DAFOS Photo World

Here are some more portraits. I get to take pictures of people in the office, for our web site and other things, and from time to time it’s nice to get into some of them and make something a little out of the ordinary. These two ladies were kind enough to allow me to show the results to the world…

What fantastic weather today! But yes, chores to do and I’m up for the ironing. Which is cool, ‘cos I can take it outside to do in the sun (which is actually hot, but you know what I mean). Strip down and get a vitamin-D recharge into the bargain.

Not that I like ironing. I don’t mind it though. Quite therapeutic, actually. Gives you time to think. Mull over those important little things that really matter in everyday life. Not the big scary issues we read about have to think about the rest of the time. The important things. Of everyday life.

Like, why is it completely impossible to stop my deodorant staining my shirts? I mean, look at ’em! And I use the very best brand, too! The adverts told me so!

What has this got to do with photography? Just think of me raising my elbows to turn the camera for that winning portrait shot (all right – don’t then). What would people think?? Honestly!

(“Camera Ninja” a photo of me by Kevin Johnson)

Just wondering. Do image processors like Capture One or Lightroom etc… use floating point for their internal maths?

I got to asking this when I was having trouble making a nice print of this portrait. Pushing contrast and graded filters to the end stops seems to make the image quite sensitive to digital rounding errors. Printing it using the standard (8-bit) printer driver resulted in awful banding in the greys. Luckily my Canon printer comes with an “XPS” driver that supports 16-bit images, and this made a nice clean print from a 16-bit TIFF.

Would such quantisation errors maybe cause problems during processing, too? Would this explain a few weird things we see from time to time? (Like a green ring around the sun that I could NEVER get rid of? Threw that one away in disgust…). Would floating-point arithmetic help?

(Bert De Colvenaer – Executive Director of ECSEL Joint Undertaking. Image (c) me).

In 2015, the Viewfinders club organised an exhibition at the “Halles Saint-Géry” / “Sint Gorikshallen” in down-town Brussels. As kind of “chief organiser” I came up with the theme – “Brussels – A Love Story”: an opportunity to show that our members – Belgians, ex-pats and immigrants alike – know something more than the average about this city we call our home.

March to April 2016, we re-ran this exhibition, with some additional images, at the “Gasthuisberg” hospital in near-by Leuven. Gasthuisberg is huge – we hear numbers of between 10.000 and 20.000 people there – making it bigger than some towns in the area! Our display there – some 58 photographs printed using the beautiful “Chromaluxe” process – seems to have been well appreciated! One of my pictures – below – was donated to the hospital when we took down the exhibition at the end of April.

I called this picture “Villo Nouveau”. It was taken while on a bike ride around Brussels using one of the rent-able city-bikes – the one in the picture. It’s parked outside the “Hotel Solvay” on the Avenue Louise / Louizalaan, which is not only a UNESCO World Heritage monument, it’s also a wonderful example of art-nouveau architecture – like the stylised iris flower that is the emblem of Brussels.

Little did we know when we designed this exhibition that our beautiful city would soon be in such need of a great deal of total loving care… I hope our exhibition – a love story in quite a pure sense – can help in some way.

Though the physical exhibition is now finished, you can still see the images on the “virtual exhibition” web-site at http://www.dafos.be/HSG2015-LEUVEN2016/index.html .