About

 

Ever since my childhood, I had a passion for photography and film. My mum gave me a super 8 film camera, the first one to be winded manually, the second one battery operated. You must be thinking...are you that old? Well,...I guess I am. Born in Leuven in the year 66 of the previous century. 

These days, times have changed. No more super 8 or 35mm camera film rolls, no longer the excitement of waiting for your photos to be developed and printed...discovering that half of them look like you were drunk while holding the camera. Nonono....these days, you have incredible devices called smartphones, which are used for virtually anything except calling and making coffee. Some of them are equipped with 3 lenses, and can produce mindblowing images; all thanks to one magic word : "software". 

What I like about photography, is the magical blend of technology and art. It's also a great deal of mathematics by the way, if you consider stuff like apertures, shutter speed, ISO settings, and the correlation between them. I admit, that's the scary part. But it's also the basic knowlegde to create the right image for the right purpose, with the final goal to evoque the desired emotion,...freeze an athlete in motion, or quite the opposite, create movement....

And what makes it unique, is the eye of the one holding the camera...play with perspective, original view points, right timing, shallow depth of field to make things stand out....in short, all the elements that a smartphone's software just can't mimique. 

You might think that uncle Jef with his camera in "auto" setting would be good enough to handle wedding pictures...because, hey, they don't make any bad camera's these days, do they ? Or that any teenager with an zillion euro worth Iphone I-lost-the-count could send Stefan Vanfleteren to the history books ?

(In case you wouldn't know, Vanfleteren is a well known long haired and equally bearded top photographer. Don't worry if you don't know him..now you do)

A few years ago, I decided to attend some evening classes @ CVO Heverlee, because I wanted to know more about photography than uncle Jef or the Iphone kid. And it sure beats hanging in front of the tele. So I attended some basic courses, specialized modules such as Landscape, Portrait, Studio..each needing a different approach....then came the boring stuff such as Lightroom and Photoshop, followed by the tecky stuff such as using flash and studio flash. And hell, because I'm a retro dude I also passed the Analog module..was kind of cool to fool around with chemicals instead of a keyboard.

So, anybody out there, if you want something slightly more sofisticated that uncle Jef's pictures, please reach out. I do lots of stuff...always was a jack of all trades. 

Looking forward to hearing from you,....

Johan