In Bloom

As some of you may have noticed, I have started to broaden my photographic view. Although I still love to photograph birds, I find myself more and more photographing insects, landscapes, mammals and abstracts.

With insects, abstracts, landscapes and flowers, you can take all the time you need to finetune your composition and exposure. Every single aspect of the end result is in your own capable hands. Whereas with birds and mammals, it's often a hell of a job to just get a shot, any shot. The variables are much less under your control.

Last weekend, I took a walk with my parents. The idea was to look for Adder (or Common Viper) in a heathland close to their home. When we did not find any, my dad told me about a bluebell forest not much further up the road. In my mind, the only place where one can photograph wild bluebell in a beech forest is the Hallerbos near Brussels. I was wrong.

Although lacking the size and wide vistas of the Hallerbos, this tiny forest offered enough opportunities for closeups and abstracts. In this image, I made the best from the strong wind by choosing a long shutterspeed. I like the effect, almost as if someone is ringing the bells.

Bluebells in strong wind; Canon 1D Mark III w. 500/4 IS; 1/3s at F10 and ISO 100;Gitzo tripod and cable release

A Long Shot

Lately, I haven't been very succesful with feathered subjects. Most of the time, I just cannot find any interesting birds to photograph. And in the rare case I do find one, it just won't cooperate.

Yesterday, I gave it another try and went for a local heathland in search for Stonechats. Within minutes I had found three male individuals. Over the course of the next hour, I found out that the first one lived way too far into the heathland, number two got scared by the mere blink of an eye and the third resorted in a heavily shaded part of the heathland.
How nice.

I had already given up and drove home when I spotted another male Stonechat. It just sat there, intensely gazing at a potential evening snack, a cloud of mosquitos. I got out of the car and tried to sneak closer, slowly of course. But no matter how hard I tried, it would not let me get closer than about 20 meters. As it sat beautifully against the setting sun in glowing heath, with a backlit mosquito crowd, I desperately wanted to get a shot. So I did something I rarely (if ever) do: I stacked both extenders on the 500mm.

I had to focus manually as AF at this focal length and shooting directly into the sun just does not work. The final result is not 100% tacksharp, but in my opinion, ultimate sharpness is not a critical factor in a backlit, moody shot like this one.

Stonechat in heathland; Canon 1D Mark III w. 500/4 IS, stacked converters; 1/125s at F11 and ISO 800; Gitzo tripod

Drop it

There was a time I went almost mad when the weather at my planned day off would be drab and rainy. Not anymore so.

I had planned to spend the morning in my hide to photograph partridge, but a quick look through the curtains was enough to resort to plan B.

Plan B consisted of an extended sleeping session, followed by slow breakfast while waiting for the rain to stop. As soon as it did, I went into my backyard. It measures only 8x5 meters, but all I needed was a square foot of green leaves covered by raindrops.

The hardest part was getting the raindrops fully in focus. The combination of the macro lens with extension tubes and the converter is long and heavy and has a tendency to bend forwards a bit. Also, the focussing range is only about 2 milimeters. I had to pull or push the tripod tiny bits to get the focus on the exact right spot. Further, I had to use a small aperture to get the full drop in focus. And that means long exposures on a windy day. I shielded the leaf from the wind with my body. After three hours, my knees, back and neck hurt a lot, but alas, at least I had fresh coffee during the whole shoot!

Raindrops on leaf; Canon 1D Mark III w. Tamron 90/2,8, Kenko tubes and EF 2x; 1/2s at F8 and ISO 200; Gitzo tripod and remote release

Back from Italy

Last weekend, the annual Asferico photofestival took place in Marano Lagunare in Italy. I decided to visit the festival to receive the award for my runner-up position, because it might well be the only (and thus last) international recognition I'll ever get.

The Dutch really did well this year. We won 15 awards, Wendy Kreeftenbergs image featured on all festival documentation and Paul van Hoofs image features the book cover. Overall winner was an unbelievable underwater image of a Castor fiber (sounds better than "wet beavershot", doesn't it?) by a French photographer.

The festival itself was relatively small, but well worth the visit. Especially the presentation by Manuel Presti was amazingly inspirational and my head almost exploded from all the mental notes I made. It was even better to be able to have a chat with the master himself. Multiple award winning photographer Cristóbal Serrano showed a very professional presentation (almost a movie trailer), but unfortunately he failed to show enough of his amazing work in between all the 'Richard Attenborough-like' voice-overs and bombasticly narcistic movie clips of himself at work. A missed chance as far as I am concerned.

Very interesting too was the insight into the jury process, kindly provided by longtime jurymember Marco Ferrari. And of course, it is always very nice to talk to other photographers and share thoughts and ideas. Somehow, you meet the same fanatics over and over again, which makes it fun to visit festivals like these.

I would like to thank Wilco Dragt for his friendly company during the weekend. We had a great time, inspite of some navigational problems on the way back. Rare jongens, die Romeinen.

Slow Starter

On last months frontpage of this website, I announced the start of a new non-profit initiative, Wild@Home and Wild@Work. The start-up phase has been slow but steady.

We sent our first quotation to the province of Noord-Brabant, are being mentioned on the weblog of Grasduinen Magazine and will be mentioned again in their regular May issue. Furthermore, the urls to the websites rise steadily to the top of the Google search results, meaning we do get a lot of visits.


Best of all is that the list of participating photographers is now an impressive one. How about David Pattyn, Heike Odermatt, Andrew George, Edwin Kats and Peter & Leon Baas? All very talented and awarded photographers who are generously willing to provide us with their best work. See the Wild@ websites for links to their personal websites and make sure you have a look at our current quality catalogue of available prints!

If you or your employer are interested in our prints, please send an email through the Wild@ websites. And if you know of any local festival or alike where our presence would fit, do not hesitate to let us know either. For such an occasion, we are more than willing to create a collection of photos of local nature and wildlife and fund a local charity with the proceeds of the day.