Jun 01
On Queen’s day I went to the Keukenhof with my mom, to appreciate (and photograph) the flowers. That is, I just take pictures of the flowers, my mom also takes pictures of the weird looking tourists-and they are almost as abundant as the flowers 
.
I think the best image of that day was this pink ribbon bromelia (Aechmea fasciata). It actually took me 45 minutes of googling to find the Latin name of the damn thing! Too bad one of it’s pink leaves is cut off by the edge of the frame.
I loaded the image in Lightroom then I first set the “camera calibration” profile to Camera Vivid, then upped the standard LR settings (clarity +57, vibrance +21, and saturation +7-you don’t want to overdo this, now do you?) and increased the “blacks” setting to 15-quite high actually. I reduced brightness to +46 from +50, and upped “contrast” to +37. And there you have it. This picture was shot with a Nikon D700, Nikkor 24-70mm f/2.8 at ISO 1250.
Pink ribbon Bromelia: Aechmea fasciata
But I did one other thing. As you can see, there is another pink flower in the background-which sticks out like a sore thumb in the original, so to cover it up I used the “adjustment brush”, set to lower the saturation to -13 and brushed over the background flower to make it less intrusive. Did I spoil the picture now that you know it’s dirty little secret?
Tagged with: 24-70 • candycolor • D700 • flower • iso 1250 • Keukenhof
Jun 01
A week after the tulip fields in Lisse I went to Flevoland province, to see if I could get better pictures of tulip fields and perhaps a modern day windmill or two.
Well, I wasn’t disapointed. I cranked up the candy factor on the picture, to make the flowers look more colorful than they already are. Funny to have a rather noisy windmill right there in your flower-bulb field.
Tagged with: bulb • candycolor • colour • flower • windmill
May 31
I went for a ride to Alkmaar to see the flower bulb fields there, but they were a bit of a dissapointment. I want a windmill behind my field of tulips. And I just couldn’t find the right one. So I drove my tiny car back to Lisse, where I decided to take some shots of a tulip field with the sky as background-the usual surroundings are rather boring metal sheds.
I played around with Lightroom, increasing the blacks which gave me rather saturated candy colors. I thing it gives the picture a nice banding effect; the cool blue and green offset with the rather warm pink flowers in the middle. I’m not too worried about the sun’s light messing up the sky in my picture. Well not really.
Tagged with: bulb • colors • field • flowers • saturation • sky • sun • tulip
May 31
The new “tradition”, the annual so called “bollenrit” was held again in the little village where I live. All sorts of cars, from the very old to the very new gather at the local square and then roll out for a spin amongst the flower-bulb fields. The pictures were more of a registration of the event than the arty farty type I’m after.
I got the hubcap of an MG. converted it to B&W, applied some sharpening, edited in the borders, slapped on my website name and there you have it.
MG hubcap
Tagged with: automobile • bollenrit • car
May 31
The Japanese Cherry trees (Prunus serrulata) were in bloom, so I grabbed my Nikon D700, slapped the 105mm Micro VR on it and shot some pics. The wind occasionally moved my subject about, so it was quite hard capturing the flowers.
As far as the picture goes, I can do better, but the one below is the best one of the bunch 
I did nothing to enhance the picture, just slapped on a border, burned the website name into the corner and voila.
Tagged with: 105mm • cherry • close-up • D700 • flowers • macro • micro • tree
May 30
I was going to photograph another sundown at my favorite spot, when I spotted this deceased majestic bird and it’s equally dead mate. No idea how they died, but somehow black and white seems more fitting for this image than color. I upped the contrast and tweaked the conversion, it is not a “convert to greyscale” from PS.
I had another one where the swan was less diagonal (the long neck from the head to the body), and in comparing the two I found that the other one was lacking impact.
Tagged with: bird • black and white • death • monochrome • swan
