The Taelemans´ Blog

The White tower, built by William the Conqueror in 1078, is the the original stark square fortress of the Tower of London.

The Tower of London’s primary function was a fortress, a royal palace, and a prison (particularly for high status and royal prisoners, such as the Princes in the Tower and the future Queen Elizabeth I). This last use has led to the phrase “sent to the Tower” (meaning “imprisoned”). It has also served as a place of execution and torture, an armoury, a treasury, a zoo, a mint, a public records office, an observatory, and since 1303, the home of the Crown Jewels of the United Kingdom.
(Source: Wikipedia)

This picture was taken from the walls of London Tower. I thought it would look nice because of the foliage framing the tower. I applied some lomo cross-processing to the picture to finish it off.

Last weekend I went to london together with my girlfriend to visit some friends who live there.
This is a picture I took of Joachim and his Finnish girlfriend, Tara, while we were visiting the Tower of London.

I’ll post some more pictures of our trip later this week.

At first, when I got my gmail account, a couple of years ago, I intended to use it as my spam account. I ended up using it as my primary mail because it’s just so convenient and clean. This week, they increased the maximum attachment size from 10MB to 20MB, while the mail account I get from my provider only allows me an attachment size of 3MB.

The only thing I feel bad about is that I use too much of google’s services. One should give the competition a chance too. Oh well, I use flickr and wordpress…

When walking through Bruges a couple of weeks ago, I noticed a car with this sticker. Apparently “Mr. Zog’s Sex Wax” is just surf wax. Fun logo though

More Info here: http://www.sexwax.com/

This bridge is the smallest drawbridge in the world and is barely wide enough to permit the mast of a sailboat to pass through.

The original bridge was built in 1620, and much of its structure remains, although the bridge was largely rebuilt in the mid 20th century. The original bridge was cranked open by hand, whereas the current bridge consists of two cantilevered half-spans, separated by a 32-inch (80 cm) gap bridged by a thick timber panel. The panel is removed whenever a yacht wishes to pass beneath the bridge, allowing the unsailed mast to pass through the gap.
- Wikipedia

You can check out an aerial image of the bridge at Google sightseeing.

One of my daily morning reads are the following sites:

http://www.overheardeverywhere.com/
and
http://www.overheardinnewyork.com/

They are like bash.org but in real life and will make you start your day with a smile. Press “Continue Reading” to see some examples.

Read the rest of this entry »

FlickrVision is a website which shows the latest geotagged flickr photos and their location on the map.
Strangely enough this site has a rather calming effect on me. I think I’ll bookmark it and put it on my second monitor at work when there is another deadline.
Too bad there is no screensaver version, this would make a kick ass screensaver! If anyone knows an application to put a webpage as a screensaver, please do tell.

When we were on holidays in Bermuda, we got 4 out of 7 days bad weather. It wasn’t until last week that I started realizing that cloudy photos with no direct sunlight can be quite workable and can contain enough information to get some interesting results. Too bad all my Bermuda pictures are taken in JPEG instead of RAW. I don’t think I’ll make the switch back to JPEG ever again now that I know how much control you still have over your picture at post processing time with RAW.
Ok, for one, RAW is lossless, but that’s not the main reason why to use RAW in my opinion. It’s mostly the control over White Balance and exposure compensation that can make the difference between an average picture and an interesting one.

Ok, it took me a while to select and post-process the pictures I took of the concert, but there’s a good reason. For some reason, the people of the venue do not seem to like the artists being lighted.. The audience was well lit though… Basically I had to crank up my ISO value quite a lot (which caused the grain) and use a fill flash to get some decent pictures.

Anyway, here is a selection of them:

You can see the rest of them on my flickr account.