Christmas award: OPOTY

2010 has been a quite succesful year, photographywise, but it just got even better. The winners of the Outdoor Photographer of the Year Awards have been announced and I am very happy and proud that my image of a Fungus in predawn blue light has won the 'Small World' category!

The competition is organized, this year for the first time, by the UK magazine Outdoor Photography. It is bound to be one of those competitions every nature photographer wants to win. Needless to say then that I am thrilled to be among the first winners. All winners can be seen on the website of the competition.

About the image, it was shot during an excursion with the local camera club to a forest wellknown for its richness in fungi. We were there at the end of a very dry summer, and therefore only found very few fungi. But as you see, you only need one. The out of focus patterns are from blueberry leaves in the foreground and canopy leaves in the far background. The image was shot lying in a ditch to be able to shoot upwards.


Funny thing is, I consider myself mainly a bird and mammal photographer, but have been most succesful with macro, plant, landscape and fungus images. Maybe I should (literally) switch focus...

Happy Christmas to all of you. I'll probably post one more blog this year, and then it's off to 2011!

Black(on white)bird

During weekdays when I have to commute to my daytime job, I curse at snow and ice covering the roads, making it difficult and even dangerous for me to arrive at work. But during weekends, it's sheer joy when I see a fresh white snow cover. On days like these, I don't travel far to take photographs. Instead, I rather visit the places close to home, as they look completely different from what they normally look like.
On Friday, I spent 5 hours in a hide at a newly erected feeding station. Not a lot of birds, but I got a few nice images of Jays in falling snow.


These 'cops of the forest' usually are very suspicious and difficult to photograph, but with a dense snow cover, they cannot resist the nuts put out for them at the feeding station. On Sunday, I went to the local fishing ponds. Because the area is closed to visitors who don't have a permit, it is a quiet place and it therefore teems with birds and mammals. Unfortunately, there were hardly any holes in the ice, so my hopes for foraging Bitterns, Rails and Kingfishers went idle. As for the mammals, I found loads of animal tracks in the snow and on the ice. At least 4 different fox trails, a lot of Roe Deer hooves and tiny tracks of mice and squirrels. But, no fur in front of the camera. I did photograph some landscapes I am happy with and also some rather graphic images of Coots and Blackbirds in the snow. Above an example.

Common Blackbird; Canon 1D Mark III w. 70-200/2.8 L IS II; 1/60s at F5.6 and ISO400; handheld

Dark Ice

Here's another one from last week. No time to go out and shoot this week, but alas, the weather wasn't that great anyway. But great wintery weather is coming our way again. Hopefully next weekend will bring lots of snow and ice! I look forward to spending some time at a new feeding station that looks very promising. I do have lots of images of birds in a snowy environment, but not so many with snow flurry actually falling down. So fingers crossed and spending enough time in the hide is all I can do. The rest is up to the Weather Gods and the birds.


The image above is a detail of a thin layer of ice in a local small stream. I tried to get right above the Dark Eye to get everything within depth of field, but it soon became clear that the ice did not have any intention to keep me safe from the lurking icecold water below. So I refrained from going any further and took the shot from the safe shore.

Dark Ice Eye; Canon 1D Mark III w. 70-200/2.8 IS L II; 1/50s at F8 and ISO200; handheld 

Less is More

Finally time to go out again, and fortunately the world outside was still covered by a beautiful layer of pristine snow. The snow hides all the chaos normally present in a forest and provides the photographer with lots of opportunities for clean landscapes or highkey abstracts. Because I knew I had only one day to spare with the camera, I was in two minds and therefore a bit restless. On the one hand, I wanted to concentrate on landscapes, small details and patterns. But on the other hand, images of birds and mammals have much more appeal when they are portraited in a white snowy world.


So I lugged around the 500mm lens together with the regular landscape and macro kit, just in case. Me being undecided about the subjects to chose, external factors made the decisions for me: it soon turned out to be 'one of those frustrating days'. I came across no less than 3 Kingfishers, all perched in a wonderful frosty setting, two Great White Herons in a snowy field, two beautiful Hares and several Robins and Blackbirds in a shrub with frosty berries. More than I had hoped for.

But...somehow half the world seemed to have decided that a Friday morning is the perfect time to go out and see if bad timing can ruin a nature photographer's day. Needless to say they gloriously succeeded. I have truly never seen that many cyclists, dogwalkes and cars in a forest in so little time and they all appeared at exactly the wrong moments: just when a Kingfisher landed on the planned perch, just when I had crawled up to a Heron, just when a Robin had approached the berries I had focussed on. Well...you get the idea. Long story short: I gave up and resorted to landscapes, abstracts and patterns, just as I should have done in the first place. Grmph!

'Lion's Footprint' in the snow; Canon 1D Mark III w. 70-200/2.8; 1/100s at F8 and ISO 200; handheld