Bramz’ warehouse

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 …

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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.

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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.

Last Thursday, I was at Vooruit to photograph Shearwater, an indie rock formation from Texas. Clever songs made from fragile musings to sheer explosions of rock, and with plenty of musical experimentations, including a bowed glockenspiel. I hadn’t heard of the band before, but they’ve definitely earned a place on my play list. Support act was the Belgian band Krakow. Just like the previous time, their mellow songs stopped every heartbeat in the room, and the tender vocals took us on a journey full of melancholy.

Link to complete photo series: Shearwater, Krakow.

Two weeks ago, I had the pleasure of taking pictures at a local festival in Oostkamp: Parkpop. A hot summer day, great crowd, lots of them anyway, perfect lighting with sufficient front light (cheers Geerolf ;), plenty of beer, and of course some great gigs! The shows of Hadise and Les Truttes were the most visual, and as such the ones I liked most.

Link to complete photo series: Les Truttes, Sergio, Hadise, The Ditch, Born Crain.

Earlier this month, on a warm lazy Saturday, I was sitting idle in the flowery garden. Tired of reading books, I decided to setup a little studio under the walnut tree and shoot some water drops. The idea is very simple: hang a bag of water above a filled basin, and make a tiny hole so you get a slow but steady flow of drops splashing on the water surface below. Aim a speedlite at a white background, and shoot away!

There are a few things you have to keep in mind though:

• You’re actually photographing the background reflected by the water, so aim your speedlite at the backdrop, not at the water surface itself. I’ve had a boring white one. Use more colourful backgrounds to get more interesting patterns.
• You want to cut down the light transmitted through the water surface as you only want to see the reflection. Although you can use an opaque liquid, it’s sufficient to use a basin with a black bottom.
• Use the speedlite as your shutter. You really want to freeze time, and a short flash of light is the way to do so. Ironically, this means that you must use a relatively long shutter speed (1/250 s) to get a good synchronization with your speedlite, but if you underexposure the environment by a few stops, the scene will be entirely lighted by the flash. As most speedlites regulate the power output by the pulse length, decrease power to get a flash as short as possible.
• Be a hoopy frood and know where your towel is ;)

Below you can see my makeshift studio. I was using a light grey basin, so to combat transmission, I’ve put in the water a torn apart black paper bag. My Canon EOS 50D with a 50mm f/1.8 lens is sitting on the tripod and is connected to an old Minolta speedlite using a PC cable. You can see the Minolta firing and lighting the white backdrop (yes, this means I temporarily connected it to my spare camera instead ;-). On top, you can see the bag of water hanging from a branch. The red arrow shows the tiny hole as the source of the water drops.

Although an outdoor studio is great to spend a warm summer day, it isn’t ideal for this kind of work as the tiniest sigh of wind will rock the water bag so that the point of impact changes all the time. This makes it very hard focussing correctly.

link to complete photo series

Over a month ago, I’ve bought myself a new camera body for my birthday: a Canon EOS 50D. Though my previous one, an EOS 400D, is still functional, after two years, I was outgrowing its limits somewhat. The new one really is an upgrade. It’s bigger and as such more comfortable to hold. The larger and brighter view finder makes it much easier to operate in dimly lit theatre venues, where you can also benefit from the ISO 3200 sensitivity to get faster shutter speeds (you can even bump it to ISO 6400 and 12800, but it gets quite noisy). The jog wheel makes navigation faster and easier to control aperture in manual mode, while the joy stick allows you to quickly select another AF point. At 6.3fps, the high-speed continuous mode is perhaps even too fast for everyday use. Another difference is the LCD on top of the camera that holds all the information on the current settings, where the 400D had to use the main display. The display is also larger, allowing you to judge the pictures in camera more easily. Oh, and it takes better pictures too =)

Loaded with my precious new toy, I went on a short trip with Brecht to the Seine-Maritime department in Normandy, France. With two bikes, sleeping bags and a tent in de back of the car, we set off to the coastal village of Sotteville-sur-Mer, a very quiet and non-touristic place (in contrast to the neighbouring Veules-les-Roses and St. Valery en Caux) with just the necessary at hand: a bakery, butchery and a grocery. The only thing missing is a local pub that’s open at night (the typical bar-tabacs have normal shopping hours).

While exploring the area on our bikes, I had ample opportunity to test the new gear, and it totally lived up to my expectations. Exposure set to manual mode, the camera is easy to operate thanks to the separated controls for aperture and shutterspeed. And most importantly, image quality is great, turning the beautiful scenery into real postcards.

link to complete photo series