Some weeks ago Neda invited me over to Den Haag to take pictures of her and her friend Lotte who brought a few special necklaces made by her mom. The idea was to take pictures outside, but the weather wasn’t cooperating so we ended up taking some shots inside. I only used a single off camera speedlight flash and an umbrella. The shots turned out quite alright for such a limited setup.

Today, a small portrait workgroup that I joined, organized a photo shoot. I asked Neda, Lena and Nata to model for us. I started out taking pictures with the Canon 1Ds Mark III (the first two images in the gallery), but I soon traded it in for my Leica. For some reason I have started to like the kind of ‘imperfect’ look of the Leica over the clean Canon pictures.

Doel is a deserted town in Belgium near Antwerp. Apart from some die hard protesters, most of the inhabitants of Doel have left the town over the years after the government made plans to demolish the village to make place for the expansion of the harbor of Antwerp. This has resulted in an eerie ghost town, which, when walking through its streets, gives you a kind of weird post apocalyptic feeling.
I went there together with Hans take some pictures.

Last Friday Neda invited me to take some pictures of her and her friends. Four models, all eager to have their pictures taken and only a short time to make them… Luckily I had a great assistant helping me out. I have selected four pictures that for me capture the character of the models.

Steve Huff, who runs a very nice Leica blog, started a Leica M9 give-away contest. To compete you had to send in two images that told a story.
After some thinking I chose to make pictures of my mom, as title I chose: “Free as a bird in her own world”. The pictures should tell the rest.

Update

We made it to the finals! Steve Huff is posting 3 pictures every day that go to the finals. When I received Edward’s comment on this blog-post this morning I found out that we were selected as one of the 15 finalists. The other images are amazing as well, so the competition is very tough. I recommend you to go ahead and have a look at the other images.

Update 2

Well, I didn’t win, but hey, at least I have a great picture of my mom!

Last weekend I organized a photo session with Neda in the Art Hotel in Eindhoven. I arranged a different suite than the one I used with Vesna and Paulo. The room had many photogenic spots and we had a great time taking many interesting shots.
Enjoy a small selection of them.

Before going on this trip we read our Thailand travel guide thoroughly. KLM had a special 50% discount on all award tickets (tickets paid with flying blue miles) booked in December and after careful consideration we decided that Thailand would be an excellent destination for us. However when we were ready to book our tickets the only ones available would arrive in Thailand on the 24th and leave on the 27th. That wouldn’t have been much of a holiday, so we went through the award ticket list where we found that tickets to Kilimanjaro Airport had the best dates (going there on the 13th and returning on the 27th of December). We quickly checked Tanzania’s tourism website and found that December was a nice time for a visit. A couple of minutes later the tickets were booked. Thailand had to wait.
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