In summer The Hague turns into festival city. One of them is parkpop, which is a free festival in “het Zuiderpark”. When I found out Juliette Lewis was gonna play there I decide to go this year, I’ve been sort of a fan of her ever since I saw Cape Fear on video. That was actually quite some time ago. A couple of years ago I heard she was doing less acting and more music, decided to check it out and I really enjoy her energy. Also watched Danko Jones, which was also very good but less interesting to take pics of since he sings and plays the guitar so mainly has one pose for the most part of the show. Seen some other stuff as well but not that interesting.

I know, it’s been like forever. Truth is, not much urban exploring has been done lately. There were some small things but when I had the day off Illogical and I decided to head back to Beringen and see what was left of it. Seems they are turning a part into a museum with hiking/biking tracks all around the facility. It is not that closed off and easy to reach from these paths. These paths are not open yet I think so it might be that they’ll have some better fencing when they open. Might be an interesting trail to ride someday. The upper floors of the buildings can’t be reached anymore unless you bring a ladder. They cut down all the stairs. Probably safer anyway but not so much fun. We had a good time on the ground floors anyway.

In Bergambacht where I work, there’s this small photography business that quit a little while ago. The shop is still here and when you ring the bell you can get inside and still buy stuff at ridiculous rates :) So last time I was there I picked up this “for Canon” 25mm extender for 10 euro’s. Some other stuff picked up: canon 18-55 lens, 2 simple flashes, some 1/4″ bolts, a Manfrotto window clamp and head and a bunch of cables. I ended up paying 50 euro’s. Next to nothing, right? So here are some shots taken with the 25 mm macro extender and my 50mm 1.8.

Every now and then we have a familyweekend and this time we gathered at Hoek van Holland for a tour of Fort Hoek van Holland. Pretty nice but we had a bit of a strange guide. After that I wanted to visit the bunkers and tunnels that are there in that area. I got some details on how to get there and one of my cousins joined me for this small detour. It turned out to be a lot of bushwhacking to get there since there where bushes of over 2 meters high. And they weren’t of the friendly kind :( So when we finally got to the bunker… Well, let’s say we didn’t make new friends on this trip. We had to hand in our papers and got an official warning… Just wondering if we’d get a note of that in the mail someday or anything? Anyway, this guy was really the typical “couldn’t be a real cop but got this job to annoy people and I like the uniform”-type. And he was convinced that “we all” knew why we where there. I still haven’t got a clue as to what he was referring to, I really came there to take pictures and told him so but hey, it’s not one of those times to get smart :P There must be some sort of sensor or camera system there, he got to us pretty quickly and by the looks of it he just drove up to the site, left the gate open and all. We thought we had to bushwhack our way back to the road but it appeared that just two steps further the bushes stopped and there was just dunes and the exit…

I work for a client in Spijkenisse so when I got there a bit early one day I decided to take some pics. I’d already brought my camera a few times but I was either late or the weather was bad. Not this time. Drove around a bit to see what to shoot, it’s not like you can park your can anywhere there. I also shot some panorama’s but I’ll put these up in a next post. First shot at the Esso terrain I was shooed away, noted my license plate and everything… I was still on the right side of the fence and no sign that said I couldn’t take pictures though. Too bad I only got the chance to take three shots and not even have the time to dial in my flash. Well… it’s the way things go, better luck next time.

Sorta theme of this day: “Lost and found”, or how to include stuff that is allready there in your images.

For our portrait photography course we had to shoot a self portrait. I had this idea about shooting myself through a lens so worked this out. It proved not that easy but, you live, you learn and I learned some stuff. Or more remembered some stuff actually. It was mainly the space available that bothered me. Included setup diagram (used the psd from Kevin Kertz) and setup pics. Also included some shots made on the third evening of the course.

So, the other day I was thinking about packing stuff and what I was going to drag along with me on a short trip and came across my omnibounce. I thought it’s quite a pain in the … when it has to go in my bag. I had some A4 folders I had bought for a next mini softbox but I figured I could make a nice foldable omnibounce out of this stuff. So after some heavy origami I ended up with this concept which works pretty well. I started out thinking I could do something like the way a shopper bag folds but that would need some gluing and this stuff just won’t glue. After some toying around with paper sheets I made this one. I am working on a V2 which will be able to hold a gel as well. Template is here, it’s for a 70×45 flash head but you can scale it down when printing or . Check out the images for more details.

Last week I started on this course at Griffioen at the VU and these are some of the results from day 2. (Or actually evening 2) The “models” are fellow photographers. Mainly using one light setups, continuous light at high iso’s.