photo (c) by Bandi Farkas, edit+enhancement by me

We went for a walk and met these musicians on the Rue de Montagne, playing Vivaldi's Four Seasons (what else) in perfect CD quality.

This piece of PS homework is instead of the many good shots I could have made yesterday, if I had had my camera with me when brave Belgian police, otherwise very busy broke up the 911 memorial march. Why? The PC mayor wanted to please his Moroccan voters. There were 10 years old kids among them, I mean the police, dressed in full riot gear. My GOD what a picture it could have been. But I had to choose between going home for my bulky 20D, which I don't always carry on me, and missing the demo alltogether.
If it goes on like this, in a couple of years I'll photograph ashura on the Grande Place or some other weird Muslim festival. This country is like camembert cheese, looks OK outside but rots inside. Wish I could go home, Hungary stinks too but at least its our own stink.

September mornings

I like the parks of Brussels. Each of them full of statues and memories, telling stories of faded glory like history books. They're never dull. During winter, even after five years, my eye still finds the green color of grass and mossy statues difficult to believe. But my favourite strolling time is autumn, when the low sun casts its symphonies of light, through an orchestra of morning haze and dying leafs.

Kilikia

Rien

I was sick the hole day and used the time to ponder through my old negatives. Found some Egyptian antiquities from my Chinon CM7 periode but screwed the scan and post this instead.

Bokrijk

Been to the skanzen of Bokrijk today. Old houses saved from decay and rebuilt in a lovely woody area. In each of them, there's people presenting old crafts, including the village photographer who takes 4x5 inch pictures with a museal camera. Didn't want to miss the fun and dressed up like 19th century peasants for the shot.

But the ultimate hero was the shoemaker, who looked like old Albrecht Dürer painted by Rembrandt. As there were no shoes to make, he played some old Dutch songs on his mandolin instead.

Infrared afternoon

Yesterday the sun was out at last so I grabbed my cameras and went for a hunt. But before, I had to fix the P-series Cokin 007 IR filter to my beloved 15mm Heliar lens. I used some black adhesive tape to narrow down the diameter of an 52mm A-series mount and fixed the P-holder via an A-to-P adapter. (All this fuss cos the my screw-in filter hasn't arrived after 1 month - eBay sometimes sucks.) Here's the result, on the left:



It will take some time to shoot all the 36 images on the Kodak HIE, though, so I took my 20D DSLR with the standard Hoya R72 as well. As usual, even with ISO @1600, it yielded no usable images under exposures of 60 seconds or so. I used a tripod.
This was way underexposed so I had to adjust it heavily in PS:

On this, I used Photo Wiz's BW Styler (T-Max and soft grade paper).

And yes, it IS possible to photograph people with a 60 secs exposure - if they do you the favour not to move :-)