Sunday 27th of September, was the day for some camera nerding with Marco & Jooky in the Spaarndammerbuurt in Amsterdam. For the non Dutch folks that are reading this. The Spaarndammerbuurt is a neighbourhood in Amsterdam. One out of the eight neighbourhoods where groups of up to 30 amateur and hobby photographers could participate in a fotosafari under guidance of a photographer from the organization. It was a good excuse to test out my new Tamron 17-50mm f2.8 lens that I bought in New York and see how I shoot pics with it on my Canon 500D.
Around 11am I met up with Marco & Jooky at Amsterdam Central Station where we took the bus towards the meeting point in the Spaarndammerbuurt. We got there early and we had something to drink and a snack while we waited for our guide. At 12 pm the guide started explaining the rules and gave some tips after which the fotosafari started. The theme for the fotosafari was “Amsterdam of Yesterday and Tomorrow.” But I didn’t really have that in my mind while walking around and snapping pictures in the Spaarndammerbuurt. I was just trying out different compositions/framing and stuff like that while taking pictures that I thought would be nice. After 2 hours of walking around we went back to the meeting point where everyone had to filter out their pics and select their 8 best pictures. We were told to be at Trouw Amsterdam in the Wibautstraat at 4pm because that was when we could start uploading our 8 pics to their laptops. Oh, btw. Trouw is a Dutch newspaper.
Before Marco, Jooky and me started to filter out our pics we copied them on Marco’s netbook and on my imagetank. And then the filtering started, I had to filter 8 pics from roughly 100 pics that I took. Yep, I still am a picture taking madman 😛 But anyway, the first few selections went pretty fast. I went from roughly 100 pics to 40, from 40 to 16 and then it got harder. Well at that time it did but it went from 16 to 12, then from 12 to 10 and the last 2 took longest. But I managed to select 8 pics which I thought were the nicest out of the 100 that I took. Now (tuesday) I probably would not have selected 2 of those but others. Like they say looking back it’s always easier …
After we selected our pics we were off to the Wibautstraat to upload our pics at Trouw Amsterdam. When we got there we proceded to upload our pics and after everyone’s pics were uploaded we had to select 5 pics that would represent the Spaarndammerbuurt for the finals. So the most honest thing to do was as a group select the best picture for eacht person which would reduce the total selection from 240 pics (30×8) to 30 pics and then our guide selected the best 5. To my big surprise my picture was one of the five to go to the finals.
During the whole uploading and selecting food was served and you could get drinks. At 7pm all the neighbourhoods had their selections and these were projected on a big ass screen and all participants voted for their favorite picture per neighbourhood and then for the overal winning picture. The winning prize for the neighbourhood is a print out of your picture on A0 format (which is pretty huge if I remember correctly) and the overal winner prize is a 4 day fototrip to New York for the winner and a friend. The votes were collected and then the waiting started. A bit after 8pm the results were in and I was in for a BIG surprise. I actually won with my picture O_o which I totally did not expect. After the overal winner was announced the three of us were off to have some all you can eat sushi after a tireing day of camera nerding.
In each neighbourhood there will be an exhibition with the pictures taken in that neighbourhood next month. So I’ll definately go take a look at the exhibition and bring along my camera to do some more camera nerding 😛 For the people that are curious and want to take a look at the pictures that were taken just follow the links that are provided just below.
If you click on the pictures you’ll get to see a larger version, if you want to see the other neighbourhood pics use the link “Bekijk alle foto’s uit …”
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