Do Not Fold

I love photography. And most of all, portraits. If you’d ask 3 photographers to make a portrait of the same person, the result will be totally different. Although the subject is the same, there is so much room for a personal touch. It’s all about the light, the atmosphere, the face, the assets, smoke, background, …

My favourite portrait photographer at the moment is Belgian photographer Stephan Vanfleteren. His portraits are really amazing imo. Good friend of mine, Thomas Vanhaute has great portraits as well, check out this beautiful portraits of Stanny Crets, Yasmine and many, many more. Photos like these inspire me so much to experiment myself with light, settings, etc. I want to officially declare this new year as the “I-want-to-make-portraits” – year :) Here are some of my older portrait experiments.

I’ve had a Lomo LCA camera for about 5 years but sold it about a year ago. It was a lot of fun and I learned a lot with it but it’s quite clear for me that I had to “upgrade”. With the LCA you have to anticipate the distance to your object to get a sharp picture, you can’t rely on the viewfinder to be accurate, and the vignetting might be cool but is not always. A lot of these things caused me to get a bit annoyed about it.

I wanted to frame the picture exactly like I wanted it to be, I wanted to control the focus and depth of field exactly as I wanted to be, etc. So I sold my LCA. Yesterday I bumped into a huge stack of pictures, all from within those 5 years of LCA pleasure. I’ve uploaded a couple of them on Flickr. For me it’s pure nostalgia :)

Replacement? Yes! I’ve found this lovely old Minolta on a second handed marked and bought it for 20 euros with three nice lenses (50mm f/1.2, 28mm f/2.8 and a 135mm f/2.8 lens) and a couple of accessories. It’s great! Manual focus, manual setup, manual manual manual :) Last week in Paris, I found this cool little Lomo LCA key chain in the same shop where I bought my first LCA. They make a perfect match!

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to you all! Coca Cola made this commercial some day, it’s one of the best Christmas commercials of all time imo. Reminds me of my youth. Cheers!

These Days is looking for new web-talents. We thought it would be fun to make a mini-site where you can show your true web-ninja skills. You got to hack your way into our minisite and prove you’re a true ninja! Good luck!

I can hear people say it already: “Silent for weeks… and then… this movie on his blog:”.

Sorry for the lack of recent updates here. It’s not my year, this year, but as you might have noticed… it’s almost over ;) I’ve got lots of things planned. More on that later!

I might do this every month starting from now. A picture I found that I like. This month: the cat and the kid.