Happy Together

A weekend like no other in several aspects. Hanneke and me got married last Friday. We were very lucky to have a bright and sunny late summers day, and celebrated our wedding together with the persons that are important to us: our family and friends.

Big thanks to everyone who spent the day and/or evening with us and for all the heartwarming giftcards, emails, presents, speeches and surprises. We will never forget this day!

Photography-wise (that's what the blog is all about, right?), it was a very strange weekend. Besides not picking up a camera at all, I suddenly found myself in the position of the photographic subject. I must admit it made me feel a bit awkward and from now on I will have deep respect for the birds and mammals that pose for my camera and look completely natural.

We have already seen some of the photographic results. Hanneke looks really amazing, but as for me...it has again been proven that I am at my best on the other side of the camera.

Fungus Frenzy

Autumn is getting closer by the day. Although temperatures are still very pleasant during the datytime, nights are getting quite chilly and leaves are starting to loose their color. A good time to start looking for the first fungi and toadstools.

We set out with a small group of photographers from our local nature photography club and went to a very nice beech/oak forest. Normally a perfect spot for fungi and toadstools. But there is always a but: it has been an exceptionally dry summer. Water levels are very low wherever you look. A huge water expanse I regularly visit is now divided in two parts by a grass trail and several streams have run dry. And so was the case with the stream that runs through the forest we visited. The result: hardly any toadstools or fungi to be found as they need moisture to thrive. But then, you often only need one.

I found a small group of small fungi along a ditch and spent most of the morning at that spot. I got down low in a ditch to photograph the fungus from a low angle.

I positioned the camera so that the fungus was placed in the spotlight of a circle of light that shined through the canopy. The upper part of the frame consists of an out of focus patch of blueberry and part of the canopy. I rendered the image B&W in postprocessing, as I am of the opinion that the color takes away from the essence of this image.

Fungus at sunrise; Canon 1D Mark III w. 150/2.8; 1/3s at F5.6 and ISO 200; Tripod and remote release, mirror lock-up

When summer ends

It has been a while since my last post, for which I had two very good reasons. Reason 1:
I did not go out to photograph a lot and when I did, weather and subjects were not willing to cooperate. So not a lot of new work to show. Reason 2: I spent quite a lot of time to revise the website. The design did not take a lot of time, but the (CSS) encoding did. It really gave me a headache, but I think it works fine now with all of the most used browsers.

Yesterdag evening, I finally found some time to go out. I went for the local Little Owl couple, but they seemed to have out-of-house obligations. Plan B was to shoot backlit images of Stonechats at sunset. But the birds never came close and the sun lost the battle against the incoming clouds. I drove home a bit disappointed, when all of a sudden I passed a small corridor in the forest where the sun could just peek through.

I rushed out of the car to find a suitable foreground subject to place against the setting orange bowl. This little flower was all I could find in the two minutes or so I had until the sun would disappear, but it was all I needed.

Sunset Flower; Canon 1D Mark III w. 150/2.8; 1/60s at F8 and ISO 200; Handheld