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Thorpe Park

gloda — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 23:01:04 +0000

My friends and I went to Thorpe Park to relax a bit after all the exams. I took the Canon G9 along and made some videos, which I put together in Premiere.
Credits: Rakieta and Dom from Alterwizje Single by Babilon, http://jamendo.com/en/album/42291. My video and Babilon’s music are licensed separately under the Creative Commons “Attribution Share Alike 3.0” license.

Mudam

gloda — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 07:00:45 +0000

Alison came down to Luxembourg for Alain and Sté’s wedding. On the day before the wedding we visited the Musée d’Art Moderne on the Kirchberg before meeting some of my friends at the cinema. (Star Trek was quite good actually. Never liked the series, I’m a Star Wars geek, and the two are somewhat antagonistic.)

Chartham Hatch

gloda — Sat, 09 May 2009 14:25:42 +0000

After my return from Spain I spent most of my time backing up every single byte from my laptop. With me Murphy’s Computer Law has a habit of kicking in just before I cross the channel either way. Better safe than sorry. (And indeed as I type this on my acer, balanced on copies of Wild Fang and Gulliver’s Travels to let the air circulate beneath it, it’s overheating, the processor is running at 90% and it’s just a matter of time before it bites the dust. I hope the Macbook I’ve ordered will arrive soon…)
To counterbalance the IT frustration I got on my bike and visited the nature reserve in the woods around Chartham Hatch, not far from Canterbury. Turns out getting on the bike to go there was a dumb idea; you’re not allowed to cycle in the nature reserve. Even so it was an enjoyable walk through some beautiful areas, and I got the camera with the 10-20mm wide angle lens out of my bag more than once.

Similar stuff: Inspired by Nature, 2008 Favourites, Hengendag

Madrid

gloda — Mon, 04 May 2009 00:00:13 +0000

From the British capital to the Spanish one. I visited Gel for a weekend in Madrid. Gel is studying in Spain on her year abroad and this was one weekend were neither of us had classes to attend or essays to finish. We did all the touristy stuff (I even used my point&shoot all weekend long). We went to see the Royal Palace, the Cathedral and the Reina Sofía museum. You should have been there to feel the tension: everybody held their breath when a small boy was running away from his parents and at full speed towards Guernica. Priceless. (The painting too.) On Sunday we visited a huuuge market that filled about a dozen streets and three or so plazas. After listening to some traditional Spanish bagpipe players (wtf) in the Parque del Retiro we finished the day with some churros. They’re the most filling dessert you will ever eat. I thought I’d have to be rolled out of that Chocolatería.

Similar stuff: London with Ollie, Chartham Hatch, Broadstairs

London with Ollie

gloda — Fri, 01 May 2009 00:00:52 +0000

My friend Ollie had to go to the University College London for an interview. Since a) you don’t pay £16 (or £24 if like me you leave your railcard at home…) to go to London for half an hour and b) it’s no fun to visit London on your own, I went along and we visited the National Gallery and the British Museum. In the National Gallery I had fun reverse engineering the lighting techniques of the masters, and I got told off for taking a picture of the cupula in the entrance hall when we were leaving (I had asked one of the wardens about photography restrictions earlier and what he said sounded like no photography of the paintings was allowed.) In the British Museum photography is fine, but it’s also one of those places that’s been photographed to death so it’s difficult to take something new there.
While Ollie went to his interview I visited Jacobs Digital Photo & Video where they had a pretty good deal on Manfrotto 5001B Nanos (I have no idea what the difference between those and the 001Bs which they replace is, they look the same to me). I had also planned a visit to The Flash Centre but by the time we got there they were closed. So we went to a pub instead.

Über den Wolken

gloda — Mon, 13 Apr 2009 23:19:36 +0000

Our flight route

Back in the summer of 2008 I flew in a balloon over part of Luxembourg. I had been given a voucher for a flight by my secondary school, the Lycée Hubert Clement Esch as part of my baccalaureate, and it was sponsored by LuxGSM, so thanks to both of those. Now I actually got my diploma back in 2005, but it took the Cercle Luxembourgeois de l’Aerostation a while to take me along on a flight…
Anyway, we drove to a field near Hivange, asked the farmer for permission and got ready for take-off. I had to help get the balloon ready so there are no pictures of that. We flew over plenty of small towns that I didn’t really recognize from up above, one of the places I did recognize fairly easily though was the Aire de Berchem (and in case you were wondering, no, the police car did not stop at the stop sign), the pig farm near the Kuelbicher Haff (the latter is hidden rather well in the woods) and the Mariendaller Haff, near which we landed gently in another field – this time we didn’t ask the farmer’s permission beforehand though :) And with gently I mean that none of my camera equipment got damaged when the basket tipped over during the landing. That’s all that matters, my head has seen its share of bumps.
The title refers to the song Über den Wolken by Reinhard Mey.

Similar stuff: Hengendag, Kasematten, London with Ollie

Connecting Generations

gloda — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 00:55:23 +0000

About an hour ago the results for a photo competition entitled The Connection Between Generations (Lëtz: D’Verbindung tëschent den Generatiounen) organized by 45Plus together with photogen.lu were announced. My photo above won the public voting and convinced the professional jury. I’m now the happy winner of a Macbook, the photo will make the first page of a calendar and I can take part in a workshop during the Rencontres d’Arles.
I’m a happy camper, and the least I can do is to share some of the behind-the-scenes info of this photo. The competition had been announced months ago, but students are masters of deadline dodging: the picture was taken the day before submissions closed. I had had the idea for the shot in mind for a while, but the problem was my lack of models: pretty much anyone I know in the UK is around my age, whereas I needed to photograph a parent with their child. So I got on my bike, cycled to the playground looking for a family to take pictures with. It didn’t take long before I met Dan and Esme. I explained Dan why I wanted to take photographs with them and offered them a copy of the photo for their family album in return. So when Esme was ready (going down the slide takes priority, after all) we started shooting.
The concept required the photo’s point of view to correspond with Dan’s. So I put the Canon strap (see setup photo) around his neck; the Tamrac strap which can be clipped on went around his waist to further reduce camera shake. After some test shots the camera was set to burst mode (6.5fps) at f/5.6, 1/80, ISO 160 and 10mm, the camera was triggered with a radio-controlled shutter release. Dan was spinning fast which meant that I could get away with quite a short shutter speed and still get enough motion blur on the background. Four of the about 80 taken photos had enough sharpness on Esme’s face, the others were blurred. With all the movement and spinning, the camera ends up wobbling around a bit. Before packing up I asked Dan to sign a model release for Esme – this is something you should do whenever you take pictures in which people can be identified. The one I use confirms that I as the photographer retain all the rights to the image, including the right to publish it, and on the other hand states that the people who were photographed are entitled to a copy of the image(s).
At home I processed the RAW image in Lightroom 2.1, with multiple virtual copies which were adjusted for the different areas of the image. Those files were then put together in Photoshop CS3, where I added a picture of a blurred sky which I took after the shoot. I cloned out some distracting elements on the ground and selectively worked on contrast and colour. Finally I added a slight vignette to draw the viewer’s attention even more into the middle of the frame.
Many many thanks to Dan and Esme for spontaneously shooting with me, and to the jury as well as all those who voted for my entry!

Similar stuff: Photo Shopping, Nightwalk, Iron Man

Photogen.lu meetings

gloda — Sat, 06 Sep 2008 23:01:34 +0000

Over the summer various members from the photogen.lucommunity organized a series of meetings. I attended two of them, one in Mersch hosted by Kiichiii which lasted until late into the night, the other at the traditional Luxembourgian funfair, the Schueberfouer, organized by Marc Gerard. It’s cool to see how this little community keeps growing, at the moment it has close to 2000 members, which is not bad for a community based on such a small region as Luxembourg is.
Photographs of me: Tom Ewert, Lex Kleren.

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Hengendag

gloda — Sun, 31 Aug 2008 16:40:03 +0000

The eve of the Luxembourg national day, “Nationalfeierdag”, is one of those occasions on which our small capital seems to be bursting at the seams. I set out with my newly acquired 50mm 1.4 USM lens to capture the athmosphere of the evening and it didn’t take long before I bumped into some friends, then I moved on to watch the torchlight procession and the fireworks. Seeing as the last time I watched them I ended up with smoldering firework chemicals in my eye I chose a safer spot this time though.

DPC Canterbury GTG

gloda — Sun, 17 Aug 2008 06:00:43 +0000

For some reason it has rained at each and every DPChallenge get-together I’ve been to over the last year. No surprise then that the one I hosted myself didn’t greet us with sunshine. Even so Dain McGowan came all the way down to Canterbury to explore the city and the cathedral with me and Sebastian Andersson. In the afternoon we went up to campus to take photos at Artsfest.

Similar stuff: DPChallenge London GTG, Photogen.lu meetings