From the 27th of February till the 6th of March, I was in Les Collons in Wallis, Switzerland, with Adrienne’s VIP (video-processing) group. Of course when you put a bunch of nerds together, add in a roll of duck-tape and purfoam, then something geeky-cool and totally useless is bound to happen. Tomasso, Frank and Karl came up with the idea to build an “omnicamera”, a camera with a 360 degrees viewing angle. Of course all for use on the piste. They built a very dangerous contraption, but it seemed to work. I’m still waiting for the video’s. As soon as I have them, I’ll put them on here.
My skiing skills are also slowly improving, I even can manage going down the black pistes (I’m so proud of myself).

Bin and Arjen gave me a “bongo” for my birthday; a sort of adventure gift card. I chose to take a 4×4 off-road day course with “traffic control” in Eindhoven. In old 4×4 Suzuki’s me and around 10 others got to drive around a challenging course with small hills, tree logs, water, stairs etc. The teacher explained how to best tackle different parts of this terrain. My co-driver had to stop early (because he had some other appointment, not due to my bad driving), so I had the car for myself the rest of the day, which was great.
I had a really fun time, it was a great gift!

We got a second chance at building our igloo. This time there was enough snow on the Alp Sellamatt (see below for a map of the area), so we set out to meet our guide Paul there.

Grotere kaart weergeven
It was a really great experience. Paul explained how to build the igloo. It took about 4 hours to complete and the result was a really sturdy and frosty house for the night. The weahter started out misty but it cleared up really nicely. Candle light in our igloo under a starry sky… It doesn’t get any more romantic than that.

I didn’t bring my SLR because of its weight, but instead I brought my new compact camera (Canon G11). I must say that when you keep the ISO low, the pictures are great.

July last year I took some pictures during the performance of my student’s band “The Seasons”. This weekend they came back for a picture session to get some white and purple pictures for their website. I can’t wait to see the end result on their web page. As soon as it’s done I will add a link to it here. -update: check it out here-

I take pictures of promotions at the TU/e about once a week to earn some extra money (pretty much to pay for the insurance of my camera gear). Usually the pictures are very standard, but this time it was my colleague Laura’s turn, so I took some extra pictures, besides the standard selection.

On the previous page you may have seen Bin highly pregnant. In the mean time Bin and Arjen have become the proud parents of a son, Maarten! Last week Maarten got baptized, me and my camera were of course also present at the joyful event.

It has been some time since I last posted a message on my website. The reason for my delay can be found in the last picture of the series below. Yes, that’s right! I’m getting married!
It didn’t happen as planned though; Adrienne and me were supposed to build an igloo in the Swiss mountains under a guide’s supervision and spend the night in our own creation. In my mind that would have been the perfect place to propose. Snuggling together in a cosy, self built hut made of snow, candle light, it doesn’t get any more romantic than that… But just a few days before we would go Adrienne got an email saying that there wasn’t enough snow in the mountains to build the igloo. To make things worse, back in Holland newspapers were reporting that kids were building igloo’s on the streets!
So I quickly had to come up with a plan B. I booked a hotel in Bellinzona, a nice small town in the Italian part of Switzerland surrounded by three castles. In the evening, in our regular hotel room, with regular heating and regular lamps, I went down on one knee an proposed.
Even though it wasn’t the most romantic location it was still a very nice moment, and most importantly, she said yes!

I have added a “Portrait Portfolio” link to the navigation-bar on the top of my site.

Inspired by an exposition of Harmonie Juliana, Mariëlle wanted some pictures of her and Ralph with their musical instruments in a similar setting. I was happy to comply and together we made some very serious works of art.

Bin asked me to take some pictures of her a couple of weeks before her due date on the 5th of December. Of course this was a nice challenge and I happily agreed to do so. Bin and Arjen preferred black and white pictures so I used Nik’s Silver Efex plugin to give the pictures a more authentic look.