Found this site when doodling on the Internet: http://ellisislandghosts.com/
Urbex photography with a professional touch to it... nice.
[it certainly does help when the place you're visiting has this rich and "loaded" history as this one.

I reorganised the nature section completely and threw away some pictures, added some other.
You can find some new additions of a winter scenery shoot here: Nature > Forests and Trees > Winter Mornings
Made during the last winter period in the neighborhood. Everything was covered with thin ice and the lighting was beautiful.

I'm updating the theme on all galleries. Basically they are using the same naming and directory structure so it's possible that depending on browser caching you will still see the old layout and some links won't work.
Just refresh the browser and all will be fine again.

I'm using a new gallery theme for my images now which is more dynamic. It allows you to 'flip' through the images in a gallery by using the scroll wheel or dragging the bottom handlebar. When clicking an image you will enter a lightbox and are then able to use the keyboard left and right arrows to navigate or enable the slideshow from the bottom commands. Escape key or clicking anywhere on the page goes back to flipping images.... It's also more forgiving in using browsers with different window sizes.

I'm upgrading all galleries for using the new theme.

I'm updating a lot of pages on the site.

- New design on several pages: removed some text here and there and created something more visually simple.
- Added a simple guestbook page.
- Some new links were added.
- Experimenting with a new gallery layout which is more dynamic and features scroll wheel and keyboard navigation [you can always give me some feedback on these]
- ...

Finally after a very long wait I have put the pictures of the cemeteries online, you can visit the directly here.

I know the site has not been updated lately. Past year I have been very busy with a lot of other things, including for the biggest part my day job. Therefore one of my new years resolutions is to get more stuff online.
At the moment I have many pictures still lying around on my hdd platters. Time to get them dusted of and put online wouldn't you say?
In the meantime, my best wishes to all who's reading this.

Proof that Beringen Coalmine is a dangerous place to wander about... I guess we don't need it anymore. Over time more and more news bulletins mention people falling through ceilings etc... whether they be urbex photographers or just plain old copper thieves.

Yes, some images I made some time ago. Decided to upload them to the Nature section.
One of them is made in Grobbendonk and looks a lot like a Cambodian ricefield > Lipton Icetea can do that!!

On 18 and 19th of May 2007 Apropo organised its yearly concert. All students and teachers take part in this two day concert to give the best of themselves. In the late night after the concert ended several jam sessions were held by a lot of talented musicians who volunteered to to lighting, sound, stage...
During the 2 days I was on stage, back stage, front stage to photograph the concert.
I have selected a "Distillers Edition" of those pictures in the apropo gallery in the varia section.

If you want to take a look at the complete concert pics take a look here. I put up a separate webpage for this event.

Amazing, at last a new update. I managed to find some time to put this tidbit online. We visited Baviere a while ago, can't exactly remember the date but it was a sunny afternoon for sure [as you will see in the pictures]. We were let in by the friendly people living there and we had company from their dog all the time. You see him in one of the images. I was always afraid he would lift his leg against my tripod
go directly to it : Baviere Hospital

I would like to take this opportunity to mention a photographer who's work I adore. Bruce Percy is a photographer living in Scotland. He is mostly interested in nature photography, well living in Scotland who wouldn't? One day when going through his online portfolio I stumbled upon what looked like a urban shoot! The Mavisbank House had been abandoned many years before and it reminded me a bit of Chateau Neufcour. Although it's not really his style he was enamoured by the place and decided to do an essay on it. He's not the person interested to go inside these kind of buildings but the beauty and purity of decay and the way the building becomes one with its surroundings over time is depicted well in his own style.
Sometimes I forget how the outside is equally important as the inside... The Mavisbank House
also take a look at his other astonishing work.

[This image is copyrighted by Brucy Percy ©1989-2007]

It's a cemetery already visited several times by other urbexers and afficionado's of the genre. It was a real pleasure taking pictures here because of the serene atmosphere there. The light on one side of this long row of forgotten automobile dreams is filtered through tall pine trees which give the lighting a specific photographic quality. Furthermore it's quiet and calm and I also have no idea if there is an owner of this place. Probably there is, I don't think we have much "unclaimed" land here in Belgium. But considering its location on top of a slope surrounded by trees and bushes it might very well be there still for years and years to come. I would definitely go back within 10-20 years and take some 100Gigapixel images using my inner-synaptic nikon photo contant lens to compare.
I'll give a post on the website here when that time comes

enjoy

On my first trip over there my friend Tom accompanied me. Since he is living in Berlin, it was one of those rare occasions when the man was in Belgium. I have also put his pictures online, you can find them here.

I recently found out by reading a book from Friedl' Lesage that famous Flemish defence Litigator Jef Vermassen has his office in a restaurated part of the castle [well a separated 'portiers huis' actually but it was part of the castle domain. Jef Vermassen is an art lover and he mentions he doesn't want to be around the office the day they start with the official destruction. We all can sympathise with that can't we?

Just a tidbit for those of you who didn't know...

When on a short vacation in Brittany France, I passed by the site of Etel where a few old shipwrecks are lying alongside the shore of the river. I believe many photographers who know about the place have visited already because it sure allows for some fantastic images. For this session I opted mostly for the black and white variants because of artistical beauty with the subject.

I've published some new images in the Nature Galleries. You can find updates in:
- Flowers from our garden
- Autumn 2006 impression
- Chatillon
- Forests and Trees : Misty Mornings

Also new updates in the Travel section:
- Vacation trip to Brittany in France 2006
- Vacation trip to Schotland 2006

As you can see I've decided to change the layout of the website (again). I need to change things quite a lot, in order to keep them fresh, clean or whatever other explanation there is for my constant need to changing things. This time I have opted for a kind of retro look using more subdued colours and tints, creating a kind of a classic old negative-photo-sticky book. Hope you like it, either way this allowed me to integrate the design of the journal blog you're now looking at with the rest of the site.

I'm enjoying a short holliday for the moment, hey it's the season for it right! So I will have some extra time to finish on some photographic work I had lying around here in the cupboard. I'm looking forward to putting some new stuff online during these days. Be sure to check out the site during the upcoming days and weeks for regular updates. You can always subscribe to my RSS feed as well to quickly see if something new is waiting for you

In the meantime I whish you all a Merry Christmas and of course already my best whishes for the next year. I hope for this year we can all elevate our level of thinking and emotions so we can eradicate as much violence and negative energy out there is the world. It's all just a matter of critical mass of positive thinking basically. I'll hope for that to happen this year... Cheers.

I've been extremely busy lately with my professional work and also some private matters -> a lot of finishing needs to be done in and around the house which fills up my spare time quite nicely thank you!
I do have a lot of work still lying on the hard disk here but I just need to find the time and energy to get it all online, bare with me

Today exposed-photography.com and gemty.com have been completely uncoupled and will exist further as 2 separate sites. All existing links to exposed.gemty.com will not function anymore. This means a lot of my images that have been cached by google will not work anymore. That's life...

As some of you have probably guessed, I have changed my provider space a week or 2 ago. This was accompanied by some period of unavailability for the time needed to get the DNS updated. Currently the site is served from a private server.
At this moment www.exposed-photography.com domain is hosted on the new server. Gemty.com is not yet switched yet due to some issues with the transferal process. But I hope to have that ironed out soon.
Sorry for any inconvenience but I hope the new server's speed will make up for it by enhancing the picture browsing.

Together with the site redesign some new Urban sites have made it online, these were a few places I visited during the last half of 2005 and beginning 2006.

You'll find the following new sites in the Urban section:

* La Chartreuse
* Volklinger Hutte [Germany]
* Anco
* Beeringen Charbonnages
* Wintercircus Gent
* Cinema Theatre Variete Jumet
* SFPO Boulogne Sur Mer [France]
* EDF Pont Sur Sambre [France]
* Another Car Graveyard
* Trainstation Montzen

I've just put the travel section online. Pictures from various journeys. I hope they will grow larger soon with the summer coming along!
Travel Gallery

I have decided to change providers. My FTP issues are situated at the ISP side. However, either they don't understand the problem or they know about it and don't do anything about it. Eitherway my problems have not been solved and it gets to be a real pain in the b#t to upload material at this time.
Changing providers will not be a big issue except probably for a brief loss of connectivity when the domain name is actually transferred due to cached URL/IP mapping with some clients and proxies along the way. Other than that it all should be okey dorey. I'm not quite sure yet if I'm gonna transfer the gemty.com domain as well. This might cause problems though because a lot of links via search engines still work via exposed.gemty.com... they will hit a "page cannot be found" wall after that.
If the change is imminent I'll put it up the homepage some time beforehand.

In Belgium we have some nice cemeteries and also a some very big ones. Het Schoonselhof in Antwerpen is one of the biggest in Europe [I believe there is a bigger one in the north of Germany, but I forgot the name].
This cemetery is visited not only by the people visiting deceiced relatives and friends but also photographers. I have been there a few times since it's in the neighborhood and everytime I see someone wielding a camera while running around the "old" section.

The old section is the nicest in my opinions because it has very old graves dating back to the years 18xx. People who were buried at that time usualy were rich and/or famous and their graves are decarated by beautiful old sculptures or they simply have a big tombe.

I've decided to get creative on this with my camera and the results will come online soon in a separate gallery. The idea came from a trip we made to shoot EDF in France. On the voyage home we passed what looked like a cemetery with some old graves in a small village and decided to take a look and from there on...

Just uploaded: a small selection from shots in our garden last year. More to come:
Flower Gallery