For a while I am walking with this idea in my head to create a book, a photo book of coarse. I already got a theme and some ideas on the type of photography. Below you will find an sample of the first test shots.

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var description = “Fooling around with scale models again. Combining them with selfmade paper structures and using them to create a new world”;

In the near future I will explain the whole idea, but for now you will have to do with some teasers, and a working title – Phantoms

A day at the Apenheul in Apeldoorn is always a nice opportunity to shoot some nice monkey photos. Especially when there are newborn monkeys. Today we went with the kids and we had a wonderful day with many photo opportunities.
Click on the monkey photo above to go to the gallery. There you will find more monkey photos.
I especially like the ones with the little baby Squirrel monkeys. The small hands and the one where the mother is feeding her baby. I was able to make these with just a lot of patience and some good luck.
All shot with my Canon 5D mkii and 24-70MM or 70-200MM lenses.

Thanks to cameraland.nl I got the opportunity to test the Rodenstock Vario ND filter, a variable neutral density filter. Last year I got my hands on the LCW Fader ND mkII for a test (click here to see the results). Personally I was not very impressed by the LCW Fader ND, not even by the mkII. My main concern was the ‘cross’ (cruciform or ‘X’) the would show while using a wide angle lens. It appeared on my Canon EF 24-70mm f/2.8 USM so I didn’t even bother to test the Canon 16-35mm f/2.8 USM II. (See on the example of the cross issue on this page.) So I was hoping the Rodenstock Vario ND will perform better.
First impression

The first difference that I noticed was that the product description of the Rodenstock Vario ND was pretty clear on the ‘known’ issues with wide angle lenses. They even marked the filter with ‘max’ which is just next to the +5 marker. Anything beyond this max marker is not guaranteed to give good results. And they were right. If you ignore their warning you will get unexpected results as you will see in my tests. I didn’t really experience any issues with color shifts, so that is way better compared tot the LCW Fader ND mkII. With the lather I experienced color shifts on several occasions.
The test
With the filter from Rodenstock I decided to give it al full test. I tried it on almost every piece of glass that I own. This caused a few problems due to the fact that I got the 82mm version of the Rodenstock Vario ND for my test and most of my lenses have the 77mm thread. So I needed an adapter ring. Normally this wouldn’t be a problem but this time

The first shoot where I tried the floating concept (or should I say hovering?). My daughter and I had a lot of fun creating these trick photography photo’s. Wondering how we did it? – just place your mouse over the large image to see the un-edited version.
After shooting we went straight home (to warm up and) to see the result. After a few tweaks in Adobe Lightroom we were both satisfied with the end result.

The whole idea is that you support your subject with something that  distincts from its surroundings, so in my case the green stool. This can be easily removed in an image editing program like Adobe Photoshop. Make sure you place your camera on a tripod and make the shot. Then remove the subject and the stool without altering the rest. So in the above example we needed to be careful not to leave footprints in the snow or bump against the sled. Take a second shot (without the little lady and stool) and in Photoshop you load both photos. Place the one with the subject in it on top of the other.
Use your favorite tool to remove (erase) the green stool from the top image. And as if it’s magic you will see it disappear. (In other words the image in the back will show where the stool was. And because you used a tripod it will not differ from the top image.
In my case I was careless and I needed also the remove the pulling rope which was tied to the sled. As you can notice I also had to created (draw) the missing parts of the black pants of Nicki otherwise her legs wouldn’t look natural. To top it off I also extended the scarf, and added shadow on the

A while ago I have been working on an old concept. (I just realised that I also need to place those photos as well (will do tomorrow)) The concept is about floating, and in this particular case, it is my 4yrs old daughter who will be doing the floating (flying, hovering, or whatever you want to call it).

Above you can hover with your mouse over the image and you will see the before and after versions

My first edit was the one here on the right. After toying with it for a while I can to the conclusion it still needed a few things. So I kept fiddling until I came to the result here above. I especially like the movement that I added to the image.
For this I used Adobe Photoshop and added radial blur to the wheels and motion blur to the background. When done I re-imported the photo into Adobe Lightroom so I could make the last adjustments. (vibrance, clarity, and whitebalance)

As added bonus we also brought the slede. And this became the prop for the next shot, which you can see here on the left. We used the same technique as before. But more about that later on.

I have uploaded a few portraits of Nickita our daughter.

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Today I went live with frozentimes.net version 5.0.
A complete new look & feel.
A new user interface.
A new approach to blogging.
A new gallery backend.
I am hoping that by replacing the gallery backend the whole site will gain in performance (speed) and it will be easier for me to maintain the gallery and export photos from my library software to the website.
Further more I felt like that the design was outdated. I went from a traditional way of presenting blog posts (top to bottom) to a magazine style.
See the images below.

I also added a new way to search. You now can search thru the articles and the photos. Or just the articles or just the photos. Change the mode by clicking the small icons next to the search button. ()
About navigation, there also a few things changed. You now can flip thru the pages with [shift][left arrow] and [shift][right arrow], you can use the same key combination for flipping thru the posts and the gallery pages.
If you open the photos in large format you can flip thru them with just the arrow keys [arrow left], [arrow right].
I also decided to abandon my old ‘bumper’page. And I am sure I am going to miss it. For old times sake, I left it on the server (it can be found here)

 
Leaves me to thank my ‘nerding’ buddy Jeroen for all the help and the advice whilst building this new template.
I do hope you enjoy the new version, so please let me know your thoughts on the new design via the comments form at the bottom of this post.

What do you mean taking photo’s on a consistent basis. Just noticed that we took almost the same amount of photos per year of our daughter with exception of the first year. Just funny to notice. (See print screen from my lightroom libary. 5th year just started)

During my last travel to Andalusia (Spain) I made a lot of HDR shots, all of them were shot without tripod. I knew it was a risk, but it worked out fine for me. With the current versions of Photomatix and Adobe Photoshop (and probably many others) you can correct the horizontal and vertical shifts automatically, and you have the option to reduce ghosting artifacts (moving people, tree branches and other objects) So all those hand-shaken images are still useful. And of course some of the HDR’s are ‘single’ HDRi’s.

Click here for the gallery

Landscapes and Ruins is what I titled this post. While we traveld through Andalusia (South of Spain) we saw so many beautiful landscapes, and ruins. Many houses were abandoned and left to the force of nature, which created wonderful ruins in very nice landscapes.
I had this visual in my head about a landscape that looked like a patchwork. I had lots of near opportunities but most of the landscapes were ‘poluted’ with industy, highways,

or modern farms. Luckily we encountered a few spots that we nice and clean, and ‘colorful as patchwork’.
We visited ‘El Torcal’, a nature reserve with unusual limestone rock formations. A lovely place to hike with your camera. And even our 3 year old daughter was able to do the short route (1,5 km) which took us about 90 minutes (in stead of the 45 minutes which the guide told us) Nice scenery and lots of good spots. I shot a lot of panorama’s and HDR images. And regardless of the extra time it took us we had a beautiful hike. (And junior had her backpack filled with nice rocks she wanted to add to her collection.)

‘El Chorro’ is a small village that is know for the gorge that has been dammed in 1920. Famous for its dangerous walkway which at the moment is only accessible by experienced climbers. The whole area has some nice views and was worth a visit. We also visited the area around Ronda a wonderful medieval ‘white’ city from the Moorish period, and we ‘discovered’ a old castle ruin that was ‘somewhat’ accessible for the public. So click on the Photos to see the whole gallery. (there are two galleries (clicking here for the landscapes or here for the ruins))

Visiting a butterfly garden or a zoo is something we always like to see on our itinerary. While we were in Spain this summer we were lucky to be able to visit both. We went to Mariposario de Benalmadena, a nice butterfly parc that claims to be the largest in Europe but I doubt that. Nevertheless we were able to photograph some beautiful species. Most of the time I tried to capture (with my 

camera) the “Morpho peleides”. This seems to me one of the more difficult species to photograph. The top of its wings is blue but you will only be able to see that while it is flying. (Or when he just lands or takes off) It took me a while to get the shot you see here. Unfortunately its not tag sharp but I will keep trying in any future butterfly garden.
We also went to Selwo Marina, a marine parc with sea lions and dolphins. A beautiful show but for the rest it was just an average parc. Bioparc Fuengirola on the other hand was a wonderful zoo. They had beautiful tigers and many other animals all worth to photograph and the whole parc looked spic ‘n span. The area where they kept the tigers was very nice arranged, and gave ‘the photographer’ nice opportunities for even better shots.
Click here to see the other photo’s.