Windmills beyond the golden field

With those modern "windmills", I was only missing Don Quichotte/Quixote...
Little walk along the fields in Fumal, Belgium.

ISO 800 - 31mm - f/4.5 - 1/4000s (I probably forgot to lower the ISO value...)

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The port of Antwerp

An impressive boat (containers sea transport) being towed and leaving the port of Antwerp in Belgium. You will notice the Doel nuclear power plants on the left.

ISO 400 - 40mm - f/2.8 - 1/4000s

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Esneux, Belgium

Alongside the river "L'Ourthe" stands the small village of Esneux in Belgium. It's really a pity we're not having a beautiful warm Spring but from time to time we're lucky to have the sun above our heads. And there's a place out there to eat delicious homemade ice creams! But I'll keep it secret...

ISO 400 - 40mm - f/2.8 - 1/3200s

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Out of time!

At the train station, you might be just in time to catch your train, you might as well be to early so you have time to chill out and appreciate the stunning architecture of this train station (Liege Guillemins, Belgium), or in the worst case you might be (too) late like this running guy. You'd better hurry! ;-)

Occasionally, you might be there for photographs hehe...

ISO 400 - 18mm - f/8.0 - 1/25s

Liege Guillemins Train station, a masterpiece.

The entrance of the impressive 'Liege Guillemins' train station in Liege, Belgium. This is also a station for TGV/High-speed train. A masterpiece from the spanish architect Santiago Calatrava Valls.

A place to wander, a place to stare at.

ISO 200 - 18mm - f/4.0 - 1/320s

Trainspotting

Herstal, a city of Belgium, is a small to mid-size city. However, the train station is surviving, they even renewed it which is quite cool. Weather was awesome, sky was very blue and I spotted that scene with the tagged train and that old yellow and green locomotive just arriving. I have applied split toning filter with Lightroom.

I need to go to Liege Guillemins train station, not so far from my place (about 20min drive), that's one of the most beautiful station in Europe there. Hope to show you this soon.

ISO 400 - 42mm - f/4.5 - 1/2500s

Frozen lake - Le lac de Warfaaz (II)

Seeing the lake almost totally frozen was just stunning. Here's another view of the Warfaaz lake in Spa, Belgium. I did a couple of shots there and this is probably the last one of the serie during the winter. I'm looking forward for Spring to be there so I can get colourful shots...

I used my "pancake" 40mm lens from Canon for this little sequence.
ISO 100 - 40mm - f/2.8 - 1/250s

Frozen lake - Le lac de Warfaaz (Panorama)

Still at the Warfaaz lake in Spa, Belgium. I like panorama's when I have wide open spaces in front of me. This lets you appreciate more of the scenery with all the ducks and that frozen water. Just an advise though, stay on the plain ground, you won't bear the low temperature water as ducks do ;-)

Panorama is made out of two horizontal shots.

For each shot: ISO 100 - 40mm - f/2.8 - 1/125s

Frozen lake - Le lac de Warfaaz

So yeah, in less than a month now it'll be Spring time, and just as last year we're (finally?) having the snow very late in winter. I can't tell you how strong the temptation was to walk on that pure white surface, on the frozen lake of Warfaaz in Spa, Belgium. Of course I've been careful and stayed on the edge of the lake, making sure I was stepping on plain ground! The lake is artificial and has been dug about a century ago to avoid flooding of Spa, a thermal city of Belgium, during storms and heavy rains.

(Sources: www.lacdewarfaaz.be)

ISO 100 - 40mm - f/2.8 - 1/250s

"Lights will guide you". Liège, le pont Saint-Léonard.

First snow here this winter, I thought it would be time for a panorama picture! This is one of the numerous bridges in Liege (Belgium), this one's the St-Leonard bridge (hence the french title) also called the Maghin bridge (le pont Maghin). That's not the most beautiful bridge of the city but surely is interesting due to the lighting of it. Bridge is crossing the Meuse river.
It was freaking cold outside and it froze my feet and hands but that was definitely worth it! I took three panorama's of this bridge but this one came out the best.

I was not sure exactly at what time they would light the bridge so I went there just a tiny bit before sunset and they switched on the lights 10min after my arrival, good one! As this is the last of the three panoramas I did, the sky here is already dark and polluted by street lamps which gives quite a nice effect though. It also has this cute little blue lit pathway on the right side.
This is a long exposure photo (15 seconds).

Lights will guide you...

Panorama is made out of 5 vertical shots
For each individual shot: ISO 100 - 18mm - f/14 - 15s

The Old Castle of Saive Go Round

Lovely place, lovely ruins of the old castle of Saive in Belgium and lovely memories. This is where we used to live. Oh well, not exactly in the castle which is kinda falling apart but in the renovated old inn that you can barely see in the lower left part of the planet (yes, I live on a planet, don't you? hehe). The land Lords (and neighbours) are also lovely people, lots of lovely things and atmosphere I guess, heh.

The castle is from the 13th century. The last Lord who lived there, Jean-Denis de Monsen, sold the seigneury to the Méan's family in 1692. The Mean's will have another castle built (in Cahorday, another part of the village of Saive) and will abandon this one. Everything remaining now are ruins but the domain belongs now to the Herrmann's (if they happen to read this... greetings!). They are the administrators and founders of a non-profit association "Les Compagnons du Vieux Château" created to prevent the castle from totally collapsing and promote the site. The ruins are nowadays (and since 1971) classified as historical monument.

Sources: "Les Compagnons du Vieux Château" asbl (association sans but lucratif).

The panorama planet is made out of a 360° panorama. Enjoy!
For each individual shot: ISO 100 - 18mm - f/5.6 - 1/30s

Post-processing. An important step (to me)

To illustrate why I do think post-processing is an important step in developing your digital photographs, I will first let the images speak for themselves here...

Click on the images for larger and better view

The left image is the photo as it comes straight out of the camera after shooting the scene, as you can see there's not much information there, poor lights, tones and colors and there's a lot of black (pitch black) without any information or details.

However, by shooting in RAW format, you make the software able to recover the maximum of light, shadows and details, just see for yourself (post-processing under Adobe Lightroom).

This is a belgian landscape taken during the golden hour, thus giving you this amazing warm atmosphere... Information was not lost even though the first image is way too underexposed!

ISO 200 - 36mm - f/5.0 - 1/4000s

Liege (Belgium) and its beautiful bridge

This is one of the most famous and beautiful bridge in Belgium, it's located in Liege, my native city. The bridge is called "Le pont de Fragnée" in french and I took that shot from a park (le parc de la Boverie) on the water diversions. That was a gray and rainy day and this was just a few minutes before it poured with heavy rain which made it difficult for me as I was right in the middle of making a panorama... Hopefully I had the time to get ready for this shot and the next one.

The bridge was built from 1901 to 1904 for the universal exhibition of 1905 (sources: wikipedia).

The left river is "l'Ourthe" and the right river "la Meuse".

Above image: ISO 200 - 18mm - f/8.0 - 1/40s

And here's another angle/view through two of these metallic sculptures, circles. This is just to the left, before the above bridge built across the water diversions. This smaller bridge is the "pont de Fétinne" in french.
As you may have noticed, I'm standing right in the middle of two rivers.

Left image: ISO 200 - 18mm - f/8.0 - 1/25s

"Au clair de la lune".

Under the moon light, in the middle of a late belgian night (in the village of Saive). A five seconds exposure time photo. I had a hard time trying to find the correct settings on the camera and missed a few shots, I was hoping the moon to be more on the left of the frame but was satisfied with the results anyway.

Above image: ISO 200 - 154mm - f/6.3 - 5.0s

Weird reflection.

Here on the left is a similar shot to the first one (taken 3 minutes before) except that I missed the focus and the moon has been duplicated in a weird way as it has been duplicated with a different exposure and mirrored. Probably a flare effect...

Left image: ISO 200 - 200mm - f/6.3 - 3.0s

Panorama - "La Julienne", overflowing river

Saive, Belgium. Enjoy the panorama.

It's been heavily raining the whole day. After five amazingly warm sunny and summer days, we could only expect this, water, a lot of water... The far right house had its basement overflowed.

I've been living here in this place for about three years but for the first time I see the water stream like this. Usually, this is a quite small river. A dramatic yet beautiful country scene!

A moment of loneliness

Sometimes you just feel this loneliness in huge open spaces, it draws you into deep thoughts.

This has been shot on the viaduct of Cheratte in Belgium. The bridge overhangs one of the main highway (E40/A3) in Belgium, 37 meters (+/- 121 feet) above the artery.

Special thanks to my sister for having the patience to pose while I was setting up the camera :)
(Wait wait, almost ready! Oh wait, no, now I'm ready. Ok sorry, one more second...)


UPDATE: entering FroKnowsPhoto Week-end contest

Jared Polin is having a contest each week on his FroKnowsPhoto YouTube channel where you can submit your photo and win a BlackRapid strap for your camera. I didn't make it to the Top 5 with my photo above, unfortunately. However, it's been selected for the photo critique (among some 300+ photos) and I'm happy that the critique was very good. My glorious 20 seconds photo critique starts at ± 6:10min. Thanks Fro! =)

A not so abandoned chapel

Something totally different from my usual work but that was worth the effort... A digital manipulation of one of my picture. Here, a chapel of Herstal, a city in Liege, Belgium.
The Saint-Lambert chapel (also known as Saint-Oremus chapel) is a cute one, it's been listed in 1965 but the background and things around it didn't make it a super duper nice photo (well, in my opinion) so I decided to keep it anyway and manipulate it digitally. Gosh, this takes hours to manipulate a picture like this, I'm not sure I will do this again hehe. Or maybe I will...

Credits for the external elements integrated into the scenery to the following artists:

» Shoofly-Stock: the bench · the trees · the crows · the owl · the birds nest · the flowers · the zombies.
» wyldraven: the big moon
» wachowicz: the small moon
» PartWish: the main stormy sky

These are links to their deviantArt profiles and will open in a new window. Big thanks to them for sharing and distributing their stock images and -in specific cases- for the permission to publish the image outside deviantArt.

- You are not authorized to share, copy, distribute this image (titled 'A not so abandoned chapel') without attribution to the original artists listed in this post or link to this post. -

- "Will this be in the local newspaper?"

- "No sir, I'm sorry, it will not be in the local newspaper, I'm just doing this as a hobby".

This is the kind of place where you find them each and every day, just spending time together, chilling out and chatting, talking about the weather, about this or that. I was walking on that place when I noticed that bench with a bunch of friends, I was hoping to get that picture so I took one from another angle but I framed them, without them knowing it (I was behind them, further). Suddenly, the guy standing up saw me and shouted at me: "Hey, come over here and take our picture!". Could I ask for more? :o)

They were super friendly, I thanked them for the picture and I left that place happy...

Charles Vögele store front

Night time is no time for shopping right? But at night, places are deserted, no cars, no people, no birds, no dogs, no nothing, it's a no-man's land except you, your camera, your tripod. You're all set up, you're ready for the bright store front night photography. This is a 40sec long exposure shot.

Just for the piece of information, Charles Vögele is a Swiss group, leader on the Swiss market in textile distribution.

Ghost visitors

At night, strange things happen.
Extracted from my album "Image manipulation".