These images were taken for a report on the Belalp, Valais, Switzerland region for Wintersport Magazine #16 (Nederlandse Ski Vereniging). Hanging under a paraglider at a few hundred feet height in one of the most stunning regions of Switzerland is a treat unimaginable. If you love heights this is something really worth doing – Life’s good!
“I’ve been wanting to do evening photoshoots from the sky at EDM events for years. However, Hollands tough safety laws don’t allow flying after dark. But even at earlier timeslots I had never managed to get a helicopter available to me for a shooting. Then, late June, luck turned. As senior photographer for Q-dance I was granted heli-time at Defqon.1, not just any slot – a LATE shot, the latest possible in Holland.
At exactly 22:05 I took off for a 20 minute shoot in which I could expand my imagination to the limits. Thanks also to the new camera equipment like the Canon 1Dx (amazing noise-levels at 800-1600ISO) and the stabilizer from the 70-200IS II telelens, also by Canon, the photos came out incredibly good with never before seen camera-angles. I immediately wanted to up the ante: Tomorrowland was just weeks away and in Belgium one is allowed to do nighttime flights. I explained the organizers my plan to do something never been done before: a risky shoot over the mainstage during the massive fireworks! With a simple “make it happen” things were set in motion: a time-slot was reserved for me and all that was left was mentally preparing myself for the technically difficult shoot ahead.”
Tomorrowland is an Electronic Dance Music aka EDM event organized every year in the Belgium town of Boom. Normally there are 16.000 people living in Boom, but on Tomorrowland there are 180.000 people dancing on three days. This year Tomorrowland took place on Friday, July 27, Saturday, July 28 and Sunday, July 29. The line-up consisted of 400 DJs, such as Skrillex, Avicii, Skazi, David Guetta, Nervo, Swedish House Mafia, Steve Aoki, Carl Cox, The Bloody Beetroots, Paul van Dyk, Martin Solveig, Chuckie (DJ), Fatboy Slim and Pendulum, playing on 15 stages per day.
The most unique view EVER from fireworks at an EDM (Electronic Dance Music) event!
Taken from a helicopter during the Friday’s fireworks show at the world No.1 dance event: Tomorrowland. These photos are the first ever made like this.
Equipment used: Canon 1Dx, 70-200 EF2.8 mkII , 16-35 EF2.8 mkII and one Eurocopter EC120 Colibri.
Many thanks go out to Ibo Örgüt (Q-Dance) and Christophe van den Branden (ID&T Belgium) for making this “world first” possible!
One of my favorite views has got to be the top of the Roque Nublo, or the “Cloudy rock”. One of the highest parts of Gran Canaria, one of the Spanish Canary islands west of the Moroccon coast, can be reached with a pleasant 45 minute hike. Just stepping onto the plain top with the two massive volcanic remnants is amazing. They still look so small but after walking the last bit you just are in awe because of their sheer size.
While shooting the snowboard and skitest for the Dutch “Wintersport Magazine” I was using the same skilift over and over again and felt it was really great for doing some shot from above as it came over the skislopes really low at a specific part.
All what was needed was a bit of good timing and a bit of good luck. With one test run (and some walkie-talkies) we managed to get speed perfectly right and while the skiers went underneath me I just had to lean out of the chairlift adn shoot a ton of pictures.
The end result came out incredibly good and I totally fell in love with this shot: it really embellishes the way you feel when on the slopes with friends. The shadows give it a really nice touch too and the spraying snow from the skies couldn’t have been more perfect, this is wintersports!
The image has been cropped slightly and was pulled a bit brighter with the curves tool. Just minor adjustments to a photo that hardly needed any work. It was shot with a manual setting at 1/1600th at f6.3 with 100ISO. 15mm fisheye lens on a Canon 1D MkIII (1.3 magnification factor).
As I’m planning a new trip to my favorite Middle-eastern country, Oman, hopefully in April I thought it would be nice to pick one shot from my previous trip in 2008. It belongs to my “Faces of Oman” series for which I photographed ordinary Omani people during a 6 day mad dash around the country for the largest commercial Newspaper (Telegraaf) and Magazine (Veronica Magazine) in the Netherlands.
The photo featured here was taken at the famous Nizwa Fortress, in the Northern part of the country. After having had a tour of the fortress I sat down while some of us went to get some sodas and icecream from the local vendor. As I sat and enjoyed the view over the tower I noticed these two guys taking a peek though one of the tower windows. I realized I just had seconds to capture this image while having to lens-change as well from my 16-35mm to 70-200mm. I figured I just had to try and switched lenses faster than I ever had. I knew the camera was still on semi-automatic (Av 5.6 with -1/3 stop of underexposure) so I just had to point and shoot. Seconds after taking four photos, the guys were off leaving me behind very happy!
The photo is about a 70-80% crop of the original, leaving out a window that was to be seen on the left side of the picture. In photoshop I compensated the color, saturation and levels to adjust for the slightly too warm (red) original.
For a big assignment for Dance4Life in Uganda, last March, I took this photo while enroute from London Heathrow (LHR) to Entebbe (EBB). Hoping to catch a few nice photos at sunset this one came out quite spectacular though not that easy to capture as the light was dimming fast and the window was pretty iced up after 5 hours into the flight.
With an aperture of f2.8 I managed to still get a shutter time of 1/400sec at 100ISO. All shots with higher apertures turned out to too “dirty” from the ice particles on the window and the haze that was pretty much on each shot was removed by auto-levelling them in Photoshop and then turning back the over-contrasted areas with the curves tool where necessary.
View from 25 meters high in the RTL Netherlands television crane at the back of the Radio538 Koninginnedag concert area. Koninginnedag (or Queensday) is basically the biggest yearly national party in the Netherlands and the Radio538 hosts a large free festival in Amsterdam which about 200.000 people attend during the course of the day.
The panorama is a stitch of several Canon 5DmkII images to make it one 25 megapixel super panorama. Watch out for more to come.
Click preview for the mega-view!
Or click here to get it as a dual screen wallpaper!
Stage view with Markus Schulz on the decks (21mp).
About time to add some panoramic images from all over the world, a section that I will be updating more over the coming months.
Most of these have been stitched using the excellent Hugin stitching tool.
View over Nagasaki, Japan, from the Clover Garden elevator. 2004
