Tagliatelle - scampi

Oudenaarde by Night

Yesterday evening, I've been walking around in Oudenaarde - the city were I'll be living in in the near future -, and I've taken these photographs.

Meet My Mom

In the past few weeks, I've been making some portraits. Some of them in a studio, others 'on location'.
I will post some of the results here and I'll start with a portrait of my mother.

These photographs are shot in her 'study room'; my mom loves painting and calligraphy (she's pretty good at it) and I wanted to express this in my photographs.

Just a pity that she's holding the pen a little bit to high

The photos have been taken with ambient light (I don't like to use flash for location-portraits). I've used a Nikon D200 with a 50mm f/1.8 lens mounted on it. Since there was not too much light available, I've choosen a small aparture number and a high ISO setting. (The EXIF information is available in the picture; you can easily view it using Opanda IEXIF Viewer"). Despite the high ISO setting, I've to admit that I'm pleasantly surprised with the noise levels in these photo's.

High Key

Yesterday, I've been playing around a bit and wanted to create a high-key picture.
I think the result is quite ok. :)

Apart from some 'levels' adjustements in Photoshop, no other modifications have been made.
I've put the lighters on a plexiglass (hence the reflection), and used two elinchrome strobes to make the picture like it is shown here.

New photography toy!

I was planning to blog about this, but I constantly postponed it until I almost forgot about it. And how could I forget this...

After years of using only a film-camera, I've finally decided to go digital. Well, I'm not really telling the truth here, since I already own a digital compact camera since 2003.
Anyway, I finally decided to buy a digital SLR camera. Since I already have a Nikon F55 film SLR, the choice was easy: my digital SLR would also be a Nikon.
After reading some reviews and testing different models, I've made a decision on the model as well: it would be a Nikon D200.

I've ordered the camera in May 2006, and I got it in my hands in the first week of July 2006.

I have the D200 now for about one month, and it is a great camera. I've done about 1000 shots in past month, and although I've already achieved some satisfying results, I feel that I haven't unleashed its full potential yet.
I hope that I'll be able to show the progress I make by regularly posting a photo here on my blog.

Here you see my F55 film camera next to the D200. Quite a difference in size!
Image taken with a compact digital camera

Back in Belgium

I'm back from vacation.

I've spent the past few days in Southern Spain, in the province of Andalucia.
We stayed in a hotel nearby the 'La Barossa' beach, from where we've explored the nearby region a bit.

This picture has been taken in Medina Sidonia. A 'pueblo blanco' (white town), a few km's more inward the country.

Low key portraits with a Hasselblad

The past few weeks, I (and my fellow photography students) have been playing with Hasselblad camera's in the studio.

This is a low key portrait that one of my collegue students took from me.

Unfortunately, I was not able to scan the entire picture (it is to big for my scanner), so that I cannot present it here in its original and typical square Hasselblad format.

I also took some very nice shots from other persons, but I'm not going to post them here (yet), since I do not have the permission of those persons to do so.

I really like those Hasselblad camera's. They're great to work with and provide great quality. I even think of buying one (a 2nd hand, because these things are expensive...)

Some of my pictures...

I've been practicing photography for more than one year now, and I'd like to share some of my work with you.

These are 4 pictures I've taken somewhere between september 2004 and may 2005. All of them were shot with a Nikon F55 equipped with a 28-80mm zoomlens. I've used a T-Max 400 ISO film, except for the photo with the karts, which was shot on a T-Max 3200 ISO.

I'd like to hear your comments!

Self-portrait

Well, I've told that this blog would also be about photography, but, until this moment, there's not even one picture present.

So, let's start off with a self-portrait I've taken 2 months ago.

This picture has been taken with an analog Nikon SLR camera with a 50mm lens. I've used a Kodak Tri-X 400 ISO film. I have printed the photo myself.

Most of my pictures are taken with an analog SLR camera, since I do not have (yet) a DSLR.
So, if I want to put them on the Internet, I have to scan them. Since I do not own a super-quality scanner, the quality of my digital -scanned- images, is not as good as the quality of my original prints.