more than a thousand words...

#12 Dark Room: Buried

This is a project I did that was dark room based. The idea of this work was to show that after death our bodies decompose until we are completely gone. I chose to represent this by putting imagery of body parts into jars of soil as over time the prints would deteriorate and eventually disappear.

I wanted to present my prints in a fashion that would strenghten the obscure effect I was trying to create with my dark room techniques and after processes. I came across a photographer called Stephen Gill who took pictures at particular scenes and after developing them he went back to bury them. After a while he would dig the pictures back up to see how they changed.

Below is a picture of the three final products of the project.

#11 Night: Tilburg at Night

These photographs are of my home town in The Netherlands. I took these as a personal and ongoing project showing places that I am strongly connected to. The reason I took these photographs at night is because when I think about them, I remember them by night as I passed them mostly during dark.

#10 Film: The Apple Project

For this video I set up a camera to capture the decomposing process of both an organic and a non-organic apple. The video is made up of over a thousand photos taken every 10 minutes for 2 weeks.

#9 Studio: Structure of Flora continued

Equipment and Settings

Camera : Canon EOS 500D
Lights : 2 Flash Heads

Attachments : Barn Doors

                : Reflector
Focal Length    : 60 mm
Shutter speed   : 1/125 sec.
Aperture        : f 18

ISO : 100

#1 Studio: Structure of Flora

#8 Black & White: Winter Stroll

#7 Black and White: Sheds

Inspired by Bernd & Hilla Becher

The two artists first collaborated in 1959 and were married in 1961. They began working as freelance photographers, concentrating on industrial photography. From their first series of photographs of water towers, the artists have not veered from architectural portraiture subjects, using both industrial and domestic structures such as gas tanks, silos, framework houses, and the like.

Many of the industrial plants they photographed no longer exist. The buildings were already under threat of closure or of being torn down when the Bechers set about photographing them. Their photographs therefore have a major significance for cultural history, if only for historical documentary reasons.

#6 Close up: Bass Guitar

#5 Live: Iced Earth

Two photographs that I captured of the band Iced Earth at Hammerfest Festival 2009 in Wales.

Aperture : f 5.6

ISO : 3200

Shutterspeed : 1/80

Focal Length : 250mm

#4 Black & White: City Soul

Due to the lack of light I had to take this photograph with a slow shutterspeed and a very high ISO.

Camera       : Nikon D5000
Aperture     : f 5.6
ISO          : 1000
Shutterspeed : 1/20 sec.
Focal Length : 42 mm

#3 Panorama: War Cemetery Limburg NL

The World War II Netherlands American Cemetery and Memorial is the only American military cemetery in the Netherlands. The cemetery site has a rich historical background, lying near the famous Cologne-Boulogne highway built by the Romans and used by Caesar during his campaign in that area. The highway was also used by Charlemagne, Charles V, Napoleon, and Kaiser Wilhelm II. In May 1940, Hitler's legions advanced over the route of the old Roman highway, overwhelming the Low Countries. In September 1944, German troops once more used the highway for their withdrawal from the countries occupied for four years.

The cemetery's tall memorial tower can be seen before reaching the site, which covers 65.5 acres. From the cemetery entrance the visitor is led to the Court of Honor with its pool reflecting the tower. At the base of the tower facing the reflecting pool is a statue representing a mother grieving her lost son. To the right and left, respectively, are the Visitor Building and the map room containing three large, engraved operations maps with texts depicting the military operations of the American armed forces. Stretching along the sides of the court are Tablets of the Missing on which are recorded 1,722 names. Rosettes mark the names of those since recovered and identified.

Within the tower is a chapel. The light fixture in the chapel and the altar candelabra and flower bowl were presented by the government of the Netherlands and by the local Provincial administration. Beyond the tower is a burial area divided into 16 plots, where rest 8,301 military dead, their headstones set in long curves. A wide, tree-lined mall leads to the flagstaff that crowns the crest.

#2 Photomontage: Fear for Fall out

Inspired by Peter Kennard

Peter Kennard was born in London in 1949. Currently he is a Senior Tutor in Photography at the Royal College of Art. His Art hangs in the Tate, V&A, Imperial War Museum and the Science Museum in London. His work directly addresses his concerns with conflict, war, weapons, liberty and the environment. His anti-Iraq war images were central to the Santa’s Ghetto exhibition in London, 2006 and both he and Cat Picton Phillips were part of the Santa’s Ghetto in Bethlehem, 2007 which raised nearly $1,000,000 for 30 university places for children from the area as well as the Wi’am Project helping the community. Other Impressive artists that caught my attention for their remarkable photomontages are Richard Hamilton and John Heartfield.

Fear for Fall out

The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) is equipped with all types of nuclear warheads, atomic, neutron and hydrogen, and their means of delivery puts the whole of the USA within effective range. The Times of London wrote on April 24, 2009: "The world’s intelligence agencies and defense experts are quietly acknowledging that North Korea has become a fully fledged nuclear power with the capacity to wipe out entire cities in Japan and South Korea." The announced vow to quit six-party talks, restart nuclear facilities and conduct additional nuclear and intercontinental ballistic missile tests is a clear message that the Kim Jong-il administration’s decision to shift to plan B is irretrievable. Plan B calls for the DPRK to join all three elite clubs of nuclear, space and economic powers by 2012, without seeking improved ties or a peace treaty with the US, as the DPRK has built up an independent global nuclear strike force which can carry the war all the way to the metropolitan US rather than on the Korean Peninsula. It is designed to impress upon the Korean population that Kim Jong-il is a Korean David heroically standing up to the American Goliath, that he can lead the epic effort to settle long-smoldering moral scores with the US over a more than 100-year-old grudge match that dates as far as the 1905 Taft-Katsura Agreement and the 1866 invasion of Korea by the USS General Sherman. The North Korean message is that any soft spots of the US, Japan and South Korea’s defense lines will be used as the testing grounds for their thermonuclear weapons. The North Korean state-run newspaper, Minjo Joson, vowed on June 9 to use nuclear weapons in war as "merciless means of offense to deal retaliatory strikes" against anyone who "dares infringe upon the dignity and sovereignty of the DPRK even a bit".

"Our military first policy calls for an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, retaliation for retaliation, ultra-hardline for hardline, war for war, total war for total war, nuclear war for nuclear war." - Kim Jong-il

#1 Studio: Structure of Flora

Structure is a fundamental, if intangible, notion referring to the recognition, observation, nature, and stability of patterns and relationships of entities. From a child’s verbal description of a snowflake, to the detailed scientific analysis of the properties of magnetic fields, the concept of structure is now often an essential foundation of nearly every mode of inquiry and discovery in science, philosophy, and art.

Inspired by Karl Blossfeldt

Karl Blossfeldt (1865-1932) was a German instructor of sculpture who used his remarkable photographs of plant studies to educate his students about design elements in nature. Self-taught in photography, he devoted himself to the study of nature, photographing nothing but flowers, buds and seed capsules for thirty-five years. He once said, "The plant never lapses into mere arid functionalism; it fashions and shapes according to logic and suitability, and with its primeval force compels everything to attain the highest artistic form." Blossfeldt’s photographs were made with a homemade camera that could magnify the subject up to thirty times its actual size. By doing so he revealed extraordinary details within the natural structure of the plants. In the process he created some of the most innovative photographic work of his time. The simple yet expressive forms captured on film affirmed his boundless artistic and intellectual ability.

Equipment and Settings

Camera          : Canon EOS 500D
Lights          : 1Flash Head
Attachments     : Barn Doors
Focal Length    : 55 mm
Shutter speed   : 1/125 sec.
Aperture        : f 16
ISO             : 100

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