Welcome to Ork.be

Welcome to the personal website of Ork de Rooij

Ork.be is the personal website of Ork de Rooij. I'm a PhD student at the University of Amsterdam where I research advanced visual interfaces to explore, categorize or simply search through large video collections.Would You Like to Know More?

When I'm not doing that I'm probably out photographing. I've been an enthusiastic photographer ever since my parents put a cheap compact in my hands decades ago. I found it marvelous to be able to capture something beautiful, and relive the experience much later when you look at the pictures. In the last couple of years I have expanded this to professional photography. Would You Like to Know More?

Latest post: Orange people make blue skies

This weekend I went to Amersfoort to do a photoshoot for a fantasy LARP group: The Inquisition of the Church of Kriegrimm. It was a fun day of shooting, and everyone was pretty enthusiastic about it! We met at the Koppelpoort in Amsersfoort, and I let them run all over the place for various individual and group shots. ;)

A downside of having many people gather in the same spot from all over the country is that you cannot easily move to a different date when bad weather happens. So, this being the Netherlands, bad weather happened. It was pretty cold, with ugly big patches of greyness in the sky, boring colors of continuously varying intensities, and the occasional rain shower.

Luckily, bad weather also presents opportunities! I got to be creative with of camera lights, to which I applied orange filters to make everybody looking orange. It's a neat trick that is all about color contrasts: if you make somebody too orange, the camera white balance wants to correct this, but it'll have the added side effect of making the sky more blue. Exactly what I wanted!.

I added the grainy structure and the almost desaturated warm "medieval" colors afterwards.

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My latest photos

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All my photos

I'm an avid flickr user. Flickr really shines in showing recent work quickly to my friends, colleagues, family and everyone else.

Flickr, however, isn't designed to show a structured collection of large, eye-catching beautiful pictures, so I've ever been on the lookout for a solution. I found this in November 2009, when I discovered zenfolio.com. Since then, I've started building a collection over there as well. Please do visit Ork de Rooij's photo portfolio there!