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
Aug 09
After Breda, we went back home, but as JP didn’t get any ice skating done, and I knew he was keen, I suggested we stop again at Kinderdijk so he could skate and I could take some pictures (as well as enjoy the friendly atmosphere). As it turned out, I made a lot of pictures of the setting sun with the silhouettes of the windmills in the foreground. I just couldn’t get enough of them, they all looked so magical. Meanwhile I’d lost sight op JP, but he was having a blast ice skating up and down the 5 km canal. I did some addition shots of him as he ice skated up to me and then braking at the last moment.
On the picture below I did a little lightroom magic (same as I always do) and then loaded it in CS4 to up the contrast and add the border (using the “canvas size” function).
Tagged with: Kinderdijk • romantic • sunset • windmill
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
