The World Through the Eyes of Jan Tielens

The last one from our holiday in France: a fresh cut field with a blue sky and some clouds. I was trying to do something with the road on the right hand side of the photo, but it didn’t work out as good as I was hoping. Next time better …

Overpelt Time - A very original clock in the apartment of my sister-in-law. The big city of Overpelt (pun intented) sits in the GMT+1 timezone (CET).

Last year, this picture was taken “by accident” by my wife. I didn’t post-process the picture, I didn’t crop, I just uploaded it to our Flickr account, straigt from the camera. Out of the blue, the picture was “discovered” by some people on Flickr, and it became an instant hit! It was featured on the first Explore page of that day.

Even today, it’s the most popular picture in our photo stream: more then 4000 views, 128 people marked it as a Favorite. It’s even the most popular picture tagged with Overpelt on Flickr.

So, you just have to be lucky…

Photography doesn’t have to be very complicated. I think simple pictures can be nice as well, like the one above: some blue sky, add some clouds and some nice street lights in Lille. Less is more.

During our stay in Lille (France) I went out after sunset with my little Light Sucker Lens (Sigma 30mm f1.4) to shoot some nicely illuminated buildings in Lille center. The first one is the town hall (I think), the second one the train station and the third one the opera. All photos were taken hand-held!

Last week we were in France (Pas-de-Calais) for a short holiday, the first “real” holiday with our little daughter. We were very lucky because most of the time the weather was quite good, resulting in the picture above: a nice field with hay bails and a blue sky with some nice white clouds. This picture totally represents the rest and peace of this part of France.

We were lucky to have a fairly nice view from our hotel room in Lille, so we could watch the sunset falling over the city. Actually the tower and the dome were quite far away from our hotel, but my new Sigma 50-150 managed to bring them closer!

Today we visited the open air museum of Bokrijk (think old buildings rebuilt in their original condition). Conditions were not perfect to take pictures of the houses, churches etc (bad light in the middle of the day), so I mainly shot my little daughter. Although I couldn’t resist taking a picture of the legs displayed above! This guy should check the Top 10 Fashion Suggestions for Nerds.

I finally pulled the trigger: I bought a new lens! It was a battle between the Nikon 105 f2.8 Macro VR AF-S and the Sigma 50-150 f2.8 HSM, and the Sigma won. I have no doubt that the Nikon is a better lens IQ(Image Quality)-wise, and it has VR + macro capabilities. But I don’t think I’m going to become a hard-core macro-shooter anytime soon, so I think the Sigma will give me more versatility. Although the Sigma gets good reviews (very sharp at f2.8 from 50 to 100mm, light and small for it’s class) it has its limitations too: at 150mm f2.8 the lens is soft when the focus distance is less than 3m. And there is some vignetting at 150mm f2.8 (exagerated in the pic above bue to post processing). But I was wel aware of those “issues” (thank you internet!), and I think I can live with them.

So far I’m really enjoying this lens! It’s heavier than I expected, it’s bigger than I expected, but I can handle it. Of course I’m still in the learning phase for this lens (150mm f2.8 gives you razor thin DOF) and I’m not going to post any boring test shots (e.g. brik wall), but I think the photo above is worth it to be posted on this blog.