The winter has become official today, although we have been up to our necks in snow already with temperatures upto -15°C. High time for me to take my traditional winterbreak from blogging. I know you can take awsome pictures at this kind of year, but I am just not that kind of person. When it is this cold I rather stay near the fire with a hot drink. So I wish you all a Merry Chrismas and a very happy and prosperous new year and you will hear from me again as soon as spring announces itself.
A couple of weeks ago I have been playing around with an infrared filter. I used an old Nikon D50 I had still laying around together with the old non-vr 18-55 kitlens and a cheap infrared filter from ebay. The test shots below are the only ones I ever took. Though it was quite fun you need bright sunshine for infraredphotography and in that kind of wheather I rather pursue bugs or flowers then that I shoot gloomy landscapes. But now seeing the pics again I think I may give it another try sometime.
So I am back from a holiday that did not go as I hoped. After two days of extremely bad weather I went down with a nasty cold and had to stay indoors till the day we had to go home again. Bad luck. We will just have to go again some time soon. One of the few pics I have to show:
I had to be in Amsterdam this week which gave me a great opportunity to do a bit of streetphotography. The city is awash with tourists now, all waving their little cameras, so I just had to pretend to be one of them and nobody took any notice of me me.
Their main passtime, apart form gazing at the prescribed sights, seems to be taking pictures and eating:
drinking beer at the corner of the street
and did I mention eating?
For today’s challenge we had to choose two subject of the previous weeks. I made it easy on myself and picked ‘water’ and ‘reflections’ because those two go so well together.
My first entry into the sunday stills challenge was exactly that to me: a challenge. There are very little barns around in my part of the world – at least no barns worth photographing. But I finally found this old dilapidated structure that with a bit of fantasy could be called a barn.
the description of the challenge mentioned going inside, but as you can see that was not really an option
It’s been very cold here in the Netherlands these last few days and for the first time in years people are skating on the ditch at the end of garden.
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In general I don’t like special effects filters. Though of course I do use photoshop to improve my photos with respect to exposure, sharpness etc. I do prefer my pictures to reflect what I actually saw. But today I was playing with my new photoshop plugin for black and white conversion Silver Efex Pro and found the ‘antique plate II’ preset so convincing that I decided to share the results with you. This picture was taken in Utrecht, The Netherlands about two months ago.
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You would expect feeding the birds in the park to be an activity for young childeren or elderly ladies. But very often I see elderly men doing the same.
But of course what they really come for is a little chat with their cronies, discussing serious subjects like the global financial crisis or the moods of their wifes.
