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I was asked by Marty to take pix at the Extrema Outdoor dance event for the organizers. I was at the event in 2007, taking pictures for technolusion, a website that no longer exists. Apart from it starting to rain cats and dogs at 8 p.m., it was a blast way back then.

This year, it was totally different. It started to rain much earlier
But I was well prepared with plastic bags and raincoats. Bummer that when it started raining, I found out that I’d forgotten them in the press room :’)

Anyway, I had loads of fun and took loads of pictures. Maybe I’ll make a new entry in my portfolio for my best dance event stuff.

The picture below was more of an journalistic type shot than a posed one. Let’s face it, whenever mankind gathers in great numbers even the tidyist person turns into a littering bum.

I like the picture because of it’s journalistic aspect. The garbage, the cut of head that show anonimity, the carelessness way in which people walk around nog caring about the junk.

I’ll post an update as soon as the organizers put my pix online.

The saturation, vibrance and clarity were pushed up a few notches, I did some recovering and fill lighting of the RAW image, added a bit of contrast (to bring out the cloud filled sky). You know the drill, nothing spectacular going on here.

On thursday, the third of juli I did another shoot for partymania. It was “N.O. presents Biets” in Paard van Troje, a typical student night. Partymania had been asked to do a shoot for a while now, but on a working night it’s a bit difficult to get working people with DSLR’s to cover an event. Luckely, I happened to be free the next day.

There were two halls, one virtually empty, the main hall packed, and I got my fill of pictures. The lights were awesome.

Didn’t do any fancy photoshop work this time. But I got you a pic of a pretty girl and a lucky guy.

The guys that organised Hed Kandi last time in Paard van Troje organised it again on the 28th of june. I covered the event for partymania.
The lights were horrible; somebody (probably the LJ) decided to light the dancers from behind with four huge red lights, casting the dancers in a red glow, which ruins the autofocus and totally throws off white balance. It took me a lot of effort in lightroom to recover some colors from the RAW data (this proves that shooting RAW is the way to go; I couldn’t have done this with JPG).

It was hard to choose the best image of the evening, but I settled for this one because it just looks good in my opinion, the movement, the blurryness, the colors.

My job requires that I occasionally work in Nieuwegein office. There, along the A2, is an office complex that in my opinion just begs to be photographed. It has mirrored glass panes that would look great with a sunset in them. But I tried infrared photography with my customized Nikon, and it works just as well I think.

I went wild on the contrast and did a little photoshop to straighten the perspective.

Last friday was my day off and I decided to visit the local zoo. The weather was fine, and I wanted to experiment with my nikkor 70-200mm f/2.8 AF S VR , nikkor 85mm f/1.4 AF D, and my new nikkor 17-55mm f/2.8.

It seemed the animals were in a spring mood. I captured two red ibisses mating and  the prairiedogs had a lot of puppies running about that I captured on digital film with my new lens. I also visited the tigers and got a glimpse of one in the grass (the other one was indoors) and after waiting for about tenminutes it started to walk around and I got a great shot. In fact I think it is so great that I threw away a bunch of old ones I made a few years ago.

I added contrast to the picture, and saturated the red channel to tone down the green and make the tiger stick out more.

I was supposed to have a spring shoot in the dunes in Wijk aan Zee, with summer clothes and swimwear. Unfortunately the weather forecast was rainy, windy and a chilly 16 to 18 degree Celcius, so we called it off. One of the models however, insisted that we relocate to an indoor location, and a friend of a friend (nudge nudge, know what I mean) works in the Beurs van Berlage and fixed it so we could shoot there. Despite not feeling 100% I felt I had to go.

The building is great, but the strobe and tripod I borrowed had some problems (the flash refused to go of more times than it actually did, the tripod was a tad to frail to carry my three kilo camera) so after the shoot I binned the majority of my pictures.

The one below is the only one where both strobes fired. But although it looks great it has some major flaws (the model just said “WOW”, but as an artist I can see all the flaws) there is the flare from the flash, her shoe that touches the edge of the photo (ouch) the black background (I wanted to do some HDR as a background but that totally failed) her left leg is too high so her skirt covers it which I find less flattering)

Oh well, I’ll try this shot again sometime. At least her skirt nicely matches the yellow brick of the building

I really haven’t done any major PS work. I just straightened the picture, cropped it severely, used the cloning tool and healing a bit.

During my illness I was so bored I did some cliché stockphotography, just to have something to do beside surfing the net. So I got me a brand-spanking-new fork and a bunch of strawberries (to combat my illness with vitamin C), popped the vegetable on my fork, stuck it in a portable studio, and lit the thing up with my three SB 800 strobes. Learned a lot. Next time, more light, and a tripod would be better. Perhaps an assistant holding the fork would also be nice. Regardless of what you think of the picture, the strawberries were delicious.

Boosted brightness to make the background white (it was sort of grayish). Upped the contrast, did a bit of cropping.

I haven’t been updating my blog for one month now, since I’ve been sick. While I was sick I got a new lens I ordered at the beginning of may. I had to cancel a party shoot I had planned, and the only real photography I could do was a bit of sunset spotting from my balcony.

I went wild on the white balance (WB) temperature and other sliders until the sky looked red. In the original, I’d put the WB on tungsten making the picture a magical blue.

Partymania got me a gig at Paard van Troje last Saturday. It was supposed to be held in the main hall, but it turned out that they only expected three hundred people, and since the main hall was used for some sort of concert, followed by an nine hundred strong after party, Stug was moved to the small room.
I walked round, shooting various people, until some people I photographed pointed out to me that they already had the partymania website card that I give after I take a picture. So I gathered my stuff and left after I tried to photograph the second DJ of the evening.
Funny thing though, there was a French DJ who was difficult to photograph since he moved his head to the rhythm of the music.

You can find the rest of the pics here. I know that the picture below looks better, but that’s because the picture below was done in photoshop and the ones on the website were done with Lightroom which can go a long way but not as far as I’d like it to go

I met Aurora on one of my party shoots. As well as being a really nice person and fun to talk with, she has an angelic face, in my opinion really photogenic. So unable to resist, I asked if I could take some portraits of her.
She agreed, and we did the shoot in Clingendael park, together with one of her friends.

It was a lot of fun, but I had to work quickly; it was going to be a hot day, and they wanted to go to the beach, I wanted to go home and get some shuteye, as I had gotten very little sleep ’cause I’d photographed Frame the night before.

Anyway, I did all my usual photoshop stuff on the picture below. I had two that I thought were really good, and I asked Peter to pick out the one he thought I should put here. So if you don’t agree, flame/blame him