We had a great day on the beach today taking some horses into the ocean. The horses seemed to enjoy it as much as we did. Click on “More” for some more pictures.

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I get quite a few emails asking me how our website has been built. Most of these questions come through Gallery where our website has been voted one of the top example sites for the last few years. People seem to think it’s just a matter of downloading some theme, which is unfortunately not the case. So it may be interesting to explain what components make up our website. Continue reading for the full post. More »

My brother Eric and his girlfriend Dewi recently had their second child, a baby boy named Romeyn. They already have a lovely daughter named Jade Julie (after Julie of course!), so the next generation of our family is now well established.

I was contacted to provide a portfolio for Photography Corner, a photography website. They do a regular portfolio section of customers of SmugMug and the people from Smugmug send them over to our website. You can see the result here.

The people at Smugmug asked us to provide them with a portfolio of images to show off their new Smugmungous theme. This new theme stretches across the whole monitor and looks especially stunning on large monitors. They used the images in media events and on their website. Check out the smugmungous images here.

I put two new articles online (dutch only) from Duiken Magazine. I wrote these articles in the end of 2007 and Duiken allows me to put the pdf’s online after a few months, which is very nice of them. They even provide me with the published pdf files. I wish all magazines would do that!

You can read the articles about Dragonets and the Banda Sea in our Publications section.

Julie and I have been pretty active in the last few years on Wetpixel, one of the best underwater photography sites. We are both staff members now, and help out where we can in running the site.

Eric Cheng, the founder of Wetpixel has recently started a magazine called “Wetpixel Quarterly. The second issue remembers the amazing photography of the legendary Jim Watt, who passed away way too early. It also contains portfolio’s of most of wetpixel staff members, including Julie and myself. We’re obviously very proud to be in such a quality publication.

If you’re interested in a subscription visit the Wetpixel Quarterly website.

 In the winter Julie and I head to the US Virgin Islands to visit Julie’s mother. In the past we did a lot of diving during those weeks, but in the last two years we’ve started horse riding. It’s a nice change from riding at home in an arena. Here we can ride freely, on the beach and through the hills. Today we went to the top of a small hill to watch the sunset over the North Shore of St Croix. It doesn’t get much better.

This is Julie’s favorite horse named Pirate. It’s a stallion, that most people that ride here can’t handle, but somehow Julie manages with her soft touch.

In September/October of 2007 Julie and I went to Indonesia on a long trip through the Banda Sea. We visited some very remote islands, some of which have a very notorious history. Especially the Banda Islands themselves were fascinating. These islands are known as the spice islands, and many sea battles were fought over its riches in the 16/17/18th century.

I wrote a 4 page story about the trip which can be read in Duiken Magazine, and will be available as a pdf in a few weeks with this article.

What is even cooler is that Julie got the cover of the January issue with a nice image of 2 boys coming to pose underwater.

Our new cat Ruby (the tabby one) has acclimated very fast. We were initially afraid our older cat wasn’t going to like sharing the house, but things have gone great. Once in a while Samba (the black one) will attack her, but she is very submissive so tussles end really quickly. They seem to tolerated each other really well. We’ve found out Ruby is a really good jumper, and loves to play with toys. She’s also a bit of a beggar, and tends to sneak up on counters at night and knock things over. But all in all, she’s a lovely cat!

Julie and I went to a Bruce Springsteen concert last night in the Gelredome, a soccer stadium with excellent acoustics. We’re not especially big fans of Springsteen but we’ve always wanted to see one of his concerts. We ended up with awesome seats and had a great evening. He performed with his band “The E Street Band”. What is it anyways with concerts that they don’t want you to take pictures. They were haunting everyone with cameras, even useless phone cameras. Seems a bit silly to me. Those things cant make photos worth a damn, as the below image shows.

Every year Julie and I go to the Virgin Islands for about three months to visit Julie’s mother. Unfortunately it’s really warm there as well, while here in Amsterdam it’s cold, rainy and gloomy. But we’ll just have to sacrifice ourselves. We’ll be on the island of St Croix, which is by far the nicest of the US Virgin Islands. Ok, maybe St John is nicer, but just too small for us.

We normally do some diving there, but last year we actually got into horse riding as well. We know a local cowboy there who we helped out taking care of about 15 horses. We had a blast, so hopefully we can do that again this year. We started to take more advanced riding lessons here in Amsterdam just for that occasion.

VI, see you in January!

We had so much fun in the Bahamas diving with Tiger sharks and Dolphins that we decided to go again. Julie actually decided to go two trips, because she wants to try the Oceanic Whitetips as well. What she really means is that she wants to take photos of the wild pigs they found last year, that would come out to the waters edge so you can take split shots. Not my thing. So for the first time in, well, forever, we’re not going on a dive trip together. I’ll meet up with her for the second trip which is the Tiger Sharks trip. Can’t wait, we had so much fun last time.

These Lemon Sharks are always getting in the way of your Tiger Shark shots!

Im really getting tired of all these computer related problems. There was a time in my life where I got a kick out of looking at insides of computers, but after a few thousand of those, I now just want things to work, and work well. I have a low tolerance for crappy hardware or software.

First, I got a new machine. It’s so new, fast and shiny, it needs Vista to run. Which it did ok for the first few hours, until i realised it didnt let me add my external 2TB sata disk, which contain all my images. I spent literally days on this crap, but in the end I gave up. I switched out my 2TB raid with Julie’s 1TB raid, and now it’s happy. And ofcourse XP has no problem with the 2TB one.  If that weren’t enough, I added 2  internal sata disks as well, which worked fine for about a day, until after one reboot they just went *POOF*, gone. They were visible in the bios, but Vista hated them or something. Maybe they were made by a competitor it didnt like. I spent a few hours on it, but I ended up reverting to a previous state of my machine which fixed the problem. How can you lose harddisks?!? That is like last century technology and Vista still doesnt get it right.

Then, Lightroom brought out version 1.3 of their awesome software. Unfortunately, instead of improving things, it made everything super slow for me. I dont really like posting in the Adobe Lightroom forums because some of the regulars there should really be kept away from other people, but I had to bite the bullet and posted my findings. A feature Adobe expanded (Camera Raw Caching) was obviously causing major slowdown on my Vista machine, and I posted pages of proof. I think they started to believe me after I posted some video of the problem, and how to make it go away (make the cache read-only). Lots of other people seem to be having slowdown problems, so I hope LR gets fixed soon.  It’s by far the best piece of software that I have used in the last few years, and I would still recommend it to anyone.

Why can’t I just have a few weeks without problems.

We just put a new gallery online containing some of our Solomon Islands images. You can see this gallery here.