Archive for August, 2005

Fair

Tuesday, August 30th, 2005
Just couldn’t resist walking along the fair, tasting the atmosphere and snapping a
shot
1
shot (1).

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Cirque Ici

Monday, August 22nd, 2005
I always like the atmosphere at the Noorderzon festival (when it’s not raining ;-) ). A nicely mixed audience is watching a broad variety of people perform arts, music and theater. Amateurs or semi-professionals pop up everywhere in the park to break-dance, perform some magic show or play on their instruments.

The Cirque Ici show I attended was, although it’s hard to describe what actually happened, very impressive. Strange devices, a marvelous show, and a guy with concentration and muscular control abilities I’ve never seen before. I think the program description tried to do it nicely:

Cirque Ici is a remarkable circus built around the extraordinary performance abilities of just one performer, Johann le Guillerm. With musical environments created by two electronic musicians, a range of machines invented specially for the performance by Johann le Guillerm himself, home-made low-tech lighting, breath-taking agility, and a broader range of performance skills than any one man should normally possess, the performance speaks of consummate creativity and extreme virtuosity.

Definitely a recommendation!

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Ed – The standard text editor

Friday, August 19th, 2005
Somehow, a conversation I had today turned into turned into the pro’s and cons of word processors and editors. As I’m well aware of the uselessness and endlessness of these kind of discussions, I couldn’t help myself and started making jokes by reciting everything I remembered about a great banter about ed: the standard text-editor I read ten years ago. After some googling I found the original, and after all these years I still think it’s really funny (although I would classify it as nerd-humor)…

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The internet as we know it

Monday, August 15th, 2005

I’ve only seen a few red vs blue movies, and I usually don’t like them. But check out the internet versus real life, and laugh like I did… Like someone said: it’s meant to be funny, but it’s quite true…

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Wedding shootout

Saturday, August 6th, 2005

Yesterday, I acted as a photographer on the wedding of a friend of mine. I liked it a lot although I was a bit concerned in advance.

I tried to prepare for wedding shoot. I Browsed the web, read some books, looked at many wedding pictures, took some notes (like be creative, try different angles, make sure you get the ’steady’ shots, try to get some details, get the people to ‘play’ a bit in front of the camera). But while I was reading the professional photo forum on photo.net, I started worrying at least a bit. As it turns out (or it seems to), (pro) wedding photographers assist a first photographer for at least two years before considering to take responsibility for a wedding shoot. And with two or three people on the scene, they’re able to guarantee some nice work (and I would be just by myself).

However, I got some good tips, and made sure I took an extra camera (borrowed an additional 300D from a colleague), extra battery, 2 speedlites, batteries for the speedlites, and enough flash card memory (5GB). Having two camera’s was great. It allowed me to keep a camera ready for the required safe-and-steady shots (the 18-55mm 300D kit lens with speedlite attached), while I had a free camera to experiment with (e.g. switching to a 70-200mm 2.8 lens for some nice detailed close-ups, or the 50mm-I 1.8 prime; both to be tested without flash (prefered) and to be mounted on a tri-pod once and a while).

My only big concern was the weather: it just kept on pouring rain, so the lighting conditions inside were minimal and I had no opportunity to shoot outside. I set up the bride-groom and family shoot inside the wedding location ( a former star observatory) and I’m happy with the results given the constraints. I flash-photographed with one camera (I hardly ever like the lightning conditions with a single flash), and mounted the other one with the 50mm-I (with f2.2, ISO-400, 1/13th) on a tripod (hold still guys ;-) ) to get some naturally-lit pictures.

In the night at the party I also tried some pictures, but I was required use my speedlite, and eventhough I think it’s hard, I managed to take some nice shots…

For now, I’ll have to convert all my RAW images to JPG, photoshop a bit and make sure they’re nice. I’ll probably have a look at a nice photograph album, and make sure all the guests can order the pictures (e.g. through pixum or a custom service….)

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