In real life, I am an engineer living in Belgium, working for a Multinational Company in the Consumer Electronics sector.
I have a lot of hobbies, including traveling, mathematical puzzling, reading and photography, a hobby changing into a very serious professional activity
You can find my photography blog over here.
You can find my photography blog in French over here (this is not a translation of the English version, subjects are different).
and another special blog dedicated to funny signs over here.
Photography:
I started quite a long time ago and I have been lucky to have a father who told me the secrets of aperture, shutter speed, depth of field when I was a young kid. When I was like 10 years old, I could meter light and determine exposure correctly, using camera's like old Yashica's and our very first reflex camera, the Canon Ft-Ql with a 50mm f1.8 lens. I continued with a Kodak Instamatic, a Canon A1, stopped for a while and have been using anything from a Pentax reflex to a small pocket Rolleiflex camera. Around 2001, I restarted photography a bit more "seriously" with a Nikon F65 (N65 in the US) and two kit lenses (28-80G and 70-300G, not really the best Nikkor lenses) and my first digital camera, a 2.3MP Canon Powershot. I was dreaming of more sophisticated camera's like the F100 and F5 at that time. The big jump started beginning of 2005 with my first DSLR, the Nikon D70 and quite a number of lenses.... next steps have been a D200 in 2006 and the discovery of manual focus lenses (old lenses still compatible with the semipro and pro camera's from Nikon). I also invested step by step in studio equipment, professional lenses and finally, "back to the future", in an F5, a pro film camera.
I always liked to take pictures, but only
recently I have invested in some more serious equipment and I have been spending
some more time to learn much more about photography and the technique, to improve
step by step. This has been and still is a very interesting journey. I also became quite active on a
number of photography forums on the net.
I have since 2006 started to make photography a second profession and I am just starting to be a bit succesful.
Anyway, my three main motivators in my photography quest are
- learning (a lot)
- sharing my experience and helping people
- having fun
Puzzling:
I've always liked intellectual challenges and more specifically mathematical puzzling, starting with the International Math Olympics in 1977... I restarted more recently with contests organized by the ffjm (a French mathematical gaming associations) and logical and mathematical puzzles at international level (with the WPC). I started participating to the world final in 2000 after a local selection in Belgium. Since then I have been travelling around the world to participate to the finals as captain of the Belgian team. Details to be found in the puzzling chapter (interesting links).
All my activities allow me to travel a lot....
Here are all the countries I have visited until now:
create your own visited country map
Where are my visitors coming from ?