Happy new year!

The last year was a year filled with different experiences. The year started with Adrienne leaving for an internship at Philips Hong Kong for almost five months. During that time I went to Orlando Florida for a conference followed by a month long visit to Bremen Germany at Fraunhofer MEVIS, my employer. Towards the end of Adrienne’s stay in Hong Kong I went to visit her there, and we went for a trip around Malaysia together.
After Adrienne came back from Hong Kong I left for a survival trip in Kloten, Sweden with Arjen and his brother in law. I finished my PADI open water course in July in Zeeland and a few weeks after that me and Adrienne went together with Thorsten on a diving trip in Egypt, I completed my PADI advanced open water course there and saw an amazing underwater world. Right after that trip we found out that Adrienne was pregnant!
Somewhat later I spent a weekend in the Ardennes in Belgium with my colleagues. Adrienne and me moved to ‘s-Hertogenbosch in September and in the middle of the mess I had to go to Toronto for another conference and I visited the Niagara falls. In November I went to Chicago to present my research at the RSNA conference, the biggest conference in the world. And as you could have read in the previous post on my blog, we ended the year with a trip to the enchanting Marrakech, Morocco.

It has been an incredible year, with many travels and experiences. For sure even bigger adventures are ahead of us, with Adrienne due in the beginning of April, I am sure it will be a year with even greater adventures… I’ll keep you updated!

Together with a few members of my photography club, we organized a monthly model shoot. Nata and Irene agreed to model for me. Here you can see the results.

In conjunction with the MICCAI conference in Toronto Hakim organized a trip to the Niagara Falls. Last time I was there it was bad weather, so I thought it wouldn’t hurt to give it another try. Little did I know that the weather would be even worse this time. Combine being on a boat down into the horse shoe of the waterfall, with a cloudy rainy day and gray is what you will get.

I had to sell a lot of other camera gear to buy it. But it is well worth it…

Expect some pictures made with this beauty from now on.

After the hot and humid jungle, we went to Cameron Highlands. The lower temperature and humidity were a great relief after the hot and humid jungle of Taman Negara. The Cameron Highlands are the home of the large BOH (best of highlands) tea plantations, and some fascinating nature. We had went on some amazing guided tours through the tea plantation, the mossy forest and as if that was not yet enough, we also went on a strenuous guided night walk until 1 o’ clock at night.

Every year, at the beginning of November, the city of Eindhoven is lit up by GLOW. GLOW is a platform for artists that use light in all its applications as a tool to let the local architecture come to life. Often this leads to very special photo opportunities and the city is crowded by people with tripods and camera’s.
This time, however, it was raining. In my opinion the rain is just excellent for taking pictures; the reflections of the light on the wet pavement are a great addition to the shots. But luckily not everybody thought so and the amount of photographers was substantially less when we went out to walk around the city.
I especially liked the light in the Catharina church in the city center. The changing lights and the choir music gave the place a very special atmosphere.
The GLOW festival runs until this Saturday night, if you have time, make sure you check it out.

I have spent some time to update my portrait portfolio and my personal favorites. You can always find the links to these pages on the top of my blog.

I have attended around 3-4 workshops on studio lighting and model photography. When I was thinking about joining another workshop, it struck me that I had almost everything I needed myself to take these kind of pictures. I had the lights, the camera, a model, and after reading so many websites and books and attending workshops I believed I had the knowledge as well.
The only thing that I didn’t have was a beautiful venue. Most of the workshops were held in a large studio with props, or a fancy hotel room. My own living room was fine for even-colored backgrounds, like the shots you have seen on my website before, but this was becoming a bit too boring as a backdrop for my pictures. I contacted one of the workshop organizers and asked him wether he made special arrangements for his hotel room shoots. He told me that he just rented a suite for the day in a hotel of his liking. I could do that…
So I contacted the Art Hotel, a new hotel which was recently opened here in Eindhoven, and asked them for the possibilities. They could rent me a room for a reduced price, as long as I would be out at six. I went to the hotel to have a look at their suites and chose their “bridal suite” with jacuzzi.
Vesna was willing to model for me and I also invited Paulo, her boyfriend, to come along to help out and take some pictures himself.

After Paulo and Vesna arrived I started taking pictures and Paulo was admiring the room.
“Shall I already fill up the jacuzzi?”, Paulo asked. I thought it was a good idea, I had no clue how long it would take to fill it up so, yeah, “go ahead”.
A few minutes later me and Vesna were startled by a the spray of water and a scream of Paulo: “oh my god, how do you turn this thing off!”.
Within seconds the whole room was wet! The water was spraying everywhere, bright colored lamps from inside the jacuzzi were lighting the catastrophe which by now resembled the pirates of the Caribbean ride at Disney land.
I jumped up and moved my equipment out of the way. The water was filling up the room fast and Paulo wasn’t able to find the “off” button.
I threw some towels at him to cover up the jets and started fiddling with the control panel myself. Finding the off button in the menu of the jacuzzi reminded me of finding the “change language” item on an old Samsung phone after you accidentally changed the phone’s language to Korean, well that, but during a water balloon fight.
After turning it off and cleaning up the room, we continued the photo shoot. I reminded Paulo that whenever you see a note saying “Let op!” in bold print, it most of time is a good idea to ask a native speaker what is written there.

Afterwards Paulo gave the term “partial nude photography” a whole new meaning, as he had to spend the rest of the day taking pictures in his boxer’s. Not as a punishment for his screw up, but because his pants were soaked.
Sharing these pictures with the rest of the world however, IS part of the punishment.

Even though we wasted some time cleaning up the mess, we still got a lot of great shots. It was great to test out my new Leica as well. I wrote below each picture with which camera it was taken. The Canon camera pictures are sharper, and have more contrast, but to me it looks like the Leica pictures somehow have “something” special, intimate and artistic.

I bought a Leica M8. For a long time I have been checking the internet, reading reviews, forums and user experience reports. Why were so many people that had a rangefinder camera so enthusiastic about it? I wanted to try it myself.

So I regularly checked marktplaats.nl to see if there were any good second hand deals. The prices were so high, that I forgot all about it. Up until last week, when I, while browsing some advertisements on marktplaats, came across a low priced second hand Leica M8. Still I was in doubt, did I miss something, did prices drop? I checked the other ads on marktplaats, checked prices on Ebay, and after someone on another photography forum also pointed out the reasonably priced M8, I mailed the seller.
The seller told me the camera was in good shape, but had some marks from being used. I decided to buy it and drove to Haarlem to pick it up the same evening.

I have been using the camera for a couple of days and I truly enjoy the picture taking process. Composing the shot with the fixed lens, manually focussing the lens, setting the aperture and the funny noise after you press the shutter release, add to the whole experience.

The pictures the camera produces are nice, they look special. As James Russell from Luminous Landscape said: “It’s like every time I shoot something with the Leica it produces a look of history or better put the photograph looks like it should have historical merit.”.

The camera is small compared to my monstrous Canon 1Ds and the lenses (which by the way are more expensive than their weight in gold) are a lot smaller since the camera has no mirror. This seems to be a great travel camera, and I can’t wait to shoot some more with it.

On the 4th of September our friends Conny and Roman got married in Zürich. It was an impressive service and their party was amazing. Both Conny and Roman are excellent Salsa dancers and they invited a lot of their dancer friends and Salsa teachers to the party. I was happy that I could hide behind my camera, because the only dance I can squeeze out is the “Crazy Little Thing Called Love” dance Adrienne and me practiced for our wedding. Since this was a Salsa party there was of course no chance that they would play that song.

The couple had a professional photographer, a talented friend of the groom’s father. I offered to take some overview pictures that the photographer, since he couldn’t be in two places at the same time, wouldn’t be able to take.