About

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.

Summer 2004 – long hair, shot on slide film; things were about to change!

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!