Frederik's Blog » pictures

Starting with photography

Frederik — Tue, 15 Feb 2011 22:23:20 +0000

I have always been interested in photography. Especially while traveling I like making lots of pictures. Up to now I have always been using a simple compact camera, but now I wanted to get some more advanced camera and to improve my skills. That is why last week I finally bought a Nikon D7000 DSLR camera together with a Nikkor 16-85 mm AF-S DX VR lens.

I am quite pleased with this camera. Once you have gone through the manual, it is not too difficult to use and the most common settings are easily accessible. Picture quality is nice, even on higher ISO levels.

Now that I have an excellent camera, I need to go practicing in order to improve my photography skills. Currently I am only a real beginner, so I do not expect any spectacular results soon. Still, here are a few examples of my first attempts.

My cat Sjama

Ghent: Gravensteen

Ghent: Sint-Jacob's church

Ghent: Saint Nicholas' Church, Belfry and Saint Bavo Cathedral

On my to-do list for the future: improving my photography skills, getting some more lenses (especially a 35mm prime lens would probably be nice), and finding an appropriate bag for protecting my current and future photography gear.

Blue sky

Frederik — Sun, 18 Apr 2010 18:12:36 +0000

Blue sky

Just an ordinary sky on a nice spring week-end? No. Notice the lack of any airplane trails. Because of the ash cloud caused by Iceland’s volcano, all of northern Europe’s airspace is closed. I guess I will never see this again in my lifetime, such a nice blue sky…

New toys

Frederik — Wed, 24 Dec 2008 18:42:51 +0000

Since Friday I have my new hifi system. The new components are:

Marantz PM8003 amplifier
Marantz ST7001 DAB tuner
Focal Chorus 816v speakers

For audio CDs I still use my old Panasonic DVD-RV32. Although this is probably not of the same class as the other components, I don’t hear anything wrong with it, so I don’t see any reason to replace it soon.

I am really amazed by the sound quality of this system. The sound is very detailed, with impressive treble and a very nice and not too overwhelming bass. It’s great to be able to enjoy the real sound quality of audio CDs now. Although DAB radio sounds clearly worse than audio CDs (not very surprising knowing that DAB radio is using 160 kbps MPEG 1 Layer 2 compression here), even with DAB I hear a more detailed sound than on my previous system.

Music For Life

Frederik — Sun, 21 Dec 2008 23:57:53 +0000

For the third year now, the radio station Studio Brussel is organizing an action to collect money for the Red Cross, this year for homeless mothers and children fleeing war. 3 DJs of the station, make live radio 24/24h for one week from a studio (called “Glass House”) which this year is in my home city, Ghent. Listeners pay to request songs, (youth) associations organize all kind of actions to collect money and bring in the money live on the radio, VIPs organize auctions of all kind of objects,… During that week the DJs don’t leave Glass House and don’t eat. They live on fruit and vegetable juices.

The action is very popular. Because the Glass House is in Ghent, I went there to take some pictures. The quality is not too great because of the bad lighting conditions, the glass, and the many people standing there. Not to mention that I’m just a basic amateur photographer with a very simple camera (Canon Ixus 800IS for those who want to know). Actually I felt a bit like watching the monkey cage in a zoo :-) There’s quite a great atmosphere though and the DJs are doing an amazing job.

The same action was held last week in Sweden too, and this week also in The Netherlands.

Watch and listen live on http://www.stubru.be, till the evening (GMT+1) of 24 December.

Music For Life 2008 House in Ghent

DJ Tomas De Soete, painter Kamagurka, DJ Sofie Lemaire and DJ Siska Schoeters in the Music For Life house

Singer songwriter Selah Sue performing for Music For Life 2008

By the way, this is my first post in WordPress, to which I migrated from Serendipity. There’s still some work left to do to make it look perfectly, but the basics should be fine now.