Jan 11
Jan Paul and I drove to the viermolengang of the river Rotte, where Rotterdam get’s it’s name from.
JP wanted me to take a few action shots of him on ice. He’s quite the ice skating fan, and as luck would have it, he’s here a bit longer than usual (he usually leaves right after new year starts) and this winter is cold enough to freeze most Dutch waterways.
As you saw in my previous post, ice skating is in, and it seems the atmosphere is “gezellig” (a Dutch word which cannot be adequately be translated into English, “cozy” comes close, but it’s like describing an “atomic bomb explosion” as a “big fireball” 
)
Of all the ones I took this one is the best. It’s a crop taken with my nikkor AF-S 24-70mm f/2.8. ED N
I took a lot of pictures of ice skaters whizzing past me while JP went around the track once, but it took him a long time, so he cut across the river before it entered the Rottemeren (the Rotte lakes), as it would have taken him an hour longer to get back. And it was a bit on the chilly side.
Tagged with: cold • ice • Jan Paul • skating • winter
Jan 10
Past working week I’ve taken all the afternoons off at my job to go out and shoot the standard Dutch tourist traps with my mate, Jan Paul, who lives and works in the USA. He had some spare time available due to ehm, shall we say, getting the papers to extend his residence permit.
It’s been colder in the Netherlands than the last say 10 years, so people en masse have been taking up skating on natural ice. It’s great to see, and if I weren’t such a (skating) pansy, I’d join them. But the truth is, that I haven’t ice skated since my twelfth year, and I’m not inclined to start now (especially when you read the papers and see the news on tv mentioning the emergency rooms are full of people with bone injuries, damaged wrists, broken wrists etc.).
I cropped the picture below, because the windmill (Rietveldse molen) was in the middle of the picture (I used the 24-70 while I should have used the 70-200 for better effect-but when it’s freezing 5 degrees Celcius / Centergrade, changing lenses is at the bottom of my list of priorities) I tweaked the colors to be vibrant, yet not saturated to give this pastel color like effect.
Tagged with: 24-70 • cold • D700 • ice • ice skating • mill • molen • Rietveld • skating • windmill • winter
