Pictures from the party itself (and a few freak videos) will be posted later… meanwhile I am posting just the “Family Portraits”, which we started calling “Fotos Estudio 2000″.

This all started over 3 years ago when me, Erica and a few more friends in Geneva had the idea of taking “Family Portraits” in “Les 5 portes” bar every time we were drunk (the golden mirror and a few artifacts in the background helped). The style was that kitsch/tacky kind of shots that annoying photographers (nothing to do with Estudio 2000) and our parents insisted during our teenager times (so long ago), making us pose in the classic odd positions and with odd backgrounds (flowers, fireplaces, whatever). Would get really worst if you had brothers or sisters. Here are 2 examples from those times in Geneva (click to enlarge):

Well, enough said, yesterday, as soon as we got tipsy enough, and getting worse while we were drinking more, we took an outrageous number of “Estudio 2000″ pictures. Here they are (click the scary picture below to open the album):

I’ll be retroposting a lot within the following days, since I’ve accumulated too much stuff and had no time or chance to connect during the road trip.
First post will be dedicated to the madness at the Chemical Brothers live performance at Montreux Jazz Festival, the day before we started the road trip.
This is the “Saturate” track, my favorite from the new “We are the night” album. I was expecting this reaction while playing live.

If you have a chance to see them live, during this tour, be sure not to miss it.

Since there was not really a lot of time to spend posting and uploading pictures, here’s a selection of the best ones and videos will be posted soon. This selection includes Italy, Monaco, Cannes , St Tropez and Avignon.

> CLICK HERE FOR ALL THE PHOTOS

My friend Ines Tail-Cutter just arrived today. I’ll post a few pictures and will add post comments later since I won’t be at home often and the after the road trip actually starts we will only have time to post in the hotels.

Ok, after all the waterfall hiking (kind of), barbecue, walking, jumping, kid’s playground, we stopped in Lavey-les-bains thermal baths & SPA. If you ever go to Switzerland, don’t even thing about not visiting this place (warning: you might get addicted and return every weekend, specially when snowing)!

It was supposed to be relaxing but as always we ended up getting even more tired after swimming and goofing around in hot water for three hours. All of this after everything we’ve done during the day. Well, most of the insane mood was due to me deciding to test my ATC2000 mini sports camera underwater. It says in the booklet and in its site that it should not be used underwater, but after taking a look in the way it is build, I took the risk (anyway I keep ruining cameras, palmtops and other gadgets by letting them fall in water, cliffs and sitting on them). I used it a lot in the snow while airboarding, clipped to my helmet. Should post those videos one of these days. But was really curious to see how it would work underwater. Anyway here’s the video, with some “intense” moments and a lot of silly ones. My hair without gel also looks really scary.

And here are some photos from Lavey-les-bains. The only bad thing about this place is that you feel like a zombie after soaking in hot water for hours (ususally 3 or 4), then jacuzzis, sauna, the ice room (as in the post photo), Turkish bath and so on. They even have a swimming pool with classical music underwater and occasionally dolphin and whale sounds. Ok, and when we are there we try to sing Ninfa Artemis gatôoooooo underwater to annoy everyone.

Overall it was fun and relaxing at the same time, turning my return to Geneva (driving around 100 Km) a nightmare (thanks Red Bull). The camera worked well underwater and did a good job. Unfortunately Youtube also does a good job ruining video quality. But you get an idea. The original 640×480 running at full screen, which the camera records directly to the SD card looks great, specially for a cheap sports camera. You can find this gadget on the link below, in case you are interested.

Where to get a Sports/Underwater camera?

We really needed to go for a walk after eating (outrageously) a lot. I had the idea of taking a few shots and play around a little bit more with jump/frozen photography.

I should do a dedicated post for this subject really soon, since I have a lot of good shots already. This is inspired by the work of Lois Greenfield, a great photographer I really admire, whom I had the opportunity to meet since she does some photo shoots for a campaign from our agency every year. The technique is quite simple: using an extremely fast shutter speed (1/1500 of a second in my case), you try to catch and froze the “moment”, since there will be no motion blur (or almost). It is quite difficult to catch the right instant in the beginning, but you get used to it and to your camera shutter lag. I just use a “cheap” Samsung camera here, but usually there’s not a lot of cheap cameras with manual shutter override options out there. Below are some examples of a few shots (click them).

Warning: Jumping a lot after eating too much in a barbecue might be dangerous (and messy). Try not to barf on nearby people.

In the end, after all the jumping and fooling around in general, we decided to have some masochistic moments in a kid’s playground nearby. Here’s the short video, obviously, I am the one behind the camera:

By the way, I saw this post from Sonia and I realized she has a great “toy”to do excellent frozen/jump photography. Couple that with the fact she’s a professional photographer and her camera might be ten times better than mine and go further in shutter speeds, and add some lighting gadgets probably (strobe flashes?). She has no excuse to post some interesting shots there…

Since the hiking didn’t took as long as we expected, we decided to drive an extra 20 minutes to “Les Iles” near Sion, which is a nice place where I was last year.

We installed our barbecue gear, which was just a disposable aluminum coal box, a picnic blanket and all the tuperwares with food. It took a while for the thing to stop burning so we could actually place food over the coals. And then it took a while for it to cook, but that’s on of the wonders on any barbecue: you are starving so bad that anything tastes great by the time food is ready (or not-so-ready) to eat. Here are a few pictures of the afternoon. The first picture of Roxa with the salad caught in the air inspired me for an after-lunch jump (or frozen) photography session (that will be the next post). There’s also a short video.
[PT] o video inclui a Roxa a mexer nos meus tomates

To be continued…
Next: Jump photography

We decided to hike in the morning. I heard about this place trough a friend and did a brief research online. Seemed interesting: lots of catwalks between 14 waterfalls in cliffs and hiking afterwards. There’s was only a problem after we arrived. Someone told the catwalks were being repaired and the trail will be cut somewhere in the middle. Nice. Anyway we went, since I wanted to scare Roxa (she’s afraid of heights and has some issues with vertigo). Obviously I jumped a lot to make the wooden structures shake and squeak, but it didn’t work very well since the base is all metal. But it was enough to produce the scary picture (find it below) and you can notice the way she grabs the walls in the video. Looking forward to return when the full trail is reopened.

To be continued…
(next: the barbecue)

Last Sunday, to get my revenge against an insanely busy week (Saturday included), I got in the car and drove to the Valais region (Switzerland). I am only posting this now, because this week was another insanely busy one, including today (supposed-to-be holiday). I picked Roxa and Abdellah in the way, (for a change) since they live between Geneva and the Valais. There was actually no big plan for the day, but ended up being great, probably because of that. In the end, and apart from the inevitable driving, there was hiking close to some waterfalls, barbecue, jumping photography, swimming, thermal baths, sauna, ice-room and well, driving back to Geneva. Obviously, I had one of my best nights of sleep after all this.

The picture above shows just a little preview of what the day was. There will be a few posts for the different things we did (beware of the swimming pool ones with my underwater video camera). To start and apart from the “teasing” picture, I leave the video of the beginning and end of the day: driving in the highway, which curiously I love to (in Switzerland at least, in this area, with this landscape).

To be continued…

Here it is: the very first post in this blog. And by the way, what is this all about? Well, this will be the place where I’ll post a lot of nonsense pictures, weird videos, useless articles I might come up with and whatever I decide to post, whenever I decide to post, after all, this is my blog.