Adrienne and me decided we would like to go on one last trip before the end of the year. We wanted to go to a place where the culture was different, the weather was good and the flight wouldn’t be too long. That mixed with a limited number of airplane tickets still available brought us to Marrakech Morocco.
Read more

To present our research work, me and a number of our group members went to RSNA, the biggest radiology conference in the world, in Chicago. It was my first time in Chicago and I enjoyed my time there a lot. It’s a big city with many things to see and do. One of the big tourist attractions is of course the Cloud Gate at Millennium park; a huge shiny metal bean.
I bought a Sony NEX 5n there for Adrienne and I must say that I am impressed with this little camera. So much so that I began to doubt if the Leica M9 would still make sense. The NEX 5n has fast and accurate autofocus, a great LCD screen, versatile stabilized lenses, a relatively large 1.5 crop factor sensor, great high ISO performance, excellent exposure metering, and is even smaller than the M9. I took pictures with both camera’s in Chicago.
Only when I was home and opened the images on my computer the difference in picture quality between the Leica and the Sony became evident. I still like the look of the Leica pictures better, they somehow have a bit more atmosphere to them, but I love the NEX 5n for quick and simple shooting.
I ordered a converter to use my Leica lenses on the Sony camera, so I am really curious to see what that will bring.

Last Tuesday we had another model shoot with a few members from my photography club. Neda offered to model for us. This time I used my Leica M9 for the pictures. I just bought a few month old 90 mm Summarit lens from Marktplaats and I wanted to test it out. I like the images, they are sharp and the colors are good. The Summarit line of Leica is the most affordable line of lenses, but the quality is still great. For only a few shots I used my forty year old Leica Summicron 50 mm. When I saw the pictures on the camera’s LCD screen I was disappointed with the amount of flare from the lens caused by the light behind Neda. But when I opened the pictures on my computer I was very surprised to see that the pictures had a special glow to them. The first of these four images was shot with this lens and it is my favorite for sure.

Yesterday I went for a walk with Pieter and Clarisa around ‘s-Hertogenbosch. Me and Adrienne moved there some weeks ago and up to now I didn’t really find the time to go for a stroll. It’s a nice place with a lot more character than Eindhoven.

Last weekend our lab organized an “Ardennes weekend”. We went with almost the entire group to an excessively luxurious house in the Ardennes in Belgium. It was an amazing place and everybody had a great time.

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.

Last week Adrienne and me went on a diving vacation in El Gouna, Egypt. Together with Thorsten we organized a week of diving with the ‘Dive Connection’. I took my Canon G11 along under water, where I made some videos. It will still take some time to edit them. For now I have uploaded the pictures I have taken during the trip. Since a break from diving of 24 hours is required we couldn’t dive on the last day. Therefore we went on a ‘desert safari’ which included trips through the desert on a quad bike, a camel and a sand buggy. Even though it was a bit touristy, we still had a lot of fun.

About a week ago Adrienne and me and colleagues from my previous job went to the Efteling. I took some shots with my new camera and post processed them with Silver Efex 2 which I purchased last week. It is great software to convert your images into black and white. The amount of options it has to change your images is amazing. I believe that you can download a trial of the software and test it for a number of days. I can definitely recommend it.

This Friday and Saturday a colleague of Adrienne was involved in the filming of a two minute video sequence somehow related to his work as research scientist. He invited Adrienne and me to have a look. It was interesting to be there. Big cranes were holding up huge spot lights, a NYPD police car was brought in together with two English speaking actresses and the street was filled with crew members.