Appreciate the Little Things in Life

I have no idea where this flower came from. I discovered it a few years ago back in the darker part of the garden. Since then it seeded itself along the shed to the doors of the shed. And despite me opening that door to get my bicycleout almost every day, it still keeps on flowering and seeding more little plants.

Mother Nature blessing me with little yellow poppies. Strong poppies. The one that comes back again and again each year despite the bad spot where it has to live.
A small miracle in my back yard.

Bold and Loud

This clementis is flowering out loud in the garden. Not one ounce of modesty, absolutely not. The colours are bright, the flower is large and the stripes are so bold.
Everytime I see them, I need to smile!

Question: Where Do Cats Come From?

So I finally understand where cats come from: they just grow in pots. And here is a snapshot from Pico (the dark, moody and black cat) proving this theory of mine. :-)

Have a nice day!

Just a Pretty Picture!

Just a pretty picture of a tulip, way past it's date, but still looking good.

Colour Combinations from Photographs

At the moment I am using photographs literally as inspiration for colour combinations. One of the easiest ways to do that is with the Kuler website:

http://kuler.adobe.com/

You can let the website do it for you, but to be honest, I'd rather help the software to adjust it to the colours I like.

After working with these images of winter, I needed pictures with warmer colours:

Can you resist colours like this? Not me!
And a landscape photograph of Scotland in the autumn gave these colours to play with:

It is a highly addictive game to find these colours in your own photographs. But it is inspiring, so what other excuse do you need?

More photographs processed

It seems that the holiday in Norfolk is my most productive holiday photograph wise! I took so many (different) photographs and still have not all images processed! I shoot always in RAW, a digital format which you could see as a digital negative that has to be processed (adjust colour, colour balance, contrast etc.) before you have the final picture that can be shown on the web or be printed out.
Creake Abbey was a wonderful place to be. I liked the tranquility of the place, these old crumbled down buildings, still standing as a testament for the people who lived here and tried to make life easier for the older people.
The abbey was built in as a home for several old men who needed care. The building was extended over 300 years till a plague killed all the inhabitants except the abbot, who was the only survivor.
How devasting this must have been. The abbey was abandent and left to fall apart.
This goes not so quick with these old buildings with those thick walls.
Lucky for us that they are still there - to enjoy them.

Since there were hardly any people visiting here, I had loads of opportunities to take pictures from all angles. This one was taken with me lying on the freshly mowed grass, a lovely experiece!
A perfect afternoon: feeling the spirit of time, beautiful structures with such a beauty, ever changing weather with gloomy skies and rays of sunlight spreading out.
How do you capture the essence of such a wonderful place?

Well, this is one of my efforts!

Evening at Cromer Pier

While we were in Norfolk, John from the EPZ website organised a mini EPZmeet with EPZers Kathy, Vince and me with hubbie in Norwich. Not the first EPZ ers we met on our holiday - on our first sunset at the beach of Hunstanton we had also met Jules by chance!
Since we could not get enough of EPZ members, we also had a mini - mini - meet with Kathy and Vince at the Pier of Cromer the last week of the holiday.

The Pier was much smaller than I thought, but had wonderful features. I liked these old benches. The sunset was obscured by clouds, so we had hardly any colour in the sky. At home I decided that I could add my own colours to the image! I opted for these soft colours and a pinhole effect.

Before the sunset, there was enough light to just walk around and take pictures of the Pier without our tripods - the unused tripods were worth a shot as well!

And guess what? The girls were wandering around with the biggest tripods...! :-)

Peaceful Place

While in Norfolk, we went out to the Broads because my hubbie wanted to photograph the mills there. During our search for these mills, we came across this little church and overgrown old graveyard.
It was late afternoon, the sun was just coming over the top of the trees which surrounded the church yard.
The white flowers of the weeds were catching the light, swinging on the light breeze. The old tombstones were scattered around the yard. Some were still standing up, others were leaning over. The stones were quite old, often covered in patterns of lychen.
I stood in the shadow of the old trees and overlooked the scene. It was such a peaceful moment, the light, the breeze and the mood of the yard. Untouched for such a long time, undisturbed for years.
Despite all the photographic rules, I took this shot into the sunlight, hoping to capture that peaceful moment.
When I look at this photograph, I still remember that feeling, the peace and the quiet.

Bird with Attitude

Normally a photographer won't take a picture of a bird who has turned his back to the lens. Because without the head, the eyes, there is often not much to look at.
But this was not true for this bird. Look at him, can you see how he is walking? Like a model on a catwalk. This is a bird with attitude, I'll tell you!
I was working at this image while the radio played the song: "I am walking away from the troubles in my life" by Craig David.
The perfect title for this image.

Pictures from Norfolk

I haven't started yet to process all my pictures from our recent holiday to Norfolk, England. As usual I am wrapped up in paperwork which seems to reduce my creative energy by the day.
Here are a few that I managed to do.
The first one was at our first evening in Hunstanton. We went to the beach, hoping for a beautiful sunset but the clouds were hiding the setting sun. Still trying to get the most of the evening I tried several positions, but one other photographer was also on the beach and kept his place, keeping showing up in my frame. So I picked up the tripod and bag and splashed through the water past him to set up the camera again.
While passing him, the man asks: "Are you by any chance an EPZer?" Yeah, of course I am! What a coincidence to meet another photographer from the EPZ website while spending an evening on the beach! What a small place the world can be!



This shot was taken the next evening on that same beach. The wind was blowing pretty hard and the waves were quite high. Since the tide was in, it was not easy to take pictures while fiddling with the filters and in the meantime escaping the bigger waves, jumping from rock to rock, or running away.
Soon one of my boots was filled with water! No time though to do something about it since we had some colour in the sky and the light changed by the minute, so pressing the button on that camera and trying different positions and compositions was more important.
Too bad that I did not know about this 'salt spray' thing at the seaside. I managed to keep the filters dry, but did not notice that the salty air was polluting the filters anyway. So in the end most of the shots of that evening were ruined by the tiny specks of salt which were sprayed into the air...
This one had the least spray on it.



The Norfolk coast is filled with little creecks and tiny harbours. We found this wreck near one of the nature reserves. Just a little boat, left behind for years and neglected. Though I took a nice picture of the wreck with good evening light, I found that combining it with different shots and elimanating the colours the image was much stronger.
Hope to get more time to process the other pictures too!

Holiday in Norfolk

This year we had the luxury of going on a holiday for two weeks, instead of the ususal one week getaways.
I felt that I needed to take all my artmaterials with me, hoping that I would be able to spend time painting. But I was too restless.
Luckily, I also brought my photographic gear with me, including my macro lens. This one is kept usually at home because of the extra weight to carry around and the lack of space in my photobag.
I took the time to capture the last of the bluebells growing near the cottage we had rented - at the edge of a grand estate.
There were also some 'Columbines' growing - I like these flowers for their complicated shapes and wonderful colours. This shot is one of my favorite - I like the warm hot colours! Too bad that the weather was a bit chilly. But it provided some dramatic skies to include in the landscape photograpy, and that is always a bonus!

Painting Classes

I gave up on New Year's resolutions a long, long time ago. But for 2009 I was serious about finally taking up painting again. Since planning time for myself is so difficult in our family, a painting class seemed the answer. This would force me to go out, away from all the other distractions at home.
The class I joined, was a group of women who had been painting together for years, but they made me feel very welcome right from the beginning. The teacher, Alexandra Steen, is also very well known around here.

Since it had been quite some time since I painted, I decided to take up an old painting that I never finished. That did not work out very well, there was a very good reason that I never finished that painting!
Still unsure about myself I thought that painting an abstract would be easy. Abstracts don't have to look like anything, don't they? Just throw some paint in strange shapes on a canvas and you have an abstract, right? Well, it seems that it is not the case, painting an interesting abstract is quite difficult actually!

So the next try was painting one of my own photographs in a different scene. A painting that I wanted to do for a long time and could not get out of my head.
It took 2 lessons and some encouragement of my art teacher to paint the little girl lost on an empty beach on the canvas.
At last a painting I felt good about! I am still looking for a good way to handle my brushstrokes and painting styles, so I am sure that I will experiment in the next few paintings. In a few years time I might paint a completely different version of this scene, but for now, I am quite happy about it.
In the meantime I started painted a fish, but am still working on that one!

Celebrating Spring

At last - spring has arrived! We had a week with lots of sun, such a welcome change from the normal grey skies.
And here, just a simple picture of a tulip from the bunch which my daughter bought for me.

Three Wise Owls

Yesterday I uploaded this image that I made from my photographs to Ephotozine.com and it was awarded with one of the EPZ awards: the HC!
Quite an honour! This is only the third HC I received on the site for my photography (and digital manipulation).

The first HC I received was back in 2006 when I mainly photographed flowers with a macro lens.
The second HC was for my (reworked) version of the waterfalls of the Buachaille Etive Mor (Glencoe, Scotland). It was only after removing some branches that the picture was awarded the HC...
It took quite a while to clone away the branches in Photoshop without any traces. You can find that picture in my blog in the entry of 1 december 2008:
http://exploringart.blogspot.com/2008_12_01_archive.html
Scroll down the page to view the picture.

So these owls have received my third HC award. Now I even have to work harder to achieve the Premier Award, the highest award on the site. It might take a couple of years or so to achieve that top award!

Sad news, sick people

Last week we got the news that this beautiful red deer stag of Rannoch Moor was shot repeatedly with an air rifle in the head. The animal was so bleeding and in pain when it was found, that it had to be humanely killed due to it's injuries. Another stag, in the nearby Etive area suffered the same fate.

It seems that several young men were the ones who thought it was fun to go out and wound these defenseless animals on purpose and leaving them to suffer in pain.
Sick!

This stag was famous in the area since it was a bit semi-tame. He was the one that I wrote about in my blog in november 2007. I nicknamed him Jack.
Last november when we were in Scotland, we went to see him again and I found him in the pouring rain in the dark. I did not want to disturb him by taking pictures while using flash. Little did we know that it would be his 2 last months on his favorite spot.
I have some great photographs that I took of him, and always had fond memories of our encounter, a magical moment in a golden sunset. Now I can feel only sadness when I look at the images.

A Winter Wonderland in the Netherlands

Last friday we woke up in a beautiful world. Everything around us was covered in a thick layer of frost, turning the landscape into a christmas card. The sky was clear blue - no grey clouds - and the sun was shining.

Time for some photography! Walking around in this winter wonderland was wonderful - the white cover made even look the most common bushes special.
I felt like walking in an infra red landscape - just turn the blues in the photo into black and it seems almost like infra red...


And this weekend it was clear that the ice was safe. A little lake between the dyke and the river was frozen solid. People from our little village were ice skating and even playing ice hockey. I had no time to take real good photographs, but here is a quick snapshot of the scene.

A Little Bit More of Scotland

This is one of the landscape shots that I took in the Scottish Highlands. The mountain is called Bauchaille Etive Mor, or also known as the Black Sheperd. Depending on the weather, this waterfall is a small stream, or is a strong force of water.
On this particular day, the snow on the Bauchaille looked like powder sugar, the mountains far back in the background were completely covered in snow. The sky was often just gray, but because the weather changes so quickly up here, one can always wait (in the car) to see if the weather turns around. And it did! The rain was mostly gone and suddenly we had even an empty space in the sky where the blue came poking through. A magical moment!

I had found a spot, a bit lower, and balanced on a small rock which stuck out from the side. It was hardly enough space for my feet ánd tripod. But it gave me a good view on the waterfall itself and hopefully the viewers a sense of the power of the waterfall, the wideness of the scenery and the roughness of that piece of country.
It was only later when I climbed back that I realise that the rock I stood on was not very stable. Don't think that I will ever try to repeat that!


Getting lost in Scotland happens to us more often than any other country I have been too! But it has the advantage of taking you to places that you would otherwise not have found! This shot of horses as taken on one of our 'little detours' thanks to the Scottish way of using roadsigns...
We drove a while into a very deserted place and spotted these horses. At that moment is was so cold that I could not even keep the camera steady - I was trembling of the cold.
With an iso of 800, and placing the camera on a wooden post, I was able to get some shots - but because of the amount of noise, I processed the image into Black & White and added a soft tone too.
I just loved the way they were interacting with each other - so playful, even jumping around so now and then. Too bad that they became a bit shy in front of the camera!

Just back from Scotland...

Just got back from an EPZ (Ephotozine.com) Meet in Scotland. Fifty photographers sharing one hostel at the shores of Loch Lomond! Literally chasing the light in the Highlands because of the rain, sleet and snow.
A lot of fun in the evenings, but quite exhausted after the meet... We made some new friends, met old friends again and met people in person that we only knew before from the website, often just the avatar name!

For the first time I tried my new Sigma 10-20 mm wide angle lens which is perfect to capture landscapes. But it also distorts the view which made it harder for me to compose good shots.
Back home reviewing the photographs that I took, I felt that I better also had used my old 18-55 mm lens...

Scotland is a great country to be in. I like the remoteness and the roughness of this country. Nature rules here and you simply have to adjust to it. I was so glad that I brought some waterproof boots, warm gloves (thin enough to fiddle with the dials on the camera), warm silly hat, waterproof pair of trousers and a windproof jacket lined with a fleece!
Otherwise I would have had to shelter in the car most of the time. Especially since we spent 2 days in Glencoe.
The weather changes there by the hour. Which gives one hope - is it raining, you can wait in the car untill it stops (maybe even for just 10 minutes or so).

This was the last EPZ Meet at Rowardennan that Davie organised. Still I hope that it is not the last time that hubbie and I visited Glencoe, Lomond and the Trossachs. There are so many beautiful places to capture!

Autumn...

Summer certainly has gone. It is not that I know this only by nature colouring the leaves and shedding them, but also because my agenda gets swamped again with appointments and paperwork is piling up again.
Luckily we managed to get away last week for an afternoon and spent some time in the woods. Not for walking of course, but photographing mushrooms!
It must have been quite a sight: both my partner and I, lying on the damp ground, looking through the camera with these large lenses to capture even the smallest mushroom. That alone might have been funny, but if you knew how much gear we had with us... Photobags, beanbag, reflector, tripod, different lenses (though I only used the macro lens). A jogger even stopped and asked if we were professionals - oh no, just some crazy people trying to get away from the pressures of our life and trying to relax! :-)
Well, not all pictures turned out so great in the end. But getting in touch, literally, with nature was a rewarding experience.

Blind Fool

I finally managed to work on the next digital collage. Blind Fool is the title of this collage.
I think everybody can relate to that title so now and then. Obviously this falcon has been blinded by his owner, but sometimes we blindfold ourselves hoping that some problems will solve themselves if we just don't look at them or don't think about it.
Ahhh, blind fools we are...