The offices of the former Dutch brewery „De Drie Hoefijzers” was opened in 1927, 85 years ago. The style was typical and rich, inspired by the School of The Hague and Art Déco. Since last year, this monumental building houses offices for some smaller companies. Both the appearance of the building as the classification, attire and furnishings are intact and preserved as such. The property is one of the rarest examples of rich industrial offices for the 1929 crisis in The Netherlands. It is also important as a historical building, both visually and functionally part of the complex of the brewery. Please find the images below.

The main hall


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Antwerp Central Station is a marvelous building, combining very modern and pretty old architecture. This is a small series of black and white symmetrical compositions taken in that railway station.



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In the middle of Breda, the „Grote Kerk”, the big church, is the eye-catching, 15th century piece of history of the town center. Living close to Breda myself, it felt like being a tourist in my own town, capturing the church and the view from above at dusk.




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Let me do a confession: for quite a while, I was thinking that HDR was no longer useful to me. I had bought a pretty good camera, and with the raw-files coming out of that machine and the miracles that the latest version of Photoshop can do with these files, why use HDR any longer? Moreover, I often had the impression that the HDR’s were not as sharp as they should be. So one starts thinking, reading and most of all trying and experimenting. My conclusionSee more images ...

Since a couple of weeks, a new version of Photomatix is available. This is the software that I use for HDR. The improvement of this version number 4 is enormous, compared to the previous one. The processing speed seems to be much faster than it was, and the program has become much more intuitive. See more images ...

Producing good HDR pictures may seem easy: take multiple exposures and throw them in Photomatix Pro or another software programme. Ready. Wish it was true. It’s always quite difficult to get exactly the result that you want, in terms of sharpness or sphere. Here is a good example of high level HDR (in my view at least), with a good description of how to work.
Recently, I have experimented further with night shots in HDR. You can find them in Cityscapes, but here are the examples.

1. Night shot of Berlin Dome. Three exposures, after which I used Exposure Fusion in Photomatix Pro (and did some radial blurring to get the effect in the sky)


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During holidays I have been in Milan for some days. Milan is known as world headquarters of fashion, but also for its landmarks: the Dome and the famous Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II. Normally stuffed with people, the latter is abandoned when one gets out of the bed early. I myself was there as 05.30, which provided me with some time to take pictures without people and enabling to make use of the beautifully lit gallery.
I would now like to share an experiment.See more images ...

Tags: Photoshop, tools, HDR, exposure fusion