Archive for June, 2009

Start @ Kalooga

Tuesday, June 30th, 2009

My in between jobs status won’t last for long as I’ll be starting a new job in a few days. My previous employer was acquired by a large firm (about 5000 people) over two years ago, and even though I had a nice working place (with regards to colleges and projects), I felt I needed to push myself by taking up a challenge and to learn new stuff.

So I’ll be working at Kalooga, a small start-up company involved in gallery search. “We” spider the web for collections of pictures, analyze them (by content, text, links, or anything that’s relevant) and enable publishers to show them in widgets on their own sites. This allows publishers to easily decorate their electronic publications with up-to-date, relevant visual content.

The upcoming year, we’ll work on the quality of search results, deal with the unavoidable scaling issues (half a billion pictures is quite a bit) and make sure our clients are well served with usable back-end applications & API’s. The job combines the domain Artificial Intelligence with some challenging web stuff (scaling with a cloud, Services, etc) and I think my background & experience will come well at hand. I’m looking forward to it!

IPhone

Friday, June 26th, 2009

Yes! I’m one of the lucky people who managed to get a new IPhone (3GS) in our country at the date of introduction. Now I can swap my Windows Mobile for an other proprietary platform ;) . I’ll let you know how I like it…

Pictures in the media

Monday, June 8th, 2009

As the wedding couple I recently photographed is well-known in our country, my pictures were published in (the gossip part of) our largest news paper (De Telegraaf), as well as some national news television shows: Shownews and RTL-boulevard (site & television show).

Below is a paper scan:

Wedding pictures

Monday, June 1st, 2009

I was asked to shoot the photo’s on the wedding of our friends. As photography is more a hobby than a profession, I was a bit anxious about it at start; there’s only one chance to get it right. However, I like a challenge and prepared well. I made sure I had plenty of good (and spare) equipment which I know how to handle, and I planned certain pictures/moments during the day. My own photography equipment is quite suited for the job, and I borrowed an additional body from a friend. As the wedding would take place inside a church (low lighting), and we planned on taking a group picture there, I borrowed studio flash lighting and looked like a pro ;) .

I’m lucky the couple is quite used to being photographed, so they know how to pose. The weather was really sunny, so everything went smooth. Here are the first pictures, I’m still converting the others from RAW to something useful:

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