It’s been a while since I used a studio setup, so I thought to get some paper sheets out again.
Used my large roof window for a nice sunny toplight, and added another light to the scene for the pics with a black background. I made thsese float using fishingwire. Anyway, enjoy!
Small disclaimer: The guns are all toyguns, I do not own any fire-arm.
So, Camilla and me had a nice day in the citycenter. Talked, laughed, laughed more and we did groceries. Seriously they should add bars in grocerystores. It would be very profitable.
When going home, I saw a lot of birds being fed by people… so the birds got close. Of course I had my camera with me, so I decided to shoot.
Well, it was Christmas after all. So here I went, back to Almere to visit my parents.
It was not a snowy white Christmas as we all hoped for, but it was cold enough to keep most people inside. Especially since all the shops were closed on Christmas day. Perfect oppertunity for me to grab my camera and shoot an almost abandonned Almere-Stad city center. Enjoy!
Was doing an asignment in and around Arnhem, so I decided to also take some other pics.
All taken with the Canon EOS 5DSR and Sigma 11-24mm ultra wide lens which works amazingly awesome at full frame. It’s very sharp and the images are great to edit in Photoshop using RAW. Anyway, enjoy!
It’s Autumn, and you probably see all your friends posting pictures of yellow/orangy leafs. Well, I’m not so different…
Lucky for me, I live not far from the Dutch Veluwe. A large natural area with beautiful places. It’s not flat at all (like the rest of the Netherlands) and has amazing areas of meadow, sandfields and forrest. I had a small stroll and took these photos.
Had a small ride to he local docks today. Not many pics, but I’m experimenting with the style. Enjoy.
All taken with the 5DSr and Sigma 12-24 frickin-wide angle lens.
A grand opening of a beautiful cinema, with great people, drinks, great bites and a fantastic movie seen in all of it’s glory. Sounds great? It sure was.
Monday evening was the opening of Pathé’s new cinema in Arnhem. And they sure know how to open a cinema. From the welcome untill the end, the evening was very enjoyable. The evening started with a drink, a bite and some nice chats with nice people. It was great to walk through the building now it’s finished, and it sure looks amazing. The interiour has a nice loungy atmosphere, combined with a beautiful view over the city.
After all of this socializing, we crowd headed for the movie. It was shown using the most advanced IMAX hardware available today. Actually, the whole cinema “Zaal 1” was designed for the ultimate IMAX experience. And an experience it was…
Imax really pushed their limits with this new cinema. Using 2 advanced projectors, the screen is crystal clear and beautiful. The 3D-effect was superb, nothing like I’ve seen before. I actually dodged and blinked a couple of times during the movie. And let’s not forget the 12-point mega advanced sound system. They did a demonstration to show how sound was back in the days, some years ago, a year ago and then demonstrated why this new system was completely awesome. An excellent performance.
Bottomline, it’s a great cinema with a very complete package. An amazing movie-experience and a great location for social gatherings and parties.
The Canon EOS 5DSr is a beast. Not just because it’s a highly professional, full frame, versatile and complete camera.
It also features a Low Pass Filter (LPF) Cancellation filter. When you have any other digital (SLR) camera, there’s a Low Pass Filter in front of your sensor. This causes a nice piece of anti-aliasing which effectively blurs your image slightly, to prevent moire. (Read more about it) This is very noticeable when you shoot area’s with small patterns such as the texture of clothes. However, to get maximum sharpness, the 5DSr has another filter cancelling this effect out.
Another reason the 5DSr is a true beast is it’s sensor. Canon must have thought “Ah more sharpness, let’s capture that in all of it’s glory”. So they came with a 50.6MP sensor. But with all this sharpness and all these megapixels, will your favorite lenses hold up?
I wanted to have a super wide angle lens without the fisheye effect. I love the Sigma 15mm fisheye, but a regular wide-angle does have it’s benefits. The new Canon 11-24mm f/4l looks superb, but so is it’s price-tag. So I went for the Sigma 12-24mm. Well, this isn’t going to be a review, but I have to say I’m very pleased with the results. IMHO, they’re easily ready for large scale print. Enjoy!
It’s always fun to bring your camera to work. When you go there, or go back, you’ll always see some nice stuff.
The new trainstation is something I pass everyday to work. They’ve been working on this for over the past 5 years or so, but it’s finally getting there. Here are three pics I took with the Canon EOS 5DSR and Sigma 15mm fisheye lens.
Who said cinema’s are dead? Pathé is opening a huge new cinema in Arnhem, and it’s really nice.
So in just two weeks time, this new cimema will open it’s doors. There’s still a lot to be done but you can already see it will be sweet. I was asked to join a fella journalist for Ik hou van Arnhem to check it out and take some pics.
It will officially open the 20th of October for the grand public, but we’ll also be at the opening the 19th for guests and press. Nice!
Yesterday, I went on a cycling trip with Camilla. We did a total of 50km and ended up getting home way later than expected…
I wanted to buy something and then go to two friends in Brummen. We both took our camera’s and shot quite some pics. Camilla brought a 18-55 and a 70-200 while I was stuck with just a 15mm fisheye. All of these were taken with my full-frame fisheye setup.
Can we get any closer?
Yes we can.
Bridge from Arnhem to Westervoort.
A nice street in Doesburg.
Camilla enjoy the sky ‘nd freedom.
Hello there.
Monday, for many people a day where the weekend ends, and your job says hi again. But not for me, since Monday is my day off. Yet, I still had to go to the office for one important meeting.
But after the meeting I was of course free to go where I want. I walked back home when I passed Arnhem’s famous Eusebiuskerk, the large church in the middle of Arnhem. I’ve been capturing it a lot, since I can see it from my window, but I’ve never actually been on there. So let’s do it! Brought my 15mm fisheye and 70-200 to enjoy the view through the Canon EOS 5DSr’s monstrous 50 megapixels. And this is what Arnhem looks that way.
Allright let me start with this: a LOT has changed. But a lot of good things too. I got a LOT of new gear, so I’ll be showing off soon. Also a new camera body… the mighty Canon EOS 5DSr. took it for a spin, here are some results. Will give a nice review later on.
I guess the last shot kinda gave away what one of the new gadgets was… hehe.
The Fitbit Flex is Fitbit’s beginner-model in a range of advanced activity trackers. It’s stylish, clean, small and it is a very nice introduction to the world of activity tracking.
It basically keeps track of two things: your number of steps and the way you sleep. Now, this sounds very basic but it takes the data a nice step further.
It registers the number of steps, intensity and also when you made these steps. This is great because at the end of the day you can look at a graph and see exactly when you were most active. This is actually a fun part for me. While looking at the graph you can often explain all the statistics. Useful? Not sure. Fun? Yes!
For example, this was me a couple of days ago. Woke up around 7:30, got dressed, checked my e-mail around 9 and went for a walk since I needed to do some shopping. I walked quite fast (hence the red and even green bars) but you see around 9:30 I seemed to drop pace. Why? I was in a very busy story and had to wait for a lot of people.
I walked quite some the rest of the day, had a late lunch around 1 and met a friend around 2, we talked for quite a while.
Around 8 I had to catch a train so I walked very fast for quite a while, the train station isn’t around the corner. As you can see, I got into the train because I didn’t walk for a while.
The Fitbit also measures your sleeping behavior, and I must say it’s quite an insight. It shows you from when to when you slept, when you were in a deep sleep and when you were actually awake(ish). Apparently I’m even more awake than I feared, and I really need to go to bed earlier to get my 8 hours of sleep. I was actually only getting 3 hours tops! No wonder I felt so horrible in the morning. It also showed I was seriously active during the night, so I made some changes to fix this. No coffee after 3pm, going to bed earlier, close the pc down a bit earlier, go for a quick walk an hour before bed… and I started seeing my statistics getting better. Great insight!
You have to tap the Fitbit five times before going to sleep, and do it again as you wake up. You mark your sleepytime by doing this. You might forget this once in a while, but no worries you can fix that afterwards on your online dashboard.
AppThere’s also a Fitbit App. You can see all the stats you want, see the number of steps, set the silent alarmclock (it will vibrate until you wake up, perfect if you have a partner who can sleep longer than you) and much more. Works very fast and it’s included without additional charges. Nice!
You work on your body for yourself and you should always compare your achievements with your own previous ones. However, having friends who have a bout the same life-rythm as you can be fun to challenge steps wise. You can add each other, start challenges and just keep a weekly score-table to see who’s ahead in steps. I can assure you that this is a huge boost and made me walk quite some extra kilometers already.
The company Fitbit really impressed me. They put a product on the market, pioneered and while growing, they kept genuine. I had an issue with mine (at first I believe it was my own fault) and they helped me greatly. Seriously, I can’t even come up with tips how to do it even better. Good stuff!
The Fitbit is a nice tool/gadget to have. It will give sporters a lot of insight to their performance. Are you a serious sporter? Look for the other models from Fitbit, they will give you more data. For the average user, the Fitbit will be quite the stimulant to move just a bit more, and live a healthier life. Money well spent!
More info: http://www.fitbit.com
There are a lot of bluetooth mobile speakersystems out there, but which one to go for? I’ve had Harman kardon’s Bluetooth speakers before, but had to bring ‘m back. Then I saw Logitech’s UE Boom…
They look good, Logitech is a well known brand and after googling a bit, I saw they’re getting very decent reviews. So I got on my bike, raced to the Mediamarkt and got ‘m. My first impressions?
The sound is the most important aspect of course. I was impressed. The bass is nice, not as booming as perhaps some others (which cost roughly over $300…) but it’s noticeable and nice. All other tones are very fine, especially for the price, even at loud volume. Speaking of which, the volume is great. If you have a closed space with 70-100 people, this could be the music-provider of the evening.
It’s also working very well for outside use. I was amazed how well it worked in an open field. So Sound-wise, it’s all good here.
The speaker is supposed to be truly 360 degrees of sound magic. However, if you rotate it you will hear some differences. Not 100% true 360 degree sound, but it comes easily close enough. It’s omnidirectional for sure.
Do you have two of these? Or does a friend of yours have one too? Then you can pair ‘m for a louder surround feeling. Nice!
Well, as you can see, it looks nice. It feels very solid and looks great. The huge + and – are actually volume controls which work just as expected, after pushing the soft rubber it has a nice click for confirmation.
There’s also a small C-ring at the other side, so you could hang it upside down. Excellent idea.
Also, it’s water resistant. Now don’t go diving with it, but it should resist a couple of splashes. Good stuff.
Last but not least, there are a LOT of designs out there with various colors. They all look stunning and I had a serious difficult time choosing the one I wanted.
So far I’ve been using it all day on one single charge. I’m not sure about the hours, but I guess at 60% volume you can use it at least 10 hours or more. Google other reviews for this. However, so far I just charged it because I could, not because I should’ve.
The sound is better than expected. The speaker isn’t cheap, but it’s totally worth it. It feels very solid and can easily compete with much more expensive models.
Victor has been a buddy of mine for a long time now. We’ve studied, worked traveled and even lived together for a while in the UK. So it wasn’t surprising that he started working as a colleague 9 months ago.
But all good things must also end, so he had his last day of work last tuesday. Since I had a day off the next day, we decided to do a one day bicycle trip into Germany. We ended doing about 170km, and it was awesome. Here are some of the pics.
This was already in Germany, about 10km after Emmerich. We had a small stop since I wanted to check the map. A little bit further and…. we’d be at this beautiful castle.
For me, this is a typical German town. Some larger houses, a wheat field and the townsname on a yellow sign. As German as it could be.
Close to Rees is an abandoned building. I’m not sure what it was, but there were coal-carts, rails, ovens and boilerrooms. I’ve been here a couple of years ago, but things have changed. People actually turned it into a “Chill-Lounge” as they called it themselves. Looks kinda relaxed! Click on the image of a larger version of the panorama.
These are actually 3 photo’s merged together since I didn’t bring any fisheye lens.
A photo for our dear friends Sjoerd Bisselink and Clair Bissell.
This was in Wesel, and was a bit typical for our trip. Often you find yourself cycling in a dull place, and all of a sudden something huge/old like this appears. We’ve seen castles like Hogwarts, or this in the middle of a boring neighbourhood. Cool stuff.
This is actually only 10% of the whole image. And, it was taken while cycling on my bicycle. Didn’t stand still.
Here, we’re back in the Netherlands. The sun was setting, it was finally getting a bit cooler, and we had a final 20km to go through forrest and open fields. But we managed to get to Boxmeer and take the train home.
It was an awesome journey, lot’s of fun and with some lessons learned.
That was it, hope you enjoyed the pics. Can’t wait for my next adventure!
Once in a while, there’s this new app which shakes us all up. It’s the latest “have you heard of..?” trend and everyone jumps onto it. Think of things like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Happening… and now Periscope.
Periscope is an app which let you broadcast your phone’s camera on the web. People can join in and see what you are doing. We’ve been broadcasting webcams for ages, so why Periscope? Well, because it works seamlesly with your phone’s camera. At any place, any time.
You can look on a world map, zoom in to your desired location and check out if anyone is broadcasting. When you see something interesting, open the stream and enjoy. You’re now officially peeping along.
When you are watching, you can either send hearts by tapping the screen, or say something by chat. This is great for live vloggers who do Q&A’s. Yesterday, I saw some therapist do a broadcast and she told about life and how to handle it. Very interesting…
Anything, really anything. So far the nudity-level has been great. I have yet to find anything 18+. So it’s fine if your kid uses periscope.
Right now, these are the typical feeds you will find:
Groups of people having fun. Especially in the Spain and New York area. Youngsters who have a party, or their chilling out at a terasse and one of them is the goofus who takes his/her phone and starts showing the world what they’re doing. Then, some people join in on the fun and type something like “Hi from Brazil!”. This will make friends of the user ask “What, some-one from Brazil is watching us?”.
People comuting People love broadcasting their ways of transportation. You see people walk on the streets, drive a car to the bank, to the mall, ride their bicycle, ride their skateboard, from a boat or boarding an airplane. It’s all there.
Couples just saying hi There’s a lot of people who just sit in their (living)room and talk. They feel like they’re hosting a popular show. They talk about their opinion and answer questions… about them.
Turkish girls not living in Turkey There are a lot of Turkish people using the app in Europe. Most of the broadcasts are by Turkish people. For some reason (especially in France) a lot of Turkish girls just play pretty and talk a bit about… actually no idea. It’s all in Turkish.
Events There’s always this guy at some event who thinks he the world wants to join in on this global (local) event. Cyclists, paintball, jeux de boulles… it’s all there.
Live shows and holidays people have no idea what the costs for roaming are. That is obvious when you see some people in foreign countries stream whole vacations. In this case, a dolphin show with 24 watching people simply loving it (see all hearts).
So yeah I bought an iPhone 6 just two days ago. The 4G made a huge difference with my old IPhone 4 3G connection, and thought why not give it a try. As you could see in my previous post, I did a nice bicycle trip yesterday.
So I got into a meadow, with no signs of civilisation as we like it for at least 10 miles around me. Grabbed my iPhone and voila: I was live, on the internet. And the stream quality? Really nice! I was seriously surprised how well it performed.
So, bottomline: Periscope is a fun app where you can see other people’s live, actually meet people and inspire others with what you are doing. I like it.
It was perhaps a bit late, but I wanted to do a bicycle trip yesterday. So at 17:00 I got on my bike and started moving.
I’ve been on the road from Arnhem to Zutphen/Brummen quite often, but I never went to Doesburg, which is close to the road. It’s a famous little town, so I had to visit it. I must say, it was quite nice.
After visiting the town, I decided not to go back the same route. I never like seeing the same road twice, so I just kept on going in the direction of Didam. There I cought up with my regular route to Germany, and went home.
Here are some pics of the journey, all taken with my Canon EOS M and it’s kitlens.
Last but not least, here’s the route I did.
Today, something different. A while ago I bought some lens-cups from Dealextreme. Received the three two months later and loved them. However,…
One of the bastards started to leak at the bottom. I wasn’t going to glue or fix it, since I don’t like glues in my drinks, so I decided to recycle it.
I live at the top floor of an old building, so as you can guess I have no garden. Now I sorta have.
The last time I bought a laptop was back in 2007. And while the machine still works, it became as slow as a steam-engine.
So what’d I get? I’m planning on new adventures, travels and trips so it needs to be lightweight and not too large. I want to write on it, browse the web, update my website and edit my pics on the fly. I don’t like posting photo’s straight from my camera to my website, so I need Photoshop to run smoothly.
Even though I’ve never used a Macbook before, I decided to take a gamble. Victor has been using one for a while and he loves it. He also brought it along to the USA during our bicycle adventure, and that was damn convenient (for him). So what can go wrong?
Went to the iCenter store to get a Macbook Air. However, the regular Macbook was even smaller, faster and cheaper. So the Air lost my vote. Compared the Macbook with the Pro version, and decided to go for the 13″ Macbook Pro. It has a large superfast SSD, a fast processor, it’s retina screen is amazing and the resolution is great. The new touchpad is designed for me. I mean, it has the same action as on my camera. A soft press for focus (first click) and a harder press for a second press. Good stuff.
So far so good. It works super smooth and I got the hang of it in a matter of minutes. Yes, sometimes I have to google how to do specific stuff, but in general it’s very intuitive. Installing software is amazingly simple. Just drag, drop and you’re good to go.
Browsing the web is great. Everything is smooth and fast. I’ve also installed Photoshop, Office and it works all above expectations. Any downsides so far? Nope.
Lucky me; they added a EUR 130 coupon to my Macbook pro, and I decided to go for the Magic mouse and it’s wireless dockingstation. I’m used to my EUR 7 Logitech so the switch was quite, impressive. The mouse is precise, but that’s not why it’s so great. The whole top is one big touchpad, and that’s amazing for scrolling through pages or photo’s. Overall: highly impressed.
So, yesterday my dear friend Camilla came over and we worked on our Macbooks all day. I was mainly installing software and configuring my shiny new Apple. So I also had to test Photoshop. Camilla brought a lemon and mint leaves so we had some nice cold refreshing minty-lemon-water. I took a photo, and it became the first EOS photo I’ve edited on my new Mac. It suits, since I find my Macbook Pro amazingly refreshing. Cheers!
So my landlord thought it was a good idea to explore our rooftop. Brought my camera, and I liked it’s view. So what’d I do?
Exactly! Pretty sure you guessed correctly that I took my 15mm fisheye, slammed it on my 5DII fullframe and I captured it’s view in 360 degree panorama. The result is OK, not perfect but it’s fine. I had to patch up quite a lot of things in Photoshop, but who cares. One of the photo’s is actually from the first panorama attemt, which I found out when I saw the shadow of a tree was a lot further than the other pic. I guess Earth DOES rotate around the sun hehe.
Want to watch the full 52 megapixel photo? View the full panorama picture (9mb!)
Took a bunch of random pics from earlier times, asked random people how to edit them.
They had no idea what they were… so it’s quite random. Here are the results.
So that was Logan. I’ve not been chatting a lot on Omegle. I guess less than 10 convo’s in 30 days, but yet I re-found a really nice person. Here’s the pic that came out of that convo:
So, I didn’t need to work last Wednesday. What did I do? Well, I felt like going for a bike trip.
I left home pretty late, around 2PM, but ended doing a 80km trip. Had lot’s of wind, which wasn’t helping. And even a bit of rain inbetween Kleve and Emmerich. But in the end, I made it back home. I also got some groceries in Kleve, so my backpack was top-heavy. Wasn’t helping but it’s always fun doing groceries in a different country with different products.
A small experiment: took my EOS M Systemcamera along and shot all pics in RAW format. I never did that before with this camera, but I feel I should’ve used that feature a long long time ago.
Anyway, here are the pics. Enjoy!
Today, the Dutch have been celebrating Kingsday. For me it went a ride on my bicycle to two friends.
They live about 20km away and ended up, with a detour, making it a nice 50km ride. Took some photos along the route, and also capture my friends parrot, Senna. What great name!
Throughout the years, I’ve made quite some stencils. I mostly design them on the computer, print them and cut them out with a hobbyknife.
It might sound a little basic, but just painting a piece of canvas in one solid color and then adding a black stencil is quite cool to do. The results are smooth and look great. Here are some examples of “paintings” I’ve done. They’re all from my livingroon.
So a new website, and a totally new approach. What has happened?
Well, about 8 months ago I was able to rent a very large space for a great price. So I took the deal and started my own company. Stfoto was finally something official, and I had a place to set my own studio up.
I’ve learnt a lot in a very short time. Both about photography and about the whole business side of it. Financial stuff, customer journeys and customer service: I had a long way to go.
I must say, if I’d do it again I would do it totally different. Is that a bad thing? Nah, means I’ve learnt a lot which is fine. Bottomline is; I’ve had a LOT of fun in the studio.
Anyway I had to leave the place since the owner found a new destination for the room.
I decided to focus again on my life rather than work. I have a great job at VGZ and my passion for all of my hobbies hasn’t vanished. So that’s what I’m going to focus on. I’m working out too to get myself in shape which brings a lot of traveling, workouts, healthy foods along. I’m going to travel more again, do creative projects, work on the airsoft field and so much more. I want to capture it all and blog about it here. So the corporate website Stfoto.nl had became turned again back into a very personal blog.
Well that’s it for now, enjoy the new website. I started all of this after talking to Ola who I met yesterday. She inspired me to actually blog again, and I ended up working on this website and writing this update until now, which is 3:30 AM. Gheez…. I need some sleep… Did I mention I’m working on a healthier lifestyle yet?
The weather became sunny again, and since I love to ride my bicycle I thought it was time to grab my bike and see what was out there.
Here in the Netherlands, we often have rain and cold weather. But not today. No, the sun was shining. I felt good, and in a very healthy mood so I decided to eat some beans and tuna in the morning. After that I went for a quick tour on my bike. Eventhough the Netherlands is famous for being as flat as a pancake, there’s a nasty little hill in our area which is still higher than the average speedbump; the Posbank. (not to be confused with Postbank, an old Dutch bank which is now known as ING).
After hearing many people talking about this horrific mountain, I decided to challenge it myself. Well I have to say, the view is quite nice, but the Posbank itself isn’t much of a challenge. It was fun tho! Here are some pics I took.
So, I needed a haircut. Saw this advert about this barbershop and decided to go.
As a photographer, I often have my camera with me. Started talking about photography and I ended up making some portrait pics of all the people working there. Best thing yet: I had a free haircut!
Be sure to like their Facebook page, they’re awesome.
Winter! Oh how much I love it. Near my photostudio is a small field with lot’s of rabbits, decided to go there and shoot some…
Of course this was with my camera, I’d never kill one of these bundles of joy. Brought my recently purchased 70-200 2.8 and well, check out these cute fluffy adorable sweet results.
Remember George? He was one of the two guys who joined me on a crazy bicycle adventure.
So he came over to inspect my studio, of course he had to become the subject of my next creative session, fun times.
