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Dino the Balkan green
lizard, who has been one of the stars of Aquaworld for the last seven years,
finds fame at last. The man with the very expensive Hasselblad camera gear
is Mr Giorgos Avagianos, wildlife photographer for the “Elliniko Panorama”
and he is doing a feature on Greek snakes and lizards for the
November/December edition.
Having started at the
Goulandri Museum of Natural History in Athens, Giorgos went to visit Andonis
Roumeliotis in Mykonos. Andonis is a well-known and respected herpetologist
and he was able to help Giorgos get some pictures but photographing starred
agamas and green lizards from several metres away proved frustrating for
him.
As luck would have it,
Andonis had visited Crete in September for the national dog show and had
more or less stumbled across Aquaworld while here. Having already met Dino,
Twitch and all the rest of the gang in the reptile garden, he advised
Giorgos to visit them to get the best possible images for the prestigious
magazine.
Back in Athens, the
editorial management was not impressed… “You want to go to Crete to
photograph snakes and lizards – impossible – over budget, etc, etc…” To
make matters worse, Giorgos’ colleagues at the Cretan edition of Panorama
assured him that “No such place as Aquaworld exists here in Crete, or we
would have known about it!”
However, being wise in
the way of editors and their purse-strings, Giorgos came up with a
master-stroke. He offered to get his reptile pictures while simultaneously
writing an article on Hersonissos – two articles for the price of one – and
the battle was won! |
Still not entirely sure
that he would find what he sought, Giorgos arrived in Hersonissos, but drove
past Aquaworld twice before finally homing in on it. Having done so, though,
he was truly delighted. “There is nowhere else in Greece showing Greek
reptiles like this – even the new Attica Park Zoo doesn’t do so” he
enthused.
The management in the
capital weren’t so enthusiastic, however, when Giorgos used up nearly 450
Euro worth of large format film in the first afternoon! Appeals for further
supplies of film when it ran out completely the following day fell on deaf
ears and the intrepid photographer had to return to the city.
His
parting words – “If I’m not happy with the negatives, I’ll be back next
weekend!” Dino, Twitch and all the others look forward to his return.
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