You can view my other pictures taken that day here.

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!

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.

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..

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!

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.

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