must type stuff here...

Last week was not fun, too much confronting with what I have lost and too little attention for new chances. If it is up to me I prefer more new chances and less confronting, thank you very much.

I spoke with Thijs who was kinda surprised that I still consider myself happy. Happy as in happy with life. I am not happy with the divorce thing of course but there are so many other things that I can appreciate and be happy with! I have great friends, a great and supportive family, my grades at university have never been better and I like my job. It is all a matter of perspective really: what do I want to look at? Stuff that is or stuff that is not?

And I am getting better at doing things alone. This is difficult to learn but I am getting the hang of it. Today I went to the 'Little Green Church' or 'Willibrord Church' in Oegstgeest. Legend has it that it was sanctified by Willibrord (hence the name) in the 8th century. Current church dates back to the 14/15th century and has been rebuild stone by stone after the siege of Leiden in the 16th century. Weather was grey overcast which made the pictures of the church kinda boring. So I continued with shooting some pictures of graves *hey at least I wasn't bored*. This afternoon I fixed them up in photoshop and the result can be watched here.

For those of you not yet in-the-know. I stopped using my flickr account so you can drop that. For now I'll be using my DeviantArt space for my pictures. I might eventually prog something myself but for now this will do.

Feeling hot hot hot

A heatwave... where?



Agreed, above picture is well... hot, especially when you realize it was taken in my sleeping room.

This however is much much worse...



This was the reason why I spent my time today entirely indoors. This picture was taken at 17:00 (so not even the hottest time of the day) at my terrace in the sun, with no shade (other than that of me while taking the picture) without any breeze of wind at all.

The thermometer eventually went off the scale to end up here:

Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest

Yesterdaynight I went with Thijs to Pirates II. We had a lot of fun, it's a decent adventure with enough power to be tense at times and enough humor to be hilarious. Don't expect a memorable tale of outstanding storytelling, this movie isn't made for that. Its goal is to entertain you and really succeeds at doing that. I don't mean to say that the storytelling is bad, just a bit confusing at times. It was very clear from the start that the writers went for a *big* story. Pirates I was a try-out and basically a stand-alone story. Pirates II picks up where Pirates I ended but is in every other aspect a real "part I" movie of two episodes. I understood that Pirates III has already been filmed.

With Pirates II you get all the content you would expect from a swashbuckle adventure movie without it becoming too predictable: canibal tribes, humor bordering slapstick, treasurehunts, barfights, seamonsters, gunboat battles, the pretty girl, the pretty guy, a voodoowitch and lots and lots of lightning fast sword dueling. Although some ideas are just a bit too far fetched. Like the bad guy pirate playing an organ aboard his ship: that's just pushing it ;). Special effects and acting more than compensate for this and add very well into the general adventure feel. The Kraken is simply great and so are the effects on Davy Jones and his crew.

The people with the patience to sit through the entire credits are suprised with a final scene. The credit scene in Pirates I (with the monkey stealing the coin and becoming undead) has more impact on the general story than the scene in Pirates II. It is funny nonetheless.

So if you are into entertaining adventure movies along the lines of Indiana Jones, Three Musketeers, Count of Monte Cristo and such go watch it. You won't be disappointed.

Another picture

Featuring my brother and his girlfriend. Spend last weekend smoking a waterpipe at their place. Very nice :)

Flickr

By buying a digital camera I was kinda forced by people to open up a picture galery. I did so here at Flickr.

If I fee like it I'll upgrade to a pro account to be able to make more picture sets and upload more than the 20M limit a month.

First picture worth sharing

 My mum's hortensia 

Nikon D50

Woot! I bought a new camera :)

It's a DSLR with a digital 15-50mm Nikkor zoom lens (28-80mm at 35mm film) and a 45-200mm Nikkor lens (70-300mm at 35mm film). I am still getting used to the controls but suffice to say that I am a *very* happy bunny. Especially the Nikon autofocus is amazing. I am used to the horrible autofocus of my old Sigma SA500 which simply sucked. I nearly always had to manual focus my pictures. At least I got pretty good at that, learning the hard way.

I am looking into replacing my filters. Of course the Nikkor's have a different lens radial than my old Sigma. So I need two new UV and polarisation filters. I am also looking into getting 81A, 81EF and some macro filters. Besides these I'll eventually want an attachment for right-angle viewing, a secondary battery pack and a powercord.

Enough to wish for! But so far I am just going to enjoy this new camera and getting used to live film switching (yay!) and making as many pictures as I like on my 1Gb SD card! Look forward to picture posts!