady, to wait for the right light, to catch a moment that was about to disappear whether I captured it or not. I was the kid quietly photographing things nobody else thought to look at, an uncle’s hands while he cooked, my grandmother’s garden in the wrong light, the particular way afternoon sun hit our street. I didn’t have language for it then. I just knew I needed to keep doing it.
That love never left, even when life pulled me somewhere else for a while.
In 2014, my wife Anni and I started Planbnb in Kavala. It became a real business fast, the kind that demands everything from you in season and gives you no time to think about anything else. I love that work too, the problem solving, the relationships with owners, watching a property go from neglected to fully booked. But it is a business with a rhythm: intense for four or five months a year, then quiet. And in that quiet, something I had set aside started asking for attention again.
It wasn’t really about needing something to do in the off-season. I want to be honest about that. It was that the stillness gave the old pull room to come back. I would walk past a property at golden hour with nothing to do and find myself framing the shot in my head before I even realized I was doing it. I missed making images. Not photos for a listing, images. The kind that hold a feeling, not just a square footage.
Planbnb gave me a livelihood and a real love of its own. Microfilming gave me back a part of myself I’d been quietly keeping on hold since I was old enough to hold a camera steady.
In 2017, I stopped treating that pull as a distraction and started treating it as the point. That’s how Microfilming began. Not as a calculated pivot to fill empty months, but as permission, finally, to take seriously something I had been doing instinctively since I was a child. The first shoots were small and close to home: properties, the same kind of spaces I already understood from Planbnb, but shot with a different intention. Not to list them. To tell their story.
From there it grew into work I never would have predicted as a kid with a borrowed camera: fashion, food, beauty, events, brands wanting someone who could see them clearly and translate that into something cinematic. What connects all of it is the same instinct I had as a child pointing a lens at my grandmother’s garden. Find the thing worth holding onto. Wait for the light. Don’t let it pass uncaptured.
Looking back, I don’t think of Microfilming as a second business I built to survive Planbnb’s off-season. I think of it as the moment I stopped postponing something I had always been. Planbnb gave me a livelihood and a real love of its own. Microfilming gave me back a part of myself I’d been quietly keeping on hold since I was old enough to hold a camera steady.
Nine years into one and almost as many into the other, they don’t feel like two separate paths anymore. One taught me how to build something real in this region. The other let me finally make the kind of images I’d been making in my head my whole life.