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 sold my Canon 85mm f/1.2 mark II lens. It was the most impressive lens I had, but I hardly ever used it. I much more often used the more versatile 70-200mm f/2.8 mark II. The sharpness is about the same, and I rarely used apertures smaller than f/2.8 on the lens. Most importantly I needed some money to pay for the new Leica stuff.
Anyway while in Amsterdam I of course also took some pictures.

Together with Hans van Assen, I went to take some pictures near the Amsterdam harbor. Initially we had the idea to photograph Sugar City, an old factory terrain, but it was closed. We ended up driving around looking for some subjects to photograph. It wasn’t the most productive day, but we had a good time, and I could play around with my Leica some more.

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.

Like every year the BioMedical Image Analysis (BMIA) group of the TU/e, my former workplace, organized a weekend in the Ardennes for its group members. The Saturday evening of the event was dedicated to Markus and my goodbye party.
As every year the event was a great success. This year’s special activity was a GPS tour through Rochefort. The group was split up in five smaller groups and each of the groups got there own GPS device with way points. At each way point a number of questions had to be answered. It was a great way to tour the city.
For our farewell party the group had organized a “Who is the biggest Apple fan” contest. Which tested our Apple knowledge and iPhone skills. One challenge was that Mark would play a tune on his melodica and we had to find the link between that song and Apple. For example, he was playing “New York, New York”, which is the “Big Apple” (Markus got that one right). Next thing we had to do was SMS an incredibly difficult message to Hans’ phone as fast as possible (here I was faster). It was a lot of fun. In the end, however, Markus won first prize. A device which was much better than an iPad. A frame with a glass plate (an empty photo frame with no back). This device had infinite battery life, infinite resolution, adopts to the environment’s light, has flash support as Ralph demonstrated by holding a flashlight behind the glass plate and flashing it a couple of times. It even has face to face chat as he demonstrated with Tim, and many many more features.
My second price was a melon. Which was as good as a real iPad because, it also didn’t have SD card support, no USB connection, no keyboard, no flash support, no video camera, and no DVD drive.

All in all, like every year it was an amazing weekend!

As a gift for our wedding my sister arranged a ‘special’ weekend away for or Adrienne and me. Special was indeed the right word. We were told to go to Dearsum in Friesland this Friday where we were given a tractor and an authentic old fashioned trailer. After one training round we were found qualified to take our new home anywhere we would like. We set out for Sandfirden to find a nice camping along the water. After about a one hour drive through the country side and small villages we arrived safe and sound. We found a great camp spot and thought we could just easily maneuver the trailer backwards into that cosy space. But it turns out that driving backwards with such a huge trailer isn’t all that simple. After one hour of trying (we didn’t give up that easily) it turned out that it was much easier to drive it forwards into position…
We uncoupled the trailer and spent the next two days scouting the surroundings on the tractor. The earplugs my sister gave us came in really handy for the long drives.

We had great fun and we would really like to thank everybody that was involved in giving us this great gift!

It has been a long time since I posted a message on my blog. I have been very busy with my new job at Fraunhofer MEVIS within the Radboud University Hospital in Nijmegen. On top of that of course came the wedding preparation stress. All for a good cause, because it was an unforgettable day last Thursday. I will soon post a longer story with more pictures, but you can have a look at the pictures Elena Maier, our professional photographer, has taken.

I am very happy with the results.

click here to go to her website and log in with
Benutzername: adriennebram
Passwort: platel

In case the page above does not work, you can also find the pictures by Elena Maier on my Picasaweb.