RSS FeedThe end of the summer is always a great time to clean up one's house or, in my case, computer. Up until now I had been using older software which, in its own right, is great software; but the newer versions had some features that just could not be ignored.
- Firstly, I've upgraded Adobe Lightroom to version 3.2, which has much better noise reduction than version 2.6, which I had been using previously. This obviously results in better image quality, which in turn makes me even more happy with my photography.
- I've also upgraded my HDR software to Photomatix Pro 3.29. I might be using this to beef up photos from time to time, if the lightening is tricky. Even with a single RAW image, Photomatix can make the lightening a lot better, though the best results are still achieved with multiple RAW files with different exposures.
- And last but certainly not least, I've upgraded from Windows Moviemaker (yeah, yeah, I know.. don't laugh) to Cyberlink Powerdirector 8, which gives me much better editing abilities and, in my opinion, better videos. The two time-lapse videos were made using this software, so you be the judge. As time goes by, and I start to make more videos, I will make a standardized template for the videos.
A nice update, that will give me even better image and video quality... ooh yeah 
It's been a while since I shared one of my dreams. Last night's dream wasn't very long or weird, but the remarkable part is that I woke up in the middle, and had another dream after that, which I also remember.
I was walking down a street in the city of Brussels, Belgium with a couple of people. I remember one of them being my best friend Daniel, and another being my friend Fresia. Who the other people were is unclear to me, but one of them was called Rens. We were on our way to meet some other people to discuss something, but what we were going to discuss is unclear to me.
When we arrived at the bus-stop that we were supposed to meet them, we saw their bicycles standing against a small L-shaped fence with a huge conifer standing on the inside of the bend. The fence was in front of a few houses with a small alley leading between the houses. My friend Fresia said that the people we were supposed to meet were probably in the alley. It seemed like a logical assumption, and so we walked into the alley.
At the end of the alley we found our friends peeking through and over a gate. When we got closer, we saw that they were looking at a decaying building. It was obvious that we were meeting them for urban exploration. As we approached the building I noticed that there was a faint light burning in one of the rooms. We opened the door and found a couple of people cooking some food on a small gas stove. I asked one of them if the building was squatted. He told us that only this part of the building was squatted. I asked him if it was ok for us to explore the rest of the building; he said it was no problem and told us that there was an entrance around the corner.
Back outside we walked around the corner and saw that there was a road behind the building and a small river with a bridge across it. The entrance turned out to be a small window just under the roof. I volunteered to climb through the window first, and made my way up there. I figured that the best way was to stick one leg in first, then my head and torso, followed by the other leg. As my first leg touched down on the windowsill on the inside, I heard a lot of scuffling and squeaking. By the time my head was inside, I could see a lot of glowing eyes in the dark.
I turned on my headlamp and saw that I had arrived in a small kitchen area, and there were at least 50 to 100 kittens all over the floor, gazing back at me. Carefully I climbed inside, and made my way over to the kitchen sink via the windowsill. It was then that I saw a dozen adult cats on a small table in the middle of the room growling and hissing at me. I asked Rens to hand me my small point and shoot camera, so that I could make a snapshot of all the kittens to show to my mother. Rens handed me my camera, and I took it out of its carrying pouch. In the meantime, Daniel was climbing inside as well.
By the time Daniel had one leg and his head inside, I noticed that one of the adult cats had jumped on my arm that was holding the camera. The cat was hanging on to my arm with its claws in my flesh. With my other hand I quickly grabbed the cat by its neck and managed to pry it loose of my arm. I flung the cat across the kitchen and suddenly heard a muffled grunt coming from the window. I turned to look and saw Daniel, still halfway through the window, with a big cat hanging onto his face with its claws around Daniel's head.
-
I found myself in an office building sitting at a round table with some world leaders, discussing something. I remember that Barack Obama was sitting across the room from me and flashed a hostile glance at me, as if I had just said something that he really didn't agree with. A few seconds later the president of the meeting called for a small break. As we were leaving the room, Joseph Stalin tapped me on my shoulder and asked if I would honor him and Mao Zedong by joining them for a cup of coffee.
We sat down in a quiet corner and drank our coffee. Mao Zedong said that both the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China had the highest respect for the Ajiran Empire, and that a trade agreement would be mutually beneficial for us all. Joseph Stalin nodded as he was sipping down his coffee. I told them that it was something worth consideration, and that I would think about it. I asked them to excuse me, as I had to visit the ladies room before the meeting continued.
After I stepped into the ladies room, I suddenly found myself outside a decaying house with Daniel at my side, and some guy shooting small pellets at us with an airsoft rifle. I managed to grab a stick and knock the airsoft rifle out of the guy's hand. I quickly grabbed the airsoft rifle and emptied the entire cartridge on the guy, who ran off around the corner. Daniel and I stood up and followed the guy.
Around the corner was a large trash container with a guy standing bending over it, while standing on small kitchen stairs. Another guy saw Daniel and Me and immediately crawled on his hands and feet next to the container. Daniel and I climbed on top of the guy's back and bent over the container to talk to the other guy. The guy shoved two weapons catalogs over and said "have a look at that". Daniel and I flipped through the catalogs as the guy was explaining what kind of firearms he liked.
After a while he told us that the people with the airsoft rifles were at war with some guys that were inside the house, and that the people inside the house had real guns. I climbed off the other guy's back and crawled up to one of the open windows of the house. One of the men inside noticed me and aimed an automatic rifle at me. With lightening fast reflexes I tugged the rifle out of his hands, flipped it over and gave both him and the guy next to him a headshot. Before the guy next to him fell to the ground, I also grasped his weapon from his hands.
I turned around and suddenly found myself standing in some sort of armory with the two rifles in my hands. My outfit had changed into a tight bodysuit that reminds me most of the nanosuit from the videogame Crysis. Daniel was standing next to me, browsing through a large selection of futuristic firearms that were hanging on the wall. He said "Forget those two peashooters, get a load of this!" , and grabbed a huge assault rifle from the wall. He yelled "Oh yeah!" and ran out of the armory. I grabbed a similar rifle off the wall and followed him outside.
Outside the armory I found myself standing on the street in some futuristic high-tech city. A split second later I heard several bullets impacting on the wall next to me. I turned to my left and saw a huge robot tank driving towards me at high speed, while unloading two enormous gatling guns in my general direction. I started running towards some sort of bridge, as another flying robot caught up with me and managed to grab me by the arm.
With my other arm I managed to grab a portable gun from my belt and unloaded it on the robot's arm, which didn't seem to have any impact whatsoever. I grabbed the large assault rifle from my back, aimed it at the robot's arm and pulled the trigger. To my big surprise, the rifle sent a huge stream of electric sparks towards the robot's arm. Daniel yelled towards me that it was a tesla canon, and that it would fry the robot's circuits. After a few seconds, the robot crashed down on the floor and released my arm.
As I ran back across the bridge, I saw that Daniel and some other men had captured another crab-like robot. We disassembled the robot, keeping only it's head and destroyed the rest of the robot's body. Back at our headquarters we laid down a line of photos of young women in front of the robot's head and powered the head back up. As the robot was "alive" again, one of the men told the robot that it had to pick two women from the photo's and then tell us who sent the robot army. After the robot had selected two girls from the photos, I too picked up a photo and handed it to one of the men before retiring to my quarters.
A few minutes later, after I had showered and was laying comfortably on a large pile of pillows, a young, attractive woman entered my quarters and stood still at the doorway. "Make me some tea and kneel at my side, girl", I said to her. "What do you mean?" , snapped the girl back at me, "I'm not a slave; make your own tea!" . Calmly but with a stern tone I replied to the girl "You are mistaken, girl. You are mine, whether you like it or not. Now serve me some tea and kneel by my side before I have you severely beaten." The girl, clearly shocked, softly sobbed "Y..Yes, Mistress", and quickly made her way into my little kitchen.
My second attempt at time-lapse video. The real time of this video was about 1 hour.
Today I was planning to visit an urbex location in the east of the country. The location turned out to be a dud, so I was left with some spare time to kill. Since there were some nasty clouds overhead, I figured I'd give time-lapse video a try. This means you take a photo every x seconds, and in the end you stitch them all together in a movie. Unfortunately about 30 mins into my experiment it started to rain pretty badly, so I had to abort the mission. I did manage to get about 300 photo's, though.
Because I enjoyed the music and atmosphere so much last year, I decided to attend the Amphi Festival in Köln, Germany again this year. Armed with my new camera-gear and accompanied by Fresia and Daniel, I ventured to the Tanzbrunnen congress center, where the event takes place every year.
My goal was to get some nice close-up shots of artists, like the ones I had seen on various websites. With my 70-300mm zoom lens, I figured the job should be doable; and I was right. I still need a lot of practice with this kind of photography; The shutter speeds and light measuring are totally different, because of all the bright lights behind the artists. In most cases I had to boost the ISO quite a bit to get fast shutter speeds, and this causes a bit of noise in the images.
Click here for the full album.
It somewhat pleased me to see that the drinks were still (too) expensive, and the pizza was still decent (although pricy). It was a bit of a relief to see that the prices hadn't been raised this year. On Sunday I had gotten used to the weird settings a bit, and was able to shoot some more photos. Too bad it started to rain quite a bit later on in the day, which prevented me from shooting more photos.
Click here for the full album.
All in all I'm pretty satisfied with the images, and can't wait to visit Amphi Festival again next year. Last year we slept over at the house of Daniel's friend Madita, but this year we decided to sleep over at Daniel's home and drive back and forth to the festival (about an hour's drive). Next year, however, I'm definitely opting for an air-conditioned hotel room, because sleeping on a sticky and crappy airbed after a long day of walking around in severe heat wasn't too good for my mood. 
While driving to the supermarket, I came across this little pond with water lilies. This posed the perfect opportunity to give my new Sony Cyber-shot a proper baptism. After a tiny bit of tweaking on the brightness and contrast in Lightroom, the picture came out quite nice I think. 
As I mentioned in the previous post, last Sunday was my 32nd birthday; but I don't celebrate it. This obviously also means I don't get many presents for my birthday. My parents gave me some clothing stuff and Daniel gave me a very cool light stand and shoot-through umbrella for my flashgun; but that's about it. But the best gift came from someone that I deeply admire and respect: myself!
About a year ago I bought the Kodak Zx1 pocket camera that records 720p video's on SD cards. While the camera works fine and is water resistant; it has some limitations that really got on my nerve, and so I decided to look for a replacement. The thing that mostly annoyed me was the fixed focus. While fixed focus is fine for most outdoor situations, it does get annoying if you want to get a slightly closer look at something and it just ends up as one big blurry blob on your photo or video.
My criteria were clear to me, and I started to look for a compact camera with autofocus and 720p video recording ability. My eye finally fell on the Sony Cyber-shot DSC-W350. It's a tiny and very cute little point and shoot camera with a ton of features. It's about the size of a credit card, and it's only 16.7mm thick.
It has a 14.1 megapixel sensor and with the 35mm equivalent of a 26-105mm f/2.7-5.7 lens it gives quite decent image quality. Aside from decent pictures, it can also record 720p video with autofocus and even zoom ability. Especially the zoom is quite nice, because that is a feature that most compact point and shoot camera's don't have. The last feature I'd like to mention is that you can make panorama photos on this camera by just sweeping it from one side to the other. While the quality of the panorama photo is not the best, it's good enough for some funny pictures for websites.
I'm really happy with this little camera. Because it's so light and small, I can bring it with me at all times. So from now on my videos and "on the road" photo's will be much, much higher quality. Stay tuned for more of those 
July 11th, you know what that means. Yep... it's my 32nd birthday (hurray! 
), and boy do I feel like an old fart!
One of the things that happens when you have your birthday, is that you receive a truckload of emails from websites and forums where you registered at some point in time, that wish you a happy birthday. The funny part is that half of these websites I can't even remember signing up on, and the other half I haven't visited in 5 or 6 years. But I'm still honored that they still remember me. Thanks guys! Whom ever you might be...
Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go find a large rock to hide under from relatives and neighbors that want to come over and congratulate me and pretend to enjoy my company... 
One of the things that I have in common with my mother, is that we both like donkeys a lot. So when my mom read in the newspaper that there was open house at a donkey shelter in the town of Baarle-Hertog, she immediately told me about it. I teamed up with my parents to check it out.
Click here for the full album.
The shelter currently houses 29 donkeys that were either neglected, abused or just very, very old. I think it's good that there are places like these that help the animals that were hurt by the beasts (read: humans).
Even though my kit was more-or-less complete, it still felt like something was missing; and I don't like that. While making photo's in dark places it always bothered me that I had to use LED based flashlights to light up stuff, which gives horrible color casting. I wanted something better, and so I decided to get a flashgun.
A bit of searching and reading reviews later I ran across a "Strobist" beginner set for a nice price. "Strobist" basically means that the flash is not mounted on the camera itself, but is handheld or on a light stand. The kit includes a Yongnuo YN460-II flashgun and a Cactus v4 wireless flash trigger.The wireless flash trigger allows you to put the flash up to 100m from the camera, and it still fires on the exact moment that it needs to; really cool.
All in all it looks like a pretty decent kit, and the flashgun sure is bright enough! The cool (or bad) part is that I have to learn how to make photo's with a flashgun now, which seems like a fun challenge. I've seen some real nice photos that were made with off-camera flashguns, and I can't wait to make some of my own.