Life’s an ocean with too much commotion

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.

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..

It has been a while since my last post, but I’ve been extremely busy with planning my trip to the US this summer (more about that later), taking pictures of the Carnival in Aalst three weeks ago, and working out in the fitness on a tri-weekly base.

Normally I’m not really a Carnival-fan, but my girlfriend is and once the date is approaching, I’m more enthusiastic about it. At Sunday there is a procession of Carnival cars going across the town. I managed to take some pictures of it, and selected a few of them (see below). It’s hard to be creative while shooting these pictures, as you always have the same perspective (you have to stay at the pedestrian road).
Having a press-card would make things so much easier …

This one (above) is a rather interesting picture to take. In Adobe Lightroom (or any other photo editing tool) you can select profiles that result in subtle differences in color and contrast. The black gets purple, the purple gets blue. I’ve selected the Camera’s profile, which has the best result in this case.

I like this picture because of the time spend on dressing this bald kid. It’s a mask that lays on top of his head, but you really have to focus to see any marks for that.

This picture is one of my favorites. It’s being converted into sepia colors (the original picture didn’t have the same atmosphere with the variety of colors). I especially like the expression of her face.

I like the dressed clothes of this kid

A picture of a carnival car, without any houses on the background
(the tree and the fall of night really does the thrick).

When you live near or in Belgium, you know the Ardennen from in to out and left to right… Yet, if you drive a little bit further to Luxemburg, more specifically in the region of Echternach, you’ll find some places you don’t find in the Ardennen.

I made benefit of the location and situation to take some close-up macro pictures. It worked out pretty well! If you walk for a couple of days through the forests, you don’t mind the little details. Bringing your camera with you can be a real burden to carry with you, but it forces you to mind the little details nature has to offer you

It’s a yearly habit of me to visit the Ardennen or Luxemburg with the family of my girlfriend, especially if you can combine it with some trappist (Rochefort, Chimay, …) and some good meat! As finalizer, a portert picture of my girlfriend with her brother.

This picture got selected for the year (2008) book of Antwerp!

On a cold winter day in december, me and Jeroen Van Aken decided to drive to Doel to take some pictures of a city that is going to be completely demolished. This to make room for a new dock for Flanders Port.

When we arrived, we surprisingly noticed that there are still people living in Doel. However, most of the houses are empty and ruined. Fragments of glass, trash and broken walls are filling the picture of Doel. The few people that still live there, live near to each other.

Taking pictures in Doel only gets interesting if you can go into left houses. However, most houses are so loaded with trash that it’s often difficult to enter them. When you finally manage to go in them, you often hear noises or people moving, because there are crackers living in these houses. We managed however to enter the former restaurant of Saeftinghe,  which has been left in it’s original abandoned state.

I think Doel was once a very cosy town with a tight community, where neighbours still knew each other. The only thing that reminds us of the livingness of the city, is the “De Lijn” bus that has some halts in this city and still drives through it.

I also noticed that there is a certain smell hovering in the city. I don’t know if it’s caused by the Schelde that passes the town or from the nuclear powerplant.

I’m looking forward to see the increased turnover for Flanders port now that a new dock is ready to be build, when all you hear is stories about too high energy costs for boat transport.

Ah well, at least it was a well-spent day and I managed to take some pictures…

On our trip to Presqu’île de Rhuys, in May this year, we noticed that we were only on a 100km trip from Nantes (South side of Bretagne). That period, Nantes was something fresh in our mind because of Beirut’s song.
So we jumped in our car and drove to Nantes! Once there, the city overwhelmed us with festivities, warmth, beautiful sights and cool-dressed people (cfr. picture).

The picture with the brass band above really represents what the atmosphere in this city was. It was really like walking through the video clip of Beirut.

I participated in the Fnac Fotomarathon in Ghent. The concept was to select two pictures for each theme. Fnac chose three themes, which differed depending on the city organizing the marathon. ‘letters’, ’stone’, ‘tasty’. You had to subscribe with a team of two persons. My team existed of Jeroen Van Aken and me.

The first theme was ‘letters’. Of course everybody ran to the city library. We did too, not to take pictures but it was on our way to the Boekentoren, a building that stores an amazing archive of letters, books and other artifacts. Unfortunately we couldn’t access the Boekentoren, so we had to take some pictures in the environment. At the ground floor, there was an archive publicly available which contained quotes of some people, sorted by category. We were lucky, because a category ‘letters’ existed.

The second theme was ’stone’. This picture was taken in Ghent at ‘de Poel’. I found this theme a little bit too abstract and difficult to do. The pictures taken for this theme were very widely interpreted (which is a good thing). The actual elected picture for this theme was not that good, in my opinion. Except for the picture you can see here, I also had another nice idea for this theme. We bought scissors in Hema in Ghent and tried to make a composition of ’stone’, ‘leaf’, ’scissors’, as in the game . Stone was the ‘Gravensteen’ on the background, a bush on the foreground and the scissors for cutting a leaf of the bush.

The third theme was ‘tasty’. This was a nice one. It was the last theme, around 17h-18h, so everybody had to eat something. Of course there were plenty of pictures of food, ice creams, and so on. We went to the Wok A Way and asked the cook to put some rice on a dish and place it on the conveyor belt. Maybe we had to do more tricks with the belt and a clear shot of the food. It was very dark and I didn’t have my tripod with me.

The pictures of Jeroen and me were not selected. Some of the pictures that actually won, weren’t that good in my opinion. Of course it’s always a very subjective choice..

The organization of the marathon day was very good! The reception at the evening for the picture election was well organized, good wine and food. Download points during that day weren’t too crowded. No critics for Fnac

Today I went to see Evita in the Chassé Theater in Breda with my girlfriend. It’s a musical about the life of Eva Perón, a girl that found her way from the street to the presidential suite in Argentina and died at age 33. It was written by Andrew Lloyd Webber, who also wrote musicals like Jesus Christ Superstar, The Phantom of the Opera, Cats, …

It’s the best musical I’ve ever seen! I really wanted to go because I like the music much and I find Evita’s life interesting and intriguing. It was played on a very high level, something I’ve never seen before. You could easily follow the story, enjoy the music and watch the beautiful dances and acts. The decors were sober but very stylish and there were not too many people on the stage (I find it often too overwhelming when too much people are on the stage, you can only focus on one or two people, mostly the main actors, so you have to go at least two or three times to experience all acts).

Evita was played by Brigitte Heitzer, who was chosen by the Dutch people in a live TV show “Wie wordt de nieuwe Evita”. I think Brigitte’s part did a lot to the musical, she’s a great singer and some of the songs were very difficult. She even said in an interview that she thought Lloyd was a women-hater because of his difficult songs. They had to rewrite some songs for the movie (released in 1996) because Madonna couldn’t sing them, so it says enough.

I like the Chassé Theater in Breda because there’s enough room to relax and enjoy the musical without being overwhelmed by people walking inside and outside the theater and without endlessly queuing at the bar waiting for a drink. It’s very stylish decorated and the seets are very well placed in the theater.

I don’t regret I went to see the musical and I would definitely go see it a second time!

Monday I went to Javapolis in the Metropolis Business Lounge in Antwerp. It’s a yearly event with several conferences, talks, workshops and BOF’s of projects related to Java. Personally I’m not a Java web framework lover. It’s hard to choose which framework you will need for your kind of web application, and knowing one specific framework doesn’t mean you know them all, on the contrary.

Monday morning I went to see Maurice Naftalin talking about Java Generics and Collections. Maurice also contributed in writing the O’Reilly book with the corresponding name. Although I was familiar with using generics in Java, I’ve learned some nifty tricks to have more exceptions detected at compilation time. The second part of his talk, Collections, was less interesting for me. He went pretty fast over all available collections and their performance. I’ve made a quick reference card with all available collections and for which purpose they can be used, together with their performance for every action (add/remove, select, iterate).

In the afternoon I went to see Google API’s by Dick Wall. He talked about the Google library which extends Generics and Collections. They kindly introduce closures (which is the main reason why I started to program in Ruby a year ago) by specifying filter functions in code blocks. These filter functions allow to manipulate the contents of collections, without having to know how to iterate over a collection. With the use of Generics you avoid having ClassCastExceptions in these inner filter functions. The second part of his talk was about the Google webservices. They use Atom feeds for transporting webservice contents. These Atom feeds can be controlled directly by XML or via a Google library. It’s pretty straightforward.

After the Google API’s talk, I went to see jBPM and Hudson, a continuous integration tool. jBPM gives you the ability to define workflows in Java. Every node needs some input and gives some output, based on the output you can let it direct to a next concept. The talk was given by someone who has implemented a jBPM workflow for a project, but she failed to explain the concept and how it’s all composed and executed. She just explained what it did for her project and showed some graphics which gave no meaning outside her project’s context.

Hudson was promising, because I googled it before I went to the talk. I’m looking for a continuous integration tool that can have distributions for kinds of software that needs a specific environment for getting it build. Triggering remote builds can be done via various ways. They all use SSH remote commands for executing a command or script that builds specific software on a machine. This means that the connection needs to be open while it’s building. Output of the build command is constantly send over the SSH connection. I’m looking for a client/server tool where the remote execution task is given to the client tool which executes a certain task. When the task is completed, the results (logs, artifacts, …) can be pushed to the server and can be processed and displayed. The main developer of Hudson, Kohsuke Kawaguchi, didn’t know exactly how it was done, but it was something with SSH…

Summarized, it wasn’t a thrown away day, I got a free T-shirt (apparently everyone got a XL sized T-shirt), and I learned some new things about the cores of Java.

By the way, you can see recordings of most of the talks on Parleys.