Last night I got - by accident, I never carry my camera with me when I go to concerts - a perfect chance to try my hand at concert photography. Together with some friends I found myself at Westerpop in Delft, The Netherlands, for a show by Sass Jordan (from Canada, check her out: she's goooood!).
Westerpop, being a festival, didn't have any of the strict rules you come across at concerts nowadays in relationship to photography, which all boil down to: you are not allowed to take any pictures. Whether this makes sense or not is a completely different point, there are things to be said in favor of this and things to be said against this.

Anyhow, when Sass Jordan started her (much too short) set, I found myself with only the professional photographers between me and the stage! So here are the results, I am mildly pleased.

A friend of a friend of mine won two tickets to a photography workshop (part workshop, part lecture)by Eddy van Wessel, a famous Dutch photo journalist, specialized in photographing in conflict situations like Afghanistan, Iraq or Chechen.
The lecture part was on how he worked and what he thought makes a good picture (emotion is more important than 'cold' technique. Something I tend to sometimes forget by obsessing about getting it technically perfect). For the workshop part he send us (there were about 15 or so of us) out into the streets of Amsterdam around the 'Rooms of Red Bull' (more precisely: 'De Wallen', a.k.a. the red light district) to shoot a series of 5 photos conveying an emotion. We had an hour. Eddy would do some editing on your best photo which would be printed (Epson sponsored) and displayed at the rooms.

I came up with this:
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Eddy edited it into this:
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It was great fun doing this workshop, I learned a lot. Mostly that I really need to get better at this PSE thing.

Anyhoo, this 'Rooms of Red Bull' thing is still going till the end of august, or so. If you're in the neighbourhood, go for it!
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Yay! Today I reached 5,000 page views, that took me one day over two months. Thank you all!

I'll be having a beer over this.

I would've had one anyway, it's Saturday after all. And I deserved it, running all day across the Dutch countryside to photograph some steam trains. It was fun but tiring, AND now I have 191 new photos to sort through, pick the best & make ready for publication. That'll be a while - I guess - before I get to it because I've only sorted through - etcetera - half the photos from my shoot with Merel. Yes, there's a lot more coming from that shoot; I've only gotten half way...
And I better hurry because at the end of this month I've got another shoot with a really gorgeous model scheduled, with another only three weeks after that. Man, I need a beer realizing this, that's a lot of work. But more importantly, that's going to be a whole lot of fun.
And that's even without counting that other model...

Enfin, there's a lot of photography coming up and the summer hasn't even begun yet!

I am getting greedy... I want 5,000 page views!