Lithiumstate

I am playing summer catch-up … so much had happened; yet I blogged so
little. But here’s an attempt at writing up a few high-lights starting off with
the Sail 2010 event!

On a casual Thursday afternoon I happened to have my camera with me at
the office .. it was beautifull weather, and SAIL 2010 was going down in
Amsterdam; nice opportunity to snap some pictures !
Since I was there relatively early (first day, 3 in the afternoon) there weren’t
many boats yet, but that also meant that there weren’t allot of people either.

Without further delay; onwards to the pictures!

It’s been a while since the last update ! Life’s been busy but i’m excited to tell you guys that I’ve finally broken the 6 month discussion I had with myself wether or not I should upgrade my camera to the full-frame sensor, low-light shooting Nikon D700; or go with the D300s; having a traditional sensor (and thus not as good in low-light) but bringing with it some nippy usability features including the ability to shoot HD video in sexy sharpness due to the lenses I have. It was a very hard choice as you can imagine; with the D300S having been favored quite a few times for it’s additional features and far cheaper price. Yet I knew that would limit my creativity in setting up shots; because I couldn’t really bring it past ISO1600 without making it seem like I was shooting a grainy snowstorm.
So yeah; mostly also being inspired by Alan’s urban photography as seen on www.shibuya246.com I made the decision to just bite the bullet (err.. pay the bill) for the D700 for it’s low light ability; and better ability to resolve the light from lenses on it’s full format sensor. Phew ! To go with the new camera, I deceided to also get the 28/2 AIS lens, which is the perfect wide-angle for shooting great urban scenery. Below is a picture of the new set; sorry for the crappy picture, I was a bit lazy. But you get the idea

Match made in heaven

Now let’s hope Nikon doesn’t announce that the long rumored successor to the D700 will cost as much as the current D700 but will have video added to it; i’d seriously get a migraine from that haha ! ”Where’s the pictures you took with this beast man ?” is what I can already hear you think. Sorry; the weather has been ridiculously  crappy the last few days; so aside from just tinkering with it indoors; I haven’t really gone out to take proper pictures with the new setup; tough it struck me as quite surprising that the built-in pop-up flash and the metering is really quite good ! For simple fill purposes I really don’t even need to grab my bulky (and awe inspiring) SB-900 speed flash.

I hope I’ll be able to take some pictures after work today, or tomorrow; providing it stops raining. Expect to see soem pictures taken with this heavy bad boy sooner than later !! But for now, despite being broke for the next 3 weeks I’m as happy as can be !

I’m not dead (yet) just extremely busy lately so haven’t had the time to update the blog as much as I want to (like at least every week . .) This morning was no exception; woke up and had to rush trough my usual morning routine, but I did hear the news on the radio stating that my country annualy spends 4.7 billion Euro’s for the development of poor countries. Damn ! That’s alot of money. But I didn’t think much of it at the tme. Fast forward 40 minutes in time and I’m standing at the train station … just like i’ve done the last two months I took a glance at the train shedule and noted that mine had the same daily delay , instead of 10 it was 15 minutes this time tough. With the usual sigh I walk past the train platforms to take the same, reliable metro i’ve been using instead of the train since the last two months. It was then that it hit me ; 4.7 billion Euro’s on the development of _other_ countries whilst our own public transport infrastucture sucks complete ass ? Damnit ! I got angry , knowing that that money would instantly solve our shitty train network. (tough Metro is fine, that doesn’t have inter-city capability which we often need in a country the size of mine) I do remember the short explanation on the radio saying that by some international law we’re abided to spend a certain percentage of the country’s treasury to the development of lesser countries. Makes me wonder how many countries including mine, have been doing this for how many years now and we structurally don’t see much happening in the 3rd world countries in the sense of massive improvements.  The funds we donate seem to be devidied between target countries, an example was given that Suriname only receives 4.6 million euro’s which is peanuts on an annual basis to do some structural good. Isn’t it better to focus all that money into a single country so that massive scale things can be one before moving on to the next ? I know change is a slow bitch but ah well.

In other news, I’ve been inspired by Alan from www.shibuya246.com (if you haven’t checked that out by now go click that link now; even more if your interested in Japan/Tokyo) to start my own weekly photo series; tough isntead of Tokyo it’ll be Amsterdam (i’ll happily trade tough) and instead of Conibini Mondays I’ll have to figure something else out that’ll be nice. But yeah .. expect to see something about that in the days to come.