Ronny Gabriels Photography

As many of you might have noticed, I have neglected this blog a bit. There are some really good reasons for this. I will explain them in later post. The most important thing is that this blog is being moved. So instead of coming here to get your updates, you can find updates, new photos and stories at the following address:

www.ronnygabriels.com

This site incorporates the Smugmug photo website and my new blog. If you want to go to the blog pages directly, go to: blog.ronnygabriels.com
The site is new, so give it a test and please let me know what you think. I will be making updates to posts and the interface throughout the next months.

Hope to see you all there!!

PS: for those reading this in an RSS feed reader, the new feed is: blog.ronnygabriels.com/?feed=rss2

Lately I'm doing some trials with timelaps photography.  It's actually harder than I thought, especially the changing lighting conditions when you do it during the day are a real pain.  I have put my first attempt on my site (watch it below). 
I'm not gonna give up in trying to make some really fun videos with timelaps, but I think I'm gonna need to do some more research.  Hope you enjoy this first try.  Let me know what you think and if you have any more tips for me on how to control the conditions, please let me know.  I'm very open to suggestions about this.

The first weekend of June saw the highlight of the still very young season of the BTCS championship with the 12 hour race at Spa-Francorchamps circuit. Saturday was jam packed with great races leading up to the big event. It started with the European GT4 Cup. GT4 might not be as popular as the GT1 or GT3 championships, but it's a unique race nonetheless, since the GT4 calendar is not that packed.



After the GT4 cup, the Belcar Endurance race was held over 150 minutes at the Ardennes circuit. Not only did we see the wonderful Belcar fields rolling out, the field was extended with cars from the British GT and Aston Martin Challenge to make for a very large and diversified field that actually had to start in two waves.



But then at around 2PM, the BTCS cars got the green flag to start their 12 hour race. Sadly I wasn't there for the start. I actually drove to Spa twice that day because I had to attend a wedding reception in Mechelen in the afternoon. But I got back about two hours before sunset and I must say that it had something magical. The golden hours of the day did not only make for nice pictures, but also for a wonderful atmosphere. I had to say I was a bit disappointed in the number of spectators, but it was great nonetheless. I actually didn't shoot too many pictures of the BTCS because it was just a treat to watch the race go by at dusk. As always you can find more photos on my site. The direct link to the gallery is: http://ronnygabriels.smugmug.com/Public/Racing-Season-2010/12H-of-BTCS

Google




Microsoft

Besides some great updates to Hotmail, like for instance let you send 10GB of documents with one mail (the docs are uploaded to SkyDrive and then linked to the mail), the coolest news is that they finally listened to me and made some major updates to SkyDrive. If you are going ... "Sky..what?", maybe a little explanation is in order. SkyDrive is the online storage Microsoft gives it's subscribers (so anyone with a Hotmail address has a SkyDrive). Now why is this a cool feature? Well, because it allows up to 25GB of online storage. That's right 25GB!

Up to now however, it was a little hard to use, mainly because you couldn't download everything in a folder at once. So if you shared a folder with 200 photos, you either had to download each one individually, or the person sharing them had to put them there in zip files. Since the limit for one file is 50MB (to prevent SkyDrive from being used to share illegal movie files etc.) that wasn't always too handy either. I think I made about 20 suggestions to the SkyDrive team (as probably did many other people with me) to get a "one-shot" download for all files in a folder and now ... it's there!! You have the option of downloading all files in a .zip file or via Photo Gallery (a free program not unlike Picasa from Google). So now, SkyDrive has become a very handy and very easy to control online sharing platform that I will use much much more because of this update.

On the 24th of July Scott Kelby, photoshop guru/instructor, is organizing his third annual Worldwide Photo Walk. In Belgium there are already 4 walks to choose from. Antwerp, Leuven, Turnhout and Kortrijk each have their own walk already with Brussels or Ghent probably to follow soon. Last year, I attended the Antwerp photo walk and I have to say it's a great event. It's fun to meet people that are into photography as well and see how everybody takes pictures in his or her own unique way. It surprised me last year how many different types of pictures were taken on the same walk.


So the idea of this WWPW is to get 50 people together in each city and make a two hour trip through the city taken photos. After the walk you all meet up for drinks somewhere to compare your work. I'm 100% sure I want to do this again, the only question that remains is "where?". Of course Antwerp is the logical choice since I live there, but on the other hand, it would be nice to explore another city. Since Kortrijk is a little bit too far away and Leuven is actually very familiar to me, the choice now is between Turnhout (the city where I was born and went quite a lot when I was small) and Antwerp (the city that I currently live in).


Anybody have a suggestion? Anybody else going on one of those walks? I will be deciding this weekend, so let me know as soon as possible. Hope to see you there, whether it's in Antwerp or Turnhout.


So if you're into photography and want to spend an afternoon with likeminded people, I really urge you to participate. The official website is http://worldwidephotowalk.com/


Oh BTW, you can't register for two walks sadly, so that's not a valid option ;-)

Almost a month after the fact, I finally got through all the photos of the Le Mans Series. I know it took quite a while, but I really let myself get dragged into shooting way too much frames. Over 4000 in one day amounting to over 12GB of harddisk space (luckily I don't shoot RAW at the races). But hey, I'm not complaining since I got some great shots, found some new angles of the Spa circuit that deliver high quality shots and in the end had a great time with my favourite of championships.


My price shot of the day must be this shot of the BMW M3 GT2

Here are some other good ones, and as always, you can find a lot more on my site. The direct link to the photos is: http://ronnygabriels.smugmug.com/Public/Racing-Season-2010/1000km-of-Spa-2010. Enjoy!

Last week, my sister invited me to go and shoot in a small nature preserve in Oud-Turnhout called "De Liereman". As good nature photographers, we got up way too early in the morning to go and shoot the sunrise.





Sadly, the sun never broke through the clouds that morning, so it wasn't as spectacular as we had hoped. Of course that didn't stop us from getting a few shots of.



You can find some of the shots on my site. Enjoy.