It’s been a long while since the last update. Sorry for that. It seems that “summer” means “vacation” only on the TV screen. Althought we hadn’t had much rest lately, we’re still alive and kickin’.

July 2nd, 2009 – Petra became a nurse (see images below). A long awaited break from studies has come her way. It’s also a relief to have completed what she started. Currently, she’s working as a nurse almost full-time. She does home care for elderly people in our area – something that’s apparently making her happy. This will be her job till we hit the road for trip number two in October.

Road trip number one went rather well. We were stopped for drugs check on the car and ourselves only once (in Bucharest, RO), the car didn’t need to have a major service, for some reason there was very little back pain for the two of us, and I only fell asleep once on the road (almost drove straight through that 360-degree highway exit lane). We left for Bulgaria on July 9 and were back in Holland on July 19 – pretty much a week back from the time I’m writing this. We managed to get all the paperwork that needed to be done in time and this gave us a couple of days extra with friends and family in Sofia. Read more…

Disclaimer: I just couldn’t resist but share how happy I am with a photo-related purchase. So bear with me, you’ll get to learn some new stuff too maybe.

A 50mm lens (or it’s 35mm equivalent) is the one that best matches the perspective of the human eye. This is why such a lens is also called “normal” or “standard”. I’ve just recently become a happy owner of the mid-range 50mm (non-zoom or “prime”) lens by Canon. As a matter of fact, it’s precisely that lens pictured on the left of the text.

It’s a lens that has a very large aperture opening (f/1.4, the smaller the number, the larger the opening). This means that photographing in low-light conditions has just become even more fun for me.

But so I don’t bore you to death, I’ve attached a few shots of Petra (with her new haircut!), pretty much the first ones I took with the lens. Having a non-zoom 50mm lens is a definite creativity pusher and eye-opener at the same time. The amount of blur on the background (known as depth-of-field) is just mind-blowing. Anyhow, enjoy the photos below and keep reading after them for some more on me and my photography.

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As the days grow longer (well, not the days themselves, but the daytime part of them) life seems to become slightly more enjoyable up here in Holland. It’s also rather pleasant to feel the warm sunshine and be outdoors at temperatures above 10°C. Here in the flat lands we’ve waved winter good-bye a long time ago… It’s just that Spring seems to be limping on its way to us. I suppose we got no other options but to wait. More glimpses of good weather are always welcome.

Now, to bring you up-to-date with our lives: studies and work are as usual. We haven’t changed houses, nor re-planted the garden. The balcony is still unused and in a state of disorder due to the wind blowing the white plastic chair around. The wooden chair is holding on cause it’s bigger, but we don’t seem to care much for either of them at the moment. The workers who are fixing the parking lot on our street (for two weeks already and counting…) seem to be rather sluggish, but they plenty make up for it by being loud. Read more…

Happy New Year! Petra and I wish you a year of growth in faith and God’s blessing at God’s timely moments!

We did have an easy and quiet evening at home… proof of that is the fact that I’m blogging at 1:10am on January 1st. Unfortunately, Petra was a bit ill (for the 3rd New Year’s eve in a row!) and we didn’t have many other options at hand. So now she’s asleep and I’m back to everyday life. But at least the firework was worth seeing from the balcony. They estimated that some 80mil. EUR (last year’s was ~65mil.) were spent on it this year in the Netherlands – for that money it better be good.

As promised, here come two shots from the Christmas celebration at our church in Rotterdam:

Well, have a Happy New Year! I’m off to an episode of TopGear…

This personal update comes a little late, but we hope you’ll enjoy it nevertheless. In the last week of September we went to visit our good friends Ali and Sonja as well as the world’s largest photography show, which takes place in Cologne already for over 30 years – Photokina.

Overall it was a good time off for me and Petra. Me being able to go out and have variety in the daytime was just great and very refreshing. Petra also enjoyed being with friends and visiting different places (such as the Frankfurt Zoo).

I suppose if I had written this right after we came back I would still have had the excitement to tell about it. Now we’re back to normal life and I’ll keep it short… Below you’ll find some images of us and our friends from our visit to Marburg. I’ll also link some of my stock photos from the trip, Photokina 2008, as well as from the zoo. Enjoy!

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