Category: photography

After a week of interrupted nights, early starts and a lot of traveling back and forwards to Noord Holland, I was more than ready for a lie-in this morning. Instead, I left the house at 5.15 to join a couple of my colleagues for a visit to the Oostvaardersplassen, a nature reserve in Flevoland province (about 100 km NE of Delft).

When we arrived at around 6.30, the sun was still just below the horizon, and as we had hoped, the clear sky had led to a misty morning, with the temperature just below zero. We parked the car by the side of the road and waited for the sun to come up, enjoying the bird song and fresh air.

Our next stop was a bird hide, where we lined ourselves up, 100-400mm lenses at the ready, and brought out breakfast. Thanks to the foresight of Arie, who was smart enough to realize that I wouldn’t have prepared anything, I tucked into cheese and salami sandwiches and fruit juice. Although it’s still early in the season, and according to Arie, fairly quiet, there was plenty to see.

Aside from the ducks, swans and geese, we also saw a great white egret (zilver reiger), a pair of grebes (fuut)and a grey heron (blauwe reiger). Sadly, no sign of a kingfisher (ijsvogel). No great bird photos to show, but at least some for the record.

After leaving the hide, we drove to the visitor’s centre, stopping to photograph the wild ponies, and another (the same?) egret. Walking down to another hide, we spent some time with another herd of ponies, and then managed to track down a great spotted woodpecker (grote bonte specht) and a white wagtail (witte kwikstaart).

We ended the morning with a cup of coffee and browse around the visitors centre, before heading home around 11.30.

I’ve fancied joining a local photo club for many years now (before I came to The Netherlands in fact), but somehow I’ve never managed to get round to doing it. A couple weeks ago I started considering idea again in earnest, and found that the national organization of nature photography has a group which meets once a month in Delft. Whilst there are a couple general interest photography clubs in Delft, the idea of a club dedicated to nature photography really piqued my interest.

As luck would have it, today was the monthly meeting, so despite the fact that my week was already looking a bit action packed, I made the effort to attend. The usual format of the meetings is a combination of theory and members showing and discussing their photos. Today was an exception, as the whole evening was given over to a presentation by one of the members of the use of layers in Photoshop. Not being a Photoshop expert, I certainly learned a lot, although how much I can remember is another matter. Whilst my Dutch was sufficient to follow the presentation, I had to concentrate hard to take in all the unfamiliar terms.

I was made very welcome by the club members, and am looking forward to attending again next month to see how a “normal” club evening progresses. A number of the club members encourage me to bring a long some of my own photos for the “show and tell” part of the evening – we’ll see if I dare!

Back at home, I’ve installed a trial version of Photomatix Pro and produced my first HDR images, shown below. In each case, I’ve taken 3 input images, and merged them to produce the final image. I feel, though, that I need to spend a little more time reading up on the process in order to truly make the most of it. Not this weekend though!

My plans to take some photographs in the St Nicolaaskerk was nearly scuppered by the fact that my 40D died on me last week during the shoot at the Valkerij Manege (fortunate that I have the 20D as backup). My attempt to drop it off to be fixed on the way to Amsterdam (which involved a diversion into the industrial estates near the Ajax football stadium) was unfortunately a complete waste of time, so one of my tasks for the week is to contact Canon and find out what I need to do to sort it out.

Fortunately, despite the trip out on the metro, I still had an hour or so before the practice to take some photographs, and thanks to a prior arrangement with Michael, I was also able to escape the crowds and take some shots from the organ loft, giving a whole new perspective on the church.

There are plenty of features in the church that I would still love to photograph, but preferably on an occasion when the church is closed to visitors (I hadn’t appreciated just how busy it gets when open). On this visit I concentrated my efforts on taking some photos with which to try out HDR (High Dynamic Range) photography, although I still couldn’t resist taking some shots of the murals on the wall. The results are shown in a separate post: St Nicolaaskerk in HDR.

Back at home, I’ve installed a trial version of Photomatix Pro and produced my first HDR images, shown below. In each case, I’ve taken 3 input images, and merged them to produce the final image. I feel, though, that I need to spend a little more time reading up on the process in order to truly make the most of it. Not this weekend though!

Despite the promises of the weather forecasts earlier this week, it was disappointingly overcast when I left the house earlier today to cycle to Berkel and Rodenrijs for a photography afternoon at the Valkerij Manege. In the end, I was relatively lucky, although the light was far from ideal for photography, the rain held off during the photography sessions, restricting itself to my cycle rides (an hour or so each way) to and from Berkel.

The session started out with an hour and a half or so of portrait photography – approximately 15 birds were spread out across the field awaiting our attention. Finding a good position was a challenge, as it was very hard to avoid getting a washed out sky as background. And of course, there were always other photographers to trip over. I particularly enjoyed the experience of getting up close to a bald eagle, after all my long distance sightings in Canada.

After a fortifying hot chocolate and piece of cake, we ventured out again to photograph the birds in flight – a big challenge! They flew a number of birds for us, including a couple of owls, and a couple bald eagles, which were really a treat to watch. The flight session culminated with a gyrfalcon – practically impossible to photograph, but amazing to watch in flight. As I had expected, I didn’t get any good shots of the birds whilst they were flying, although there were a couple near misses! The experience of an owl’s wingtip brushing against your shoulder has to be felt to be believed. I would certainly love to go back for another attempt.

To round the day off, 6 young owls were brought out for a run around the field. Curious about everything, not at all shy, they came running up to us, and nibbled on our fingers. Unbelievably cute!

I’ve spent the last couple evenings trying to retrieve my gannet photos from the corrupted disk. The first piece of software I tried was a failure – ran for 12 hours, and didn’t manage to find anything. Thankfully, the second, C-Data Recovery, did the trick, and I now have the complete set of photographs back from the dead – a great relief!

Now that I’m back in full possession of my photographs, I can happily say that the experience was well worth the stink of fish guts and bird poo that attached themselves to me for the rest of the weekend!

Off to France/Norway now, but more gannet photos to follow on my return.

So, I went to Bass Rock (near North Berwick, Scotland) this weekend to photograph gannets. Despite bad weather cancelling my original booking for Sunday, I managed to join the workshop being held on the Saturday, and we were blessed with a few hours of clear skies whilst we were on the rock.

The experience was fantastic. On route to the rock we had a “chumming” session, where the skipper of the boat threw pieces of fish in to the water to attract the gannets. Before we knew what was happening, the boat was surrounded by a maelstrom of gulls and gannets, the gannets diving into the water to grab the fish – really spectacular.

We then spent a few hours on the Rock photographing the gannets. They’re beautiful birds, wonderful to photograph close up, especially when the pairs interact with each other. All in all, I was pretty pleased with the photos I came away with, especially as I had some reasonable flight shots.

But…… got home, tried to download them. The second card of the shoot (only 87 photos) downloaded fine, but the first card seems to be corrupted. 300+ gannet photos (including all my flight shots) vanished into dust.