Jun 02

Japanse kers

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De japanse kers (Prunus serrulata) stond in bloei, en dat was reden te meer om mijn nikon D700 te voorzien van de nikkor 105mm Micro VR en wat foto’s te schieten. Er stond wel een briesje, wat zo nu en dan de oorzaak was dat het onderwerp bewoog, en dat maakte het lastig om scherpe foto’s te maken.

Ik denk dat ik beter kan, als ik het resultaat zo bekijk, maar de foto hieronder is de beste die bij die batch zit. :-)

Ik heb niks getweaked aan de foto, behalve de scherpte wat opgevoerd en een rand eromheen gewalst in Photoshop en voila.

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Jan 17

Molenviergang Aarlanderveen

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The day after the Zaanse Schans, JP wanted to go to Aarlanderveen, a village on the other side of Alphen a/d Rijn, well, at least from where I live.
There was going to be an ice skating marathon, but he wanted to shoot the viermolengang, four windmills arranged so that each windmill lifts the water higher out of the polder to the river which gets rid of it in the North Sea.
The day was cloudy, totally different from the day before, and the freezing weather had turned a bit warmer, just above freezing, and the ice was like frozen snow in it’s consistency.
The marathon was called off due to the thaw.

Not that most people cared to listen to. Cars were parked by the roadside by the thousands, and scores of people were skating the route regardless of sloshing through the mushy toplayer of the ice.

It was pretty weird having hundreds of people in the middel of nowhere.

But along the way, we did what we came for, photographing the windmills.

I processed the original RAW twice, once lit exactly right, a bit saturated, vibrant and a lot of clarity. The other I made dark by reducing brightness, underexposed, upped th econtrast and pasted it in a second layer above the first.
Then I reversed the dark layer, reduced contrast and brightness, selected all light areas and removed them. Reversed the dark layer again, and put it in overlay mode, producing the picture below.

Aarlander Veen Molenviergang

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Jan 12

Zaanse Schans

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There is a tourist trap near Zaandam called “the Zaanse Schans” where it looks like they put all the old wooden buildings they have no room for anywhere else from that area. Not just any buildings, but the really old stuff from the 16th century and on, including windmills. Parking there for less than thirty minutes costs only one euro, but any time over that is seven fifty, a fortune. As you enter, some guy with an expensive Canon snaps a crappy picture of you and tries to sell a print of it surrounded by a calender for five whole euro’s.
But besides those gripes, the place is nice for taking pictures. The river Zaan was calm and virtually ice free, there was no wind. So it was a quiet, cold day, with no wind, and the ice on the ditches/canals (to the right behind the mills) was smooth (so JP and I took some time to take a few ice skating snaps)
The picture below is of a wood sawing mill, a typical example of the mills used to saw the planks to build the seventeenth century VOC fleet.
I upped the contrast, vibration and saturation in Lightroom, reduced the brightness, producing that vignetting which looks nice. With the sun to the right and the low humidity in the sky, it was already quite blue when I took the picture, and upping the contrast and vibrance and saturation added to the effect. I removed the red saturation on a buoy that was irritatingly obvious. And I used the healing brush on a white spot somewhere in the sky.

Zaanse Schans

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Jan 10

Rietveld Windmill part II

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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.

Rietdijk Mill

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Dec 28

Fairytalicious

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Hercules (not his real name, DUH) got this shoot through FOK! for the 13th of December, and wanted me to tag along, so I did, as I didn’t have anything else to do, and I though it might be a good opportunity to test out my D700.
The event was held for PABO (NSFW people), a website that sells erotic stuff to enhance your sex life. They had nearly 1800 women enter a contest, Miss PABO 2008, and 10 chicks remained. And on the evening in question one of those ten would win. Martijn and I had to each deliver ten to fifteen pics to FOK! of the entire event. I shot more than 600 pictures, so I shot a bit more than necessary.
I delivered my pics to Martijn, and he forwarded them to FOK, then dumped his batch on his website. The guys from FOK! weren’t that pleased, especially since it took them eight hours to get our twenty pics online. Suddenly they wanted all our pictures, and they even took their article offline. And they didn’t even have any upload facilities at that time. :’)
Anyway, I gave them my unsorted, unedited pics, just as they wanted (even though formally the agreement was 10 to 15 pictures). Even the rubbish. Of course I removed any alterations I had made before uploading to FOK!. And I resized them all, so they wouldn’t take as much disk space, and what does a website want with hi res pictures anyway?
Anyway, I used the Lightroom sliders to get more out of the picture, as the shots straight out of the camera were either too light or too dark (good thing I always shoot RAW). I used a new way of sharpening my pictures. Enjoy.
O yeah, b.t.w. this is one of their models, not a contestant :D .

PABO model

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Dec 18

Building Site

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Achmea is building a new office across from where I work. Over the past months I’ve seen the site develop, and they’ve just managed to put up the Elevator shafts. Sometimes, they keep the lights on after working times to do some overtime (I guess), and when the darkness approaches, or what’s more important, the blue hour, The whole scene looks good enough to photograph. As I can’t open any of the top floor windows sufficiently to put my lens through, I had to take the pictures from the inside, and that gives me a lot of reflections that I don’t want. And I don’t have a 77mm polarizer jet, so I had to take a floor tile (which has a black colored backing) and use it as a shield against the reflections. i upped the saturation, clarity etc. a bit, as well as boosted the contrast to give me this dramatic picture. It was taken with my D700 and 18-35 AF D f/3.5-4.5, which by itsself is a pretty contrasty lens.
For the observant, the SVB building mentioned in my previous post is in the background, but they haven’t turned on their top blue ribbons, nor their huge green lights.

Achmea building site

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