Again good news: one of my pics has been used for the cover of the “Welcome to Dubai” magazine, which is produced by the Dubai Tourism Department. The picture is part of one of my most favourite series and has been taken in the desert of Liwa in the Empty Quarter, on top of a majestic sand hill (it took us an hour to climb it, a real race against the clock seen the setting speed of the sun in this part of the world…). At the end of the session I requested the model to keep the headscarf above her head and in the wind, resulting in a nice dreamy effect due to the longer exposure time. The picture was taken a few years ago, with an Canon Eos5 using Velvia slide film, and it was quite an expensive photograph to produce: the fine fine sand which was (due to the wind creating the nice effect) virtually everywhere and ruined one of my lenses. The ballhead of the tripod as well did not survive the climb to the top of the hill….

Proud to announce that one of my Finnish pictures has been published by Life: shown in “Finland’s Beautiful Winter” is my picture of a Snow Owl resting in the snowy landscapes of Finnish Lapland:

Photographing the beautiful landscapes and wildlife of Lapland in the midst of winter was not one of my most comfortable experiences: at temperatures of -20 degrees Celcius (at some exposed hilltops it was even as cold as -35 degrees Celcius) everything tends to freeze up (naturally) including hands, fingers (making something as easy as tripping a shutter difficult), tripod ballheads (even cracking a Manfrotto ballhead up in the process) and reducing battery lifetimes signifcantly. The Canon Eos5D however kept performing flawlessly, and the hard work and difficult circumstances eventually paid off: our Lapland trip was one of my most successful commercial projects to date.

One of my Kyrgyzstan pictures has been published by National Geographic Traveler:

The picture was taken during our stay with a nomad family in the magnificent Tien Shan mountainrange of Kyrgyzstan, and shows a young boy wearing traditional clothes in front of the yurt where we slept during the freezing nights (yurts were placed at a height of around 2,500m). Below the picture a bit more in detail:

One of my pictures of Dubai’s amazing ongoing civil works (in this case the Palm Cove Canal project at Dubai Waterfront Development) was published as a full page spread in “Dredging and Port Construction” magazine. A tearsheet of the magazine can be seen below :

Above picture was taken digitally on a Canon Eos5D, using a 16-35mm Canon L series zoom lens. A Lee graduated 0.9 ND filter was used to hold back the sky, which would otherwise have burnt out due to the harsh desert sun.

One of my pictures is currently featured in Photoshelter’s April 2008 showroom with theme : “Capturing Green”. The photograph is depicting my partner in the arctic snow landscape of Lapland during one of our hikes (at about -10 degrees Celcius !) – great fun to work in conditions like these with battery powered photographic equipment and nice heavy tripods… Here is Photoshelter’s tearsheet :

Belgian dredging giant “Jan De Nul” used some of my photographs from an industrial shoot for them for an advertisement campaign in Belgium’s largest Flemish newspaper group “De Standaard/Het Nieuwsblad/De Gentenaar”. A tearsheet of the advertisement can be seen below.