00:02So I've been having this incredibly frustrating week since the new year, doing admin and answering emails, etc, stuck in
00:18Athens, watching on the news the rest of the country, being absolutely blanketed in snow,
00:26temperatures dropping down to minus 23 in some places, lakes freezing over, forests freezing, looking amazing, and I've been stuck
00:36in Athens, not being able to get away to photograph any of it, until today that is.
00:55So finally, I've been able to get away, and I'm just now driving up to a place called Meteora, which
01:03is an area that has a group of monasteries that are perched on these Dolomite Mountains,
01:10and it's an absolutely stunning location at any time of the year, but I'm hoping to be able to capture
01:18it under these conditions that I've not been able to capture it under before, covered in snow.
01:28So tomorrow, today rather, the weather is predicted to be sweet, snow in the higher ground, some rain down here,
01:37and very low cloud, as you can see I'm driving in practically a whiteout in a minute.
01:48And tomorrow, hopefully the weather should open, so low temperatures might need a freeze, which should hopefully give me some
02:02beautifully snow-covered frozen monasteries on snow-covered mountains tomorrow morning, bathed in sunshine.
02:13And it should look amazing, and it should look amazing, when you look.
02:17So I've still got about 80km left to drive, I'm taking it easy because the conditions are a little bit
02:26treacherous, with freezing rain, and I should hopefully catch up with you tomorrow morning, from my vantage point above the
02:40monasteries.
02:42So I'll see you there.
02:46Well I guess it isn't tomorrow morning, it's actually still this afternoon, and I arrived in Kalambaga village, which is
02:55the village below the Mateora monasteries, and the clouds and fog seem to have cleared a little bit from around
03:03the Mateora, so I thought I'd drive up quickly this afternoon, and this is the view that I've been greeted
03:11with.
03:11Which I'm sure you'll agree, which I'm sure you'll agree, is quite stunning.
03:30So, seeing the conditions are this good right now, before finding even a hotel to stay in, I think I'm
03:37going to get my camera out of the bag, and get off a couple of quick shots, I probably even
03:42won't set up the tripod, just grab the camera.
03:45And I'm held, and take a couple of quick shots.
04:04So, I'm just going to do a few shots, concentrating on the Rusunu monastery, just down here, which is actually
04:14a convent, it's a Rusunu convent.
04:19So, I'm going to set it at 160 ISO, and at f8, and at about 160 of a second.
04:34And that looks pretty amazing.
04:55I'm going to do a quick panoramic as well, which I will stitch together later on.
05:08I'm shooting fairly wide, to give me space to stitch the pictures together.
05:25And it does look absolutely amazing.
05:32No filters needed.
05:35Handheld.
05:38And it looks amazing.
06:03I'm going to do a little bit.
06:09I don't know.
06:49So good morning, I am up at the monasteries on the mountain road and what I had feared
06:57might happen overnight did actually happen and the warmer temperatures of yesterday did
07:04thaw a lot of snow and the result was that overnight with the dropping temperatures that froze
07:10and created a bit of an ice rink from the road which made it impossible to come up really
07:17early this morning for the sunrise and in fact I wasn't even allowed to because the police
07:21were stopping everybody.
07:23So what I'm going to do is because I can't actually get to the spot that I wanted to because
07:28it's a bit unsafe.
07:29You see the cliffs where you would normally stand to get shots of the monasteries are snow-covered.
07:39So you can't actually see where you're stepping and it's a little bit dangerous because there
07:43is no protection, there's no barriers and the slip would mean a fall of hundreds of feet.
07:51So not safe.
07:53So I'm going to unpack my gear and hike up to another spot which I know is safe to take
07:59some pictures of the Rusinu convent and hopefully the Vala and the great monastery up here.
08:09So yeah, unload the car and we'll get underway.
08:29So I just hike up now to my vantage point and see what I can see.
08:35Let's see.
08:44o
08:46o
08:48o
08:56o
08:58o
08:58o
09:37It's not the shot I was hoping for because I was hoping that early this morning we'd
09:41get some cloud inversion but as I said I couldn't really get up here because of the ice on the
09:47road so it's still a beautiful photo though with the monastery bathed in sunlight.
