Winter keeps going strong

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Originally uploaded by DFW-Photo

This year's winter seems to last eternally. At least it's more of a winter than we have had for a decade, and of course just when you get winterguest birds in your garden, you don't have your camera ready (4 fieldfares, in Dutch 'kramsvogels'). So you'll have to make do with an 'Image du soleil levant', the painting that sparkled off impressionism in the end of the 19th century, but then in a 21st century fashion. Keep warm!

Hazy Sunday morning

Hazy Sunday morning
Originally uploaded by DFW-Photo

Found the new issue of 'Black & White Photographer' with quite a few landscape pictures (almost all of seaside locations on the British isles). That inspired me to play in Lightroom with a picture of earlier this year, and which has some water--no seaside in my neighbourhood, a ditch is all you can find here! But then again, with a few wild ducks and the haze of a Sunday morning in spring, what more do you need?

Twente landscape

High time for a drink--I had a thermos full of coffee in the rucksack. And of course no bench to be seen, but it was too cold to sit on the bare earth. Some time later, at the corner of a dirt road, a bench came in view. Finally! I did sit down, I did drink my nicely hot coffee, but hardly dared to look behind me. I was walking to enjoy the landscape of Twente, but my idea of tourism was quite different from what someone had done at that corner of the road: put his old and decrepit holiday caravan on show. For sale!

The only way to picture this, I thought, was in black-and-white and with a heavy sky (that needed some post-processing, as it really was a light-grey deck of clouds). Previsioned & executed later the same day--I just love digital photography!

Ballooning

It had never entered my mind, so to speak, to sail in a balloon, but with luck, we had won a ticket for such an experience. To prepare myself, I had leafed through Yann Arthus-Bertrand's book 'La terre vue du ciel' again. I noticed that many of his pictures had dramatic lighting: the sun low in the sky made for long shadows and warm colours. Can't be too difficult, once you're in a balloon, I thought. How wrong I was! Not a single picture good enough to be compared with his! Not that the weather was not good enough. Beautiful setting sun, spring giving trees the freshest colours of green imaginable and blossom as well, nothing was lacking. But there simply was not enough light to take pictures at a low ISO-setting (to avoid noise), with a decent aperture to have enough depth of field ( around f/5.6 or f/8) and a shutter speed fast enough to avoid blurring. Yet I have a camera with built-in stabilizer (must make all those Nikon and Canon owners jealous ;-) ), which should add a few light values (EV) to what you can shoot without a tripod, still it did not work well enough! The two pictures that came closest to what I had expeced to make, you can see below. Some of the others are on display at my Picasa site. If you don't know how perfect they should have been (in my mind), perhaps they're not too bad... Of course, in the Picasa set there are also a number that were made for the others that shared the balloon flight rather than 'serious' pictures for the discerning few that read this blog.