tomorrow it’s Photowalk day (and Sunday)

Man I’m really looking forward to Saturday and Sunday.
This year the official “Scott Kelby” worldwide photo walk will take place on two days, and I will be hosting both days in Kampen. Some people might ask “Why Kampen?” well I think it’s the most interesting place close to my hometown of Emmeloord. And yes Emmeloord can be interesting too but I love Kampen with it’s medieval streets, great bridge, small train station and “harbor” also there are some great HDR options and a busy shopping street with loads of interesting people…. this is gonna be so much fun.

I will of course lead the walk together with Wendy Appelman and Evita (our intern) so you can expect some nice tips and tricks and much more… but most of all it will be a fun filled walk with great photo opportunities.

We still have some room on the Sunday so if you want to join us make sure to surf to http://www.worldwidephotowalk.com and register for the Sunday version, or just drop me a mail. Of course we will also run a competition for the “walkers” for which we opened a Flickr page.

Apple TV2 review

Besides Photography I love “gadgets” however I’m a person that doesn’t want to own all gadgets that look cool, to be honest I’m also a bit “anti-gadget”, I know that most gadgets will end up collecting dust in some closet and will often be thrown out after not being used for many years when the space is needed. So my collection of gadgets is containing gadgets that I really use (well ok I also make mistakes :D)…..

 

A few months ago someone told me about the AppleTV and that this was perfect for my Home Theater setup, however because we already run a media server and a very good media player I never looked seriously into the AppleTV. When the Kelbytraining app was released some things changed for me. I love watching the guys on Kelbytraining and I love to do that on our projector (the image quality they use is awesome) so with my iPad2 I used the monitor connection set and ran a HDMI cable to our switch to use it on the projector. After each video I had to click on the iPad to activate the external monitor again but it worked flawless. However running the cable every time was my main objection, so I started looking into the AppleTV2 again. Because it’s not available in the Netherlands (yet) we decided to pick one up during our stay in the states for PhotoshopWorld. In this blog post my small review on the AppleTV2.

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My TwiT Photo interview

Yesterday I was interviewed and we did a live photo shoot during the live broadcast for TwiT.tv Photo.
In this blogpost the video from that interview, hope you like it 😀
Feel free to share the link to the video.

NIK 4.0 Color Efex

The last few weeks I’ve been under NDA so I couldn’t share any of my thoughts about the new Color Efex 4.0 from NIK, however yesterday they released the software so I wanted to give some attention to the release, and all I can say….

 

If you already know the version 3.0 without any doubt do the upgrade, you’re gonna love it.
If you don’t use Color Efex yet, please download their trial version, Color Efex is without a doubt one of my favorite plugin suites from NIK (and all plugins), it’s used in almost all my work just to give a slightly different tone or more “bite”.


The following new additions I really love :

 

Dark contrasts:
A great filter to give an image a great look, very moody and loads of detail.

 

Film looks:
Divided into several categories including vintage (my favorite)

 

Detail extractor:
Loved Tonal contrast but this is even better. Mimics a cross between HDR and Tonal Contrast. GOTTA love it.

 

And so much more….
Color Efex 4 has great filters and some things has changed, Tonal Contrast for example works differently and I like the new method better because it has less haloing and noise. But the best thing about Efex 4 must be the option to STACK filters and make recipes. Yes you read it correctly you can stack filters on top of each other and create an unique look and store this and share it online.

 

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED.
I know it’s not really a review but I think there are a lot of them out there, so I just wanted to give you the things that I really liked 😀