Life’s an ocean with too much commotion

Yes well, it wasn’t expected, but.. we.. won! All credits go to Nena Driehuijzen of course, who found the object that fitted around her head. There were four themes of which we needed to take pictures: ‘Couleur Locale’ (local colors), ‘Mobiel’ (mobile), ‘Patronen’ (patterns) and ‘Buitengewoon’ (extraordinary). The elected picture for theme ‘Couleur Locale’ was ours. The jury commented on the picture, saying that it represented summer (using the colors), nice background that elaborates on the local-ness, and great expression! This time, we drove home with a big smile on our face

You can view my other pictures taken that day here.

Time for our first real summer trip this year.. I needed it, had too much work and stress lately. We booked a flight with Jetair (cheap one actually) to Las Palmas, rent a car and drove to our hotel: Anfi Club Monte in Patalavaca, Gran Canaria. The advantage of the Canary Islands is that the temperature is overall constant, about 25-30 degrees, even during winter. In combination with some breezes, perfect weather to relax or explore the island.

The first day we went to Maspalomas, a beautiful scenery of sand and dunes. Of course we forgot to smear sunscreen on our back and shoulders, so we were both burned. As a result, the next days we explored the island instead of doing some sun-spotting at the pool. We drove up the mountain, looking for the lake Soria, above San Bartolome. Unfortunately, the clouds were too thick and we couldn’t see a thing once we were at the top of the mountain. The next day we went to explore some ports, one of them was Puerto de Mogan. A very cosy little place, often called little Venice. It’s beautiful to walk through the little streets decorated with flowers in all kinds of colors. A little bit further uphill was Mogan situated, but that was just a normal little town so we drove through it rather quickly. Once driving back on the mountains we arrived at a lake, actually a reservoir, and it was beautiful. I think the temperature dropped to 15 degrees or so, we saw some campers, tables where you could picnic, and lots of quietness. The next day, we decided to explore the other half of the island. We visited Anden Verde, about the most beautiful coastline you could see in Gran Canaria (in the upper west of the island). Close to that, you have Dedo de Dios, a typical rock formation that was destroyed due to a heavy storm some years ago. You could see that the city near Dedo de Dios really lived from its tourists, and is now rather drained. We also visited Cenobio de Valeron, some rock silos where ancient people store their cereals to let them preserve better. The next day, it was time for some sunbathing at the pool. I’ve played some water polo (and I won!), and – of course – we were both burned again . So the next and last day, we decided to stay on our terrace and watch the world championship.

Summarized, it’s the ideal location for a relaxing vacation. You can also do some cool hikings on the mountains, and the temperature is always great. It was worth flying over, and now I’m completely recharged and ready to dive into work again!

Yesterday we’ve visited an abandoned site in Goetsenhoven, a military domain that used to function as a teaching school for flying small air planes. Only a part of the site has been abandoned, there is still military activity present in this area. This made it harder to completely go wild

When we initially arrived there, the site was completely lined with barbed wire. Despite of that, the place was still a mess. There were several buildings in the area that functioned as a gym, places to sleep, classes, a hangar for trucks and cars and two big office buildings. The only interesting building on this site was the first one, a long building with a kitchen, probably a weapon depot (or is it just my imagination..), a bar and a washing area.

Every building we’ve visited had used bullets (blanks) spread around the floor. Other interesting things we’ve found were some pamphlets containing procedures when finding a bomb and talking with terrorists. Glass was broken, doors were hit down on the ground, the ceiling began to rot.

In the first building, someone put some red paint on the wall, which resulted in a super composition for a picture.

What really made me feel bad, is the fact that these buildings itself were still in a pretty good state. It took a lot of money (tax money) for constructing these buildings, and the government is just letting them rot. All you hear on the news today is that they don’t have enough space to house illegals, well I can tell you, they probably could give space to 500 people there without doing much extra costs.

The three pictures below have been created using HDR. It’s not really realistic, but I like the result.

We decided to celebrate New Year’s Eve somewhere, so we went looking for a cottage near the Ardennes. It was a real burden to do so as we found out all cottages in and near the Ardennes were fully booked. We looked further and eventually found something in Klotten, near Cochem in Germany. It’s called Ferienhaus Börsch. It’s a great cottage, room for six people and everything in place to cook wonderfully. We’ve made the Peter Goossens Event Menu, it turned out to be a lot of work but everything worked out pretty well, it was delicious.

I like the idea of spending New Year’s Eve on a different location. It allows us to get away from all stress stuff, and nobody needs to sacrifice his home and get all the load for preparing the food and serving dinner.
Here are some pictures shot in Klotten at the Mosel river.

I decided it might be a good idea to log our trip to the USA while it’s still more or less fresh in memory. Our trip exists of various different kind of places, states and attractions.

First we took the plane from Brussels to Seattle, via Atlanta. We booked our flight with Delta Airlines in the end of January via Joker. We departed at 10.30AM (local time) and landed in Atlanta at 2.20PM (EST). From there on, we had a connection to Seattle departing at 4.50PM and arriving at 7.20PM (PST). Ine and kris,

two friends of ours, live in Vancouver and our initial motivation for going to the USA, was to visit them, as they lived for a year there and we miss them of course . We arranged they’d pick us up in Seattle and drive us to Vancouver, where we would spend the weekend. Afterward I realized we should make this visit a little bit longer, as we had to recover from  the Jet Lag. The weekend was over before we realized it. Sunday evening they dropped us off across the USA border in a small town called Bellingham.

From there on, we’ve rent a car and drove to the airport in Seattle (SEATAC). Our flight brings us to Salt Lake City.

What I remember of this first experience with Canada – and Vancouver BC more in particular, is how the lifestyle is very European. You’re not looked after when walking through the city, you can eat/buy most of the things available here, so adapting to it is not that hard as I thought in my opinion. It’s a very nice city, I realize now why Ine and Kris love this city and live here now.

The picture on the left show Tanja, Kris and Grizzly. I normally don’t have any affection with animals, but this one I liked immediatelly!

It was a very nice start of our vacation in the West and we’ll meet Ine and Kris again later .

It’s been a while since my last confession.. euh post
I’ve made a long and big trip to the US last month and I’m finally done with selecting and post-processing the pictures. You can view a slide show of these pictures here.

It’s becoming a yearly tradition, the picture contest organised by Fnac. This year it was organized in Bruges. I went their in a two-person team with Nena Driehuijzen. This time, the three themes were ‘Music’, ‘Rest’ and ‘Nostalgic‘. After eating some gingerbreads, we started walking through the city.

Music.. First we had no idea what kind of picture would fit that theme. It needed to have something to do with Bruges, but not too obvious. We saw many contesters walking towards the conservatory or statues holding a music instrument. While wandering through the streets, we passed an afro hairdresser. We came suddenly to the idea of taking a picture of the hair cutter singing a song. Taking the picture was harder than it sounds, it turned out that the only thing she could express while singing, was opening her mouth. At the other hand, it needed to be naturally. It was very funny seeing the girls trying to sing their heart out, as you can see on the left picture.

Nena had the idea of taking a picture of a bird, so we searched for a pet market. Good thing we had a backup line we could call once and a while for help navigating through Bruges.  On a bird’s cage, there was a tag ‘Fijn zangertje’ (translated: nice singer). It was perfect! While Nena was taking the picture for our theme, I focused on the bird’s picture as seen on the right.
Finally, we also needed a picture that was somehow related to Bruges (we thought this would make our election more easier, but it turned out the jury didn’t mind after all..). Lacking a good zoom lens, we made a picture of a small replica of the Belfort of Bruges.

The second theme was ‘Rest’. This gave us back the hope we lost during the first theme, as this is somewhat easier. Per definition, every picture is a snapshot of a something, hence it’s in rest. So we went to the park and took two pictures of Nena sleeping on a bench. It needed to look a bit caught-in-the-scene while hiding. I think it were good pictures. Looking at the winning pictures, I think our pictures were better than the winning ones. It was a girl puking some food out of her mouth. Hard to see the ‘rest’ part in that picture..

The third and last theme was ‘Nostalgic’. It’s actually in your advantage for not knowing the city in which you have to take pictures. It forces you to walk around and open your eyes. Earlier that day, we came across a little store that sold old (1920-30) post cards. One of these pictures had the print ‘Une Pensée’. When we knew what the last theme was all about, we returned to the shop and Nena took a picture of it.

Some time ago, I went through some pictures a friend of mine took in Bruges. Suddenly I remembered she had taken a picture of a writing on a wall. The writing had everything to do with ‘Nostalgic’. It was located at the Katelijnepoort. Unfortunately, we didn’t know where it was, so we had to ask for directions to some people. We hiked about a half hour (which turned out to be a big detour..) to get there. The detour was worth it as in my opinion the resulted picture is great.

At the end of the day, the results of the jury’s selection were shown at the concert hall in Bruges. We were hoping for some price but unfortunately the jury thought otherwise. In my opinion, some of the elected pictures were much better than ours, but there were some (e.g. for the theme ‘Rest’) where I didn’t understand the motivation of the jury.

Our conclusion is to focus on compositions with figures and mis-en-scene. Lets see how it turns out next year..

Everybody who loves taking pictures of abandoned places will have visited the http://www.abandoned-places.com/ site at least once.
One of these places described on that site is located in Aalst (Belgium), the abandoned factory of Bonneterie Bosteels – De Smeth.
This factory was very famous for its knitwear, better known as it’s product line ‘Du Parc’.

I’ve visited that location twice. The first time I took my flash with me, the second time I brought my tripod.
I’ve looked at the pictures on the abandoned-places site and compared them with my pictures. It seems that people stole and broke a lot of things, which makes this factory maybe not that exciting any more.
There was also a big fire in 2006, which burned down most of the offices on the first floor. Apart from that, taking pictures of objects and small corners turned out interesting.

You can enter the factory by crossing the gate, right of the main original entrance. If you want to access Du Parc from the city park, you can enter some small doors of the factory as well.
It’s best to stay out of the surrounding (abandoned) houses near the factory, as there are still people illegally occupying them.
The factory is really huge, it took us two times more than three hours to walk through it (of course including the necessary stops to take pictures).

In the center of the factory, there is a little garden with lots of bushes and trees. Through some of the windows, nature was already giving its best in infiltrating in the factory.
Most of the objects on the ground floor are stolen or gone, except for hundreds of cotton spindles, which are placed around the factory in a very weird way (you’ll notice it immediately when you’re there).
On the first floor, you can still see some knitwear, clothes, and the machines used for assembling and creating them. The first floor is much more interesting than the ground floor.

I’ve made a very small selection of the pictures taken in the factory, I hope you like them. If you have visited Du parc to take some pictures as well, I’m very interesting in seeing them, especially pictures taken before the fire in 2006.

I just had some time to upgrade my WordPress to the latest version. Next to the upgrade, I also applied a new (nice?) theme to my website.
It’s more dark and obscure than the first theme, but in my opinion it makes the pictures look prettier.

Do you hate it or love it? You can always leave feedback

See you!

Now that I have a new laptop, it enables me to run Adobe Lightroom again. This means, new pictures!!

About a month ago, I was shooting pictures of the Vibe Productions studio. The aim was to have some pictures in an industrial and dirthy atmosphere. I’ve made some close up pictures of the material in that studio, and applied some heavy Lightroom effects on that. Some of the results are listed here, other ones are viewable on my Flickr account.

It was actually the first time I did a project with an actual goal. Most of the time I just walked around and shoot pictures of things crossing my way. I find it exciting but nevertheless stressful to shoot pictures with a goal. I realize one needs actual training for doing things like that (light usage, composition, …). Maybe I should consider taking lessons, but they all start from zero and I’m afraid it’ll be too boring in the beginning. Anyone with tips?

What can you expect from me in the near future.. I’m currently processing my pictures from the ‘Du Parc’ textile factory in Aalst. I’ve visited that factory twice, the second time I’ve spend more attention to the places I loved the first time. Next week I’m visiting Paris, so you can expect some cliché Eiffel Tower and Moulin Rouge pictures

I’m also planning a huge (one month) trip to the US & Canada, which takes a big gap of my spare time. Isn’t that the perfect excuse for not posting regularly on my blog?

See you!

Oh yeah, before I forget.. the pictures