Bramz’ warehouse

Link to complete photo series: TV Buddhas, Nasty Billy Hamilton.

Link to complete photo series: Freaky Age, Mint, Skag Sessions.

Link to complete photo series.

Due to some technicalities, this didn’t get online sooner. Pi day seems the perfect opportunity to put this straight, so here it is …

One of the prizes of the Westtalent contest was a free promo shoot by the in-house photographer, yours truly. I was very pleased to see that award going to my friends of SX, because I knew they wouldn’t make it easy.

The band had chosen the dunes of De Panne as location, and proposed a general idea around which we experimented a bit on the “set”. We wanted the light to look artificial, so I brought along several speedlites and some PocketWizard magic. This was my first real experience with speedlites, so obviously I’ve made a lot of beginner mistakes. For example, though I had multiple heads and stands, I didn’t set up any backlights to accentuate the contours. Instead I combined them to one single key light to get more power, while I should have cranked up the ISO instead.

All things considered, I’m very pleased with the results. The location was great, the weather dramatic. The colours blended nicely together, and the rain didn’t spoil too many shots. Though I should have kept my lens cleaner, to avoid any flares. And playing with speedlites is just too much fun: underexposuring the background, and hitting hard the subject with a flash of light … nice! Though there is still much to be learned on that topic!

link the complete photo series.

Link to complete photo series.

Link to complete photo series.

Channel Zero! Says enough. One of …no, scrap that. The most influential Belgian heavy metal band of the nineties, when I was still busy being a headbanging teenager. And now, after more than ten years of silence, they’re back! Heavier than ever. w00t! Here’re my impressions from the photopit …

Link to complete photo series.

For people who are wondering what I was doing the last month, well, I was touring through West Flanders in a red VW van. I have the pleasure of being the in-house photographer of Westtalent ’09, a provincial music contest that gives a platform to young local talents. On each Friday and Saturday, there was a preselection in one of the many youth clubs across the province. And it’s been a fantastic ride already. We’ve seen great musicians and lesser great ones, but overall there were many promising bands to be discovered. Unfortunately only 16 of them can go to the semifinals which start tonight in the 4AD. Here’s a snapshot of the preselections.

Link to complete photo series.

It’s been more than two years since I’ve released the first version of my pycpuid module for Python. I haven’t been using it since, but as some people do, I decided to upgrade it a little. The result is pycpuid-0.2.0.zip. It’s still an unfinished work (I would like to add some more of the high level functions), but as progress came to a standstill again, I’m releasing it as is. Here’s the changelog:

• The feature abbreviations now resemble the ones in the Intel and AMD documentation.
• features() is now a function and returns a list of strings, instead of being a comma separated string.
• Added some functions like vendor() and brand_string() as handy wrappers.
• pycpuid is now a combination of a pure python module pycpuid.py and an extension _pycpuid.c. The extension module is only responsible for the actual cpuid call. All the fancy wrapper bits are implemented in Python.
• Added gcc support. Using __cpuid intrinsic on MSVC to support x64.

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Just like last year, I was at the rock contest De Beloften to give my mental support to a befriended band. Last year that band was Lixi, this time it was my pals of Hindenburg. And just like last year, being imported from West Flanders turned out to be a disadvantage: neither Hindenburg or Outskirts made it to the top three. The righteous winner still was found in the Intergalactic Lovers. I’ve only taken pictures of Hindenburg, as fellow Indiestyler Paul Lamont was already covering the whole show.

As the pictures already had high contrast because of direct sunlight, I decided to experiment a little and exaggerate it. I tried to get a gritty look by playing with unsharp masks and vibrance. With varying success, I guess =) Though it’s hard to judge in screen resolution. I’m also not sure about the method to increase local contrast. Two possibilities are an unsharp mask or an overlay blend of a high pass copy. Both more or less do the same thing (technically, the unsharp mask is also a blend with a high pass). The unsharp masks has more pronounced ghosting though, which makes it grittier of course, but it doesn’t work as well in low resolutions.

Link to complete photo series.