The area near Brussels Airport is easily accessible. They are many roads, bike roads, fields, etc. and the place is very interesting for some creative shoots. But my attention quickly turned over to the airplanes. I was amazed how low they get when approaching the airport and I couldn’t stop taking the pictures. The feeling of a low-flying airplane together with the enormously loud sound of the engines was simply AMAZING! I can’t wait to go there again!

So what does thinking outside the box mean for me as a photographer? Ohh it can mean so many different things. I think it comes all together to a combination of various things: the ability to break the rules of photography, creativity and the potential to see the world around in a unique way.

How can you learn to think outside the box? Well, I really can’t give a definite answer to that. I can definitely tell you that you don’t have to be born with it (although it can be helpful to a certain extent) but you can learn it as well. i can tell you how I try to think outside the box: I look around at the world around me from different angles and various perspectives. I keep trying to see it in a way others don’t. It sometimes works, sometimes doesn’t. It’s important to train yourself, your brain and your eyes and not to give up. The more you try to see the world around you from different perspectives, the easier it becomes.

The 3rd Brussels Photo Walk will be as spontaneous and unplanned as the 2nd one (which was a really nice one) – we will meet and keep on deciding where to go as we’ll progress. I think the photo walk will take between 2-3 hrs but there is nothing fixed. The more spontaneous, the more fun! Hope to see you there!

Where to find us and how to know when we meet? We have two groups: one on Flickr (click here) and one on Facebook (click here) . Feel free to join these groups to get announcements when & where we meet next time.

The idea: Photowalking is quite straightforward: you grab a camera and walk around taking pictures of things you see and you find interesting to take pictures of. However, it is much more interesting and even educational when you do it in a group. Anyone interested in photography comes to photo walks: amateurs, people just starting with photography, professionals and semi-professionals. Thanks such diversity of the participants, there is a great potential of not only exchanging views and opinions about photography but also of learning from each other!

Who can come to Brussels Photo Walks? Anyone interested in photography, talking about it, taking pictures and learning from each other! Even if you just start your adventure with photography and you have a point-and-shoot camera, you’re more than welcomed to come. Remember: equipment doesn’t play a role at all! And if you just know how to turn your camera on and off, come to a photo walk and we will be more than happy to teach you more about photography and assist with any problems and questions you might have! Brussels Photo Walks are about sharing experiences, knowledge and passion to photography while having lots of fun.

Where to find us and how to know when we meet? We have two groups: one on Flickr (click here) and one on Facebook (click here) . Feel free to join these groups to get announcements when & where we meet next time.

I took these pictures during Brussels Photo Walk #2 which took place on 13 May 2010.

It took me awhile (being so deep in digital cameras nowadays) to realize that film cameras limited me by certain number of pictures a photographic film roll could contain (not like digital cameras, which can take from few hundred to few thousand RAW pictures, depending on the capacity of a memory card). The limitation of a number of ‘exposures’ (in photographic jargon of course) in film cameras forced me to spend some time and think about a composition of a picture, how to frame a subject, inspect closely foreground, background, double check the lighting and any other details that could improve a picture so that no film and frames would be wasted. This limitation of a film camera was (and for someone who uses a film camera still is) a very important step in the learning process of the art of photography and I personally believe that it still should be a part of the learning process of photography.

I think that digital cameras with their huge memory cards give us the freedom that actually does more harm than good for those who want to learn photography – we don’t take that extra time and effort on checking composition of a picture like in a film camera because we know that we can re-take a picture countless number of time and delete easily ‘bad’ pictures without any financial costs (as it wasn’t the case in the photographic film roll era).

I think I have found a solution for those who own only digital cameras and who want to learn composition in a way it was done before. The solution is quite simple: next time you will go for a photo walk, do an assignment for yourself or just take pictures, leave your 8 or 16 GB memory card at home and take with you only one memory card of 1GB or even less (the less capacity, the better; I just checked that 1GB for shooting 12.1 MP RAW will give you about 68 exposures). Depending if you shoot RAW or JPEG and how many megapixels your camera has, you should find a memory card that enables you to take not more than 30 exposures. And remember to leave all other memory cards at home! This way you will limit your gear but you will definitely expand your knowledge and experience in composition!

I strongly encourage you to try it out few times and I guarantee that you will see improvement in your photography soon.

Happy Shooting!!!

Exposure is NOT the same as shutter speed!

I won’t go in detail but I will just give a quick summary to those of you who are still confused a little: exposure is the total amount of light that passes on a film (or a digital sensor). That total amount of light depends on the aperture and on the shutter speed.

Note: Some photographers use ‘exposure time’ as a ‘shutter speed’. Although this is correct (shutter speed defines for how long a film or a sensor are exposed, therefore ‘exposure time’), I personally don’t use ‘exposure time’ because it’s very much different from ‘exposure’ itself but can create much confusion.

Again, the answer is quite simple (at least at first): The inclusion of video-making in Aperture 3 is because of the changing trends in the photography world and among photographers! Aperture’s developers have noticed (which actually it’s hard to miss) that more and more photographers start including video-making into their portfolios and services. I won’t elaborate too much here on the reasons for that and the specifications of this changing trend because next article will be specifically devoted to the changing trends in photography. However, I will mention just 2 reasons for the moment:

1) Market Saturation - the photography market has started to be more and more saturated with “wanna be” photographers thanks to the falling prices of semi-professional and professional equipment as well as to its growing availability. I think I should clarify what or rather whom I mean by “wanna be” photographers before people start jumping on me: I don’t mean young photographers who know what they do (although they still learn the art of photography) and know how to behave like a professional photographer towards clients. If you still wonder what I mean by a “wanna be” photographer, watch this video of Judge Joe Brown – Cheap Wedding Photographer.

2) Video becomes a standard in DSLRs – yes, if you’re a photographer and you’ve bought a DSLR in the last couple of years, there is a pretty good chance that your camera records decent videos. There is no need to buy an extra video camera. So why not getting new customers for video-making (and earn extra money), while you can keep using existing gear which you’ve been using for taking (or rather making) pictures?

Few real-life examples of photographers who have started or plan to include movie-making into their services:
- probably the most obvious is Chase Jarvis. I have no idea when he has started making movies… but he does and does it often with DSLRs;
- Scott Bourne from PhotoFocus.com – to me, he is a photography veteran (of course in a very positive sense). He’s been a long time photography-only Nikon shooter (at least to my knowledge) and only recently he decided to get few Canon DSLR bodies and add-ons to make movies;
- Eric Roy – a photographer based in Minneapolis, Minnesota (US). I spoke with Eric just last week and he confessed to me that he is going to start making movies very soon as well and include movie-making in his portfolio and as a part of his services.

Apple introduced many new features (like brushes with special effects, brush in/out adjustments, and many more) in Aperture 3 and I have to say that many plugins which I use with Aperture 2 are unnecessary and even useless. One of the most important feature for portraits for me is skin smoothing, a new feature in Aperture 3. There are many more feature in Aperture 3 and going over would take too much time. The bottom line is: it seems that I don’t need now to have any additional plugins in Aperture 3 except for BorderFX Aperture Plugin , which I mainly use to apply a watermark when exporting post-processed pictures. Unfortunately, BorderFX is still only available in 32-bit mode (at least when this post was written) and the 64-bit beta version of BorderFX has too many bugs to use it.

I will write why I won’t make Aperture 3 my main post-processing software in next blog post, so stay tuned.

When I was in Maastricht (the Netherlands) in January 2010, I saw this playground surrounded by white snow and I couldn’t stop thinking about my nightmare from childhood. I grabbed my Nikon D90 without any hesitation and just when I was about to take a picture I realized that I should make a picture (besides, there was something missing – dramatic lighting). I pull out my SB-900 speedlight and asked a friend to hold it up at about 75-80 degrees between me and the object and point it directly at it. I also underexposed the picture in the camera in order to achieve more dramatic lighting and contrast. Few post-processing tweaks here and there and voilà! – Playground from hell – almost the same as in my childhood dreams (still brings chills when I look at it).

I hope to have time for another Brussels Photo Walk soon, so feel free to get in touch with me if you’re interested in joining!