England - Part 3 - Hastings and such

As I sit in the train writing this blog post I squint to see the beautiful landscape that surrounds my home town. In the rising sun and with a slight mist everything seems to be beautiful. Long shadows, warm tones and incredibly soft light make for a rather beautiful scenery. It all makes me remember England. Although I have to admit that I didn't see many sunrises there, I saw plenty sunsets. I've often listed the many differences and commonalities between England and Netherlands (yes without the THE because it's more correct) and today I can list another which is sort of both. Brighton has amazing sunsets, both Arnhem/Nijmegen has beautiful sunrises. Brighton is great in spring, where Arnhem/Nijmegen is best in fall.

Sadly I won't get out of bed early to catch that light in the morning. In my mind there is no light as beautiful as the darkness in our room during those five extra minutes of sleep. Ah well, I still have the photos of the sunsets in England.

Read on after the jump >>>>

England - Part 2 - These Too

Next to the photos I took of landscapes and a lovely model I will get to later, I also took some photos of other people and things. Today I will show you three photos. A landscape, a street portrait and "portrait of a bird".
The photo to the left is of my friend Kub, who was one of the Dutchies in Brighton. We often made road trips and so we ended up at the beach at Hastings (think Battle at Hastings, 1066) and I squeezed the shutter. I like it very much. It has movement and something special to it. What is she thinking, what is she doing? Where is she going? Who the hell can she be?

I do like photos that raise questions, or in other words tell a little story.

Of course there is more to see.
See more after the jump >>>

England - Part 1 - Sunsets

As most of you know I have spent a couple of months in England at the South Coast. I lived in Brighton and made quite some trips to neighbouring hamlets. I can assure you that if there's one thing to be liked about photographic England, it has to be the sunsets. The late afternoon skies were absolutely amazing and thus I took a large amount of photos. Today I will show two of the sunsets from that time.

Read on after the jump >>>

Holiday in France - Part 3 - Friends

And one more please... Not only do I have another post today with a photo of Yalmar which I believe to be one of the coolest photos I have taken during the holiday, I also have some good news.
I dropped off the not yet printed film roll at my (very) local photo store and they have given me the best news this week: They can print it!!
Which means, that what is supposed to be me best roll, will in fact be up very soon. Coming Wednesday I will pick up the prints and hopefully put them up on Thursday morning.
In the meanwhile I will be showing you some pics I took of my friends.
Have fun!
Read on after the jump >>>>

Holiday in France - Part 2 - I took these too

Part 2 of the Holiday Photos. This post is called "I took these too", which sounds a bit derisive although not meant that way (well a bit). The thing is that you will always have photos you love, photos you like, photos you rather like, photos you don't really like and photos you find ridiculous. These photos fall into one of the middle categories. I do like a lot about the photos, but they may have something in it I don't like so much (although I think the photo to the left pretty okay, and I rather like it :) ).

I like to discuss the picking of photos in this post so read on after the jump >>>>

Holiday in France - Part 1 - The cameras

Like I mentioned in my last post we went on holiday in France. Of course I took way too many cameras with me and in my camera bag I had my Nikon D200, Holga, Diana and SprocketRocket. On the Holga and Diana I shot 120 film roll on 6x6 (although I screwed that one up as some of you may have noticed on the photo to the left).
I took quite a lot of photos on both the digital as the film cameras and I will be showing the film photos on the blog over the coming days.
Starting off today with a couple of Holga photos.

Read on after the jump >>>

Band

And so we went on holiday to France, me and my lovely girlfriend to together live the good life. If there is anything you can make us happy and content with it is certainly great food and a bottle of fine wine. And boy let me tell you, they have an abundance of that in France. Cheese, wine, dried sausage, olives (sweet sweet Nyons olives), some more wine, trout in butter sauce and slow roasted guinea, Crème brûlée, even more wine and more cheese, and amazing weather! We also had the pleasure of some great company seeing that some good friends of us were staying nearby. All and all a great holiday!
On one day the four of us decided to go to the market in Nyons and there we stumbled upon an amazing Jazz-Fusion trio playing in the streets. I grabbed my camera, got in up close, and squeezed the shutter.

Read on after the jump >>>

Comics

Right guys and gals, something slightly different today.
If you keep up with today's world of the visual arts you can read everywhere that it is becoming more and more important to not just dabble in one field, but in several at the same time.
Well, although that may be true, it's not the reason I did these.
It is a form of crossover from photography to comics, but I am just fooling around with a new app I got for my iPad some time ago.
It lets you create pages out of a comic book with any material you have on you iPad.
So I decided to grab some pics and try to make one page comics.

Read on after the jump >>>

5 minute self portrait

It's always a good thing to keep practising, whatever your art may be. In my case this is of course photography ;) I haven't had a model sit/stand for me for quite some time, that's why I decided to do another self portrait.

It took me about 10 minutes to set up, and then another 5 to take the photo.

Read on after the jump >>>

Friends, iPhones and Hipstamatic

A couple of weeks ago I discovered the new family album functions in Hipstamatic and it gave me a idea. Since it lets us share photos with other hipsta users I decided to ask a friend of mine to join in this album and fill it together. The quest: to take photos of whatever you see, tag it with a special tag, with that put it in our shared album and share it with each other, do this all one month and after that see what we've created.
Today I will show you some photos that didn't make the cut (and so weren't uploaded to the shared album)
Read on >>>>

Day 67 - What do you think? (Skipped Post)

Sometimes it's hard to know what people see in art.... some of us see a polar bear in a statue where others simply see a naked woman (come to think of it, some of my friends see naked women in everything they see), and it goes the same for photography.
I see a lot of possibilities for this photo, as well as a lot of names for or stories behind it.
Today I want to keep my ideas a secret and have you all name this photo, or otherwise give it a story.
This could be anything ranging from Sleeping Beauty (NL: Doornroosje)(for the Dutchies: Saw what I did there *wink, wink, nudge, nudge, you know what I mean, you know what I mean?* ) or telling me that it should be an advertisement of some sort.
Just let me know...
More about the photo after the jump>>>

Wanted: Models

Hello All,

as most of you know I love doing portraits and now I want to expand my portait portfolio. For this I have everything I need except for models. So I am asking you to sign up as a model. I cannot pay you anything for it, but, if everything goes right, you will have some nice portrait photos of yourself.
You can sign up by sending me an email, phoning me up, talking to me in person or leave a response down at the bottom of this page in the reply section.
I'm not sure yet whether it will be a day of shooting everyone on the same day, or maybe private shoots, but I'll figure that one out when I get some signer-uppers ;)
I want say one more thing, and that is that everyone is welcome
Read on a little bit to see what you need to do >>>>>

Panoramic

Some time back I bought a camera (film 35mm) that was able to get great panoramas. I thought it was about time that I scanned some and show them to you. So without further ado here are the first scans from my panoramic film camera.

 The photos have all been made by a camera called the sprocket rocket and it takes photos over the length of two normal 36x24mm frames. This also means it's a "true" panoramic, because a true panoramic needs to have a ratio of at least 3:1.

The bnw photos are converted colour photos and are made in Antwerp, Belgium.
The single colour photo has been taken in Berg en Dal, Netherlands.

You can see the other two photos after the jump >>>