I’m attending an architecture photography workshop at the CKE in Eindhoven. I’m not really an architecture photographer, but I thought it would be nice to learn. Our assignment was to go one day to Rotterdam and take pictures there. It wasn’t a very photogenic day, the sky was boringly hazy and the light very diffuse. But still I could take some interesting shots.

After watching countless episodes of Discovery Channel’s “Survivorman”, Arjen thought it would be fun to take a “Fire and Bivouac” course and learn some survival skills ourselves. It sounded like fun, so I agreed to take the course with him with a company called “Extra Survival”. We arrived on Friday the 12th around 20.30h in the forest. There we got a short instruction on how to build a shelter from a piece of plastic sheeting, after which we had to build our accommodation for the night.
The next day we learned how to make a fire and build a shelter from natural material. I must say I slept better in my “natural” shelter than underneath my plastic sheet. But perhaps that’s due to the hard work that day. On the last day we learned how to collect the best fire starters and how to set up a plastic sheet shelter in different situations.

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!