Mar 23
Jan Paul had to visit his sister who lives in the city of Breda. It’s been a while since I was there, and we’d planned to shoot some pictures after the visit. It was pretty cold, and I shot a few pictures, but the scenery sucked compared to the rest of the week.
Oh well, it can’t all be a party.
I thought that this picture of castle Bouvigne was the better one of the bunch (too bad it was closed, I would’ve loved to visit it’s English, German and French garden).
I imported the RAW of the picture below in two stages, one sharpened, one extremely blurred. The picture itsself already had a shallow depth of field. I put one in a layer over the other, then used a mask to combine the blurry background with the sharp latern.
The sign warns that the ice is dangerous. I guess a few weeks of freezing just doesn’t help covering some dodgy moats with ice.
Tagged with: blur • bouvigne • castle • DOF • ice • shallow DOF • winter
Mar 01
I suggested to Jan Paul that we’d go to Muiderslot, a textbook type castle with a moat. So his colleagues in the US and A (sorry, bad Borat joke 
) could see that ‘Holland” contained more than frozen water and windmills.
It was an interesting ride, we did the full blown walk-through-the-castle-following-the-guide tour, but weren’t allowed to take any pictures. Bummer. But very educational-I learned where some Dutch sayings originated from.
And the moat was almost completely frozen over. And better still, almost nobody had used it for ice skating, so the ice was as smooth as glass.
I told JP to go get his ice skates (he had that very same thought), ’cause how many people can claim they ice skated on a moat? So he did, and I took a whole set of pictures, mostly while lying flat on the ice.
Although it was cold, I had a blast. And so did Jan Paul.
The picture has added vibrance (screw saturation, vibrance the new saturation!) reduced brightness for a darker sky, bit of messing about with contrast and voila. On the large version Jan Paul is plain to see, but on this anti-theft size postage stamp, he may be harder to make out. And you’ve gotten a bit of Moire on the castle walls as a bonus .
And yes, those are shark fins. I guess somebody at the castle’s museum ahs a weird sense of humor.
Tagged with: castle • ice skating • Jan Paul • moat • sharks • smooth • winter
