Day 1 Kent, Leeds castle and Photoshop world

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Let’s start off with some hot news.
March next year I will be joining my friends from Kelbytraining during Photoshop world in the USA to teach two seminar/workshops during this amazing event. You can image I’m psyched to get there and be part of the “madness” called Photoshop world.

Kent day 1
Today we arrived with the boat at app 7:00AM and drove straight to Dartford where our hotel is located.

First we had to go to a shopping mall to get a new 3 sim card for our mifi and get internet on the go.
From there I twittered if someone had a nice suggestion for us to visit in the area.

Man do I love twitter 🙂
When we arrived at our hotel in Kent I twittered of some people could advise me some places to visit. Of course one could use Google or the flyers in the hotel but I think the people living in the area often have much better advise than the flyers can ever give. In this case I was advised to check out Leeds Castle as being one of the most beautiful castles in the area, well I can say thank you all very much, it was indeed more than worth the time.

The castle is located in a beautiful park and because we wanted to have images from a distance we decided to not go through the “commercial” park entrance but we walked over a public footpath, and after a small hike we indeed got some very nice views from the castle, much to our surprise however when we got closer we ended up inside the castle and to be honest if you are ever in the area, make sure you also go inside, it’s a very worthwhile experience, the different rooms are very well decorated and there are a lot of stories told about the history and the rooms itself.
The only place we were not allowed to photograph was the chapel, which was a shame because that was a very nice location, but of course you have to follow the rules.

Here some images from inside the castle.
Remember all these images are straight out of the cam/aperture just a little tweaking from aperture on my laptop.

After our inside journey we walked outside to see if the light had become better to shoot the outside and luckily it did, although still not perfect it was good enough for me,I have to be honest that I love moody clouds more than blue skies, so the way the light and the clouds were now it was just perfect for me. From inside however we already spotted a photographer with a large tripod and what I thought from a distance to be medium/large format camera, so we decided to walk up to him and chat a bit, it was indeed a special camera and I think it’s always fun to see that there are still people using film and the large format cameras, would love to see an image from that from the castle. As you can imagine I could not resist to take a shot of him and his camera while he was not paying attention 😀
After the chat we walked around a bit more and ended up with for me the best two shots from the day, can’t wait to print those out at the studio on large format.


We also visited the location were I will be teaching the workshop on Wednesday and I’m more than looking forward for that one. The hotel were we host it is already amazing but the surrounding areas are absolutely stunning, make sure to keep checking the blog on Wednesday evening when I will try to upload a small backstage video and maybe some shots.
We still have 2 seats left by the way, they will probably be filled up tomorrow after the Photovision Roadshow seminar but if one of the blog readers is interested I would love to give them a heads up of course 😀

Keep checking the blog tomorrow when I will try to twitter some material from the Photovision Roadshow at night after the seminar.