I went, I saw, I took photos. De Nieuwe Anita doesn't have a lot of light to work with, but you can use that to your advantage.

Experiencing Russia means experiencing Russians. Moscow is a massive city - this is a tiny sample of its 10+ million inhabitants, the crowd that helped me understand this mad country.

Some bands record well, others are better live. I'm a great fan of live recordings, and I love a band that can play an audience while playing their music. Here's a small selection my favourite photos from past shows.

Growing up is hard work for a kitten. A small selection of what our boys have been up to in 2010.

On Saturday I took some photos for Unfold at the Fiber Festival, which is difficult to describe but easy to enjoy. Chiptune musician Monodeer made a particular impression. Gameboys are still awesome.

For videos and words go here and here.

Check out the Humble Bundle, a collection of indie games on sale for just a few days. You pay as much (or as little) as you want, and get to select who gets to benefit from your payment. Most of my contribution went to the EFF.

If anything I recommend getting it for Braid. It's an at-times fiendishly difficult puzzle game and it'll mess with your head, but there's a real sense of achievement when you figure something out.

Besides Braid there's Cortex Command (an unfinished game, but you get free updates for life), Machinarium, Revenge of the Titans and the iPad classic Osmos. All 5 included games are cross-platform and DRM-free! Pay what you want once and you can download versions for Windows, Mac and Linux.

Go go go!

My friend Daan Doesborgh made it to the final of the Dutch national championship Poetry Slam, so we ventured out to Utrecht to support him.

The winner would be chosen by a split vote: half of the vote was up to the official jury, and half was to be measured by audience supporter noise. Since I knew several of the contestants who made it to the second round I had to make some tough choices regarding who to support with the most noise. Only two poets could fight it out in the final round. Fortunately the judges made the toughest decisions and the final was to be between Daan and Martijn Teerlinck. These guys are quite familiar with each other's work so it was going to be a close race.

It ended up being very, very close (0.1 dB difference in crowd noise) but in the end Martijn was declared the winner.

If you look closely at the photo with the scores in the background, you'll notice that there might be something amiss... which the sound guy figured out after only a few minutes. He announced that there was a problem and they'd have to review the scores again. It gave us all flashbacks to the infamous incident of wrong winner being announced on live TV. Confusion reigned and since no one knew quite what was going on some people took the opportunity to jump on stage to voice their discontent.

Eventually order was restored and it was decided to do a re-vote, which through an organized effort on our part (a few voices were lost) went to Daan. Martijn was stripped of his newly acquired title and Daan was declared the winner after all, but clearly no one was entirely happy with how it all went down.

The mess was somewhat cleaned up by the organisation afterwards by announcing that Martijn and Daan both receive the first prize. Still, it's a blight on what should have been a fair competition. Hopefully they'll sort out the judging system for next year so that One True Winner can be chosen. Until then, all hail the kings of Poetry Slam: Daan Doesborgh and Martijn Teerlinck!

Hi, I'm Onno Siemens, a photographer and technology enthusiast based in Amsterdam.

Print

Much of my commercial work involves covering events taking place in Amsterdam. Publications include:

• Time Out
• Amsterdam Weekly
• Unfold Amsterdam
• The Shakey Photo Project

Television

In 2006 I was featured in a "one minute documentary" produced by Coast Productions, filmed by John Pardue and broadcast exclusively on MTV Europe. It was part of a series sponsored by Canon titled "The Shot":

Accomplished photographers share a photograph and the story behind it. The passion for photography combined with brilliant photographic abilities make for remarkable photographs.

It was filmed over the course of a weekend in London and focused on my concert photography.

Geekery

Until a few months ago my daily work involved Unix system administration and development. Having worked for 10 years straight I'm now taking a short break. I built this website using Ruby on Rails. It is served by nginx with the Passenger module behind a Varnish cache.

Contact

If you have any questions or photo requests, please contact me. I'll be more than happy to help you out!