Jun 01

Keukenhof 2009

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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? ;-)

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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 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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