Hi, I’m Raphaël, nice to meet you!
This internet domain is mostly the front of my email. Still, if you’re curious, here’s some information about me.
Born in 1980 in a dilapidated farmhouse in a rural and back then quite underdeveloped part of North Brabant. It’s now the backyard of the Eindhoven High Tech region. Back then, our neighbors were dairy/cattle farmers for the most part. I gained considerable expertise in sawing down small trees (to feed to our goats), tending campfires and shooting a 4.5mm air rifle (at lifeless targets). I also found that growing vegetables is fun, that mushrooms are colorful and mysterious, and that cats are most likely the pinnacle of creation.
The 1990s – living in the province capital (provincial, still!), attending grammar school, long hair, playing the violin in youth orchestras while listening to rock music, holidays in France. Probably the last time I saw my buddy Joost taking a train and certainly the last time I dragged him onto one, but certainly not the last time we traveled together. To France, of course. Remember the 1990s, by the way – that odd amalgam of fluorescent colors, unbounded economic optimism and the moroseness of grunge music.
Next decade: changes. Doing a Master’s in Information Management at Tilburg University, also moving there for the next twenty years. Picking up photography in earnest, while analog (did I shoot a lot of slides…) gave way to digital (and even more RAWs….) Graduated, worked at ASML for a while, started PhD research at Nijmegen University. In the meantime, the world lost its innocence by the end of summer 2001 and boundless optimism made way for a dot-com bubble and an actual credit crunch. I lost my long hair (good thing, though) just in time before starting to lose the rest of it, too!
In the 2010s, I obtained my PhD in Innovation Management and started working on various projects on a freelance basis. A lot of academic education, primarily, but also some contract research and consultancy. Started InnoTeP in 2011 with a few (former) colleagues and ended up organizing an annual innovation conference for well over a decade. Also met a very special lady whom I’m now happy to share my life and home with. On the photography front I went back to mostly shooting film and developing a taste for old-fashioned printing techniques, ranging from silver gelatin black & white to carbon transfer and color chromogenic printing.
2020s…that’s now! Covid was a weird period and I suppose it precipitated more changes although it didn’t directly affect us much (fortunately) . We moved out of the city, into the village, out of the apartment and into a proper house – with a garden! Eased my way out of academic work, and started spending more time on the technical side of analog photography. Also started delving into electronics and embedded systems engineering – and a lot of cooking, cleaning & ironing!
