photography

Row Your Boat

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Well, we’re all in the same boat now aren’t we!

Since we don’t yet have a house of our own and are living in a small house with two elderly people, we are very housebound, even compared with other people who are laying low, staying at home. It does feel like a kind of war situation. Our fellow citizens are deciding what we ourselves must ration by their hoarding behavior. Luckily we haven’t run out of anything and have been able to find what we need in the grocery store. No panic in our house. DB is working from home and his parents don’t go out, so I have become the designated grocery shopper. I’m being very careful myself because of asthma. Cross fingers and wash hands.

DB and I are going out every morning, early, and walking for an hour. This allows me to get to know my new town better, we get some exercise, and my lungs become acclimated to this new clean sea air. I take photos.

The top photo was taken today at sunrise while we walked on top of the dike from Huisduinen back to the town center. That’s the Texel ferry in the distance. Texel is probably the safest place in the world to be right now but we’ve been told to stay away by the Texel authorities. I can’t blame them.

Here are some other photos of the area that is within a 30 minute walk from my in-law’s house. For the coming few weeks the only things I’m doing is knitting, reading, writing, walking and taking photos.

Every day there is new news about this Corona virus situation. Up until today I was sliding back and forth between nervous fear and relaxed vacation feeling. But today I feel annoyed and jumpy. Maybe I have to start walking twice a day.

Here’s a knitting update. I’m making good progress on my sweater. I should have it finished in 5 weeks or maybe less!

Windy Day at the Beach

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Windy Day
Windy Day

As we often do on Sundays, we went to the beach and dunes for a run/walk.  He ran, I walked.  And I took some photos.  It was sunny and cold and very windy.

The wind made interesting relief sculptures out of small stones and shells.

wind sculptures

I haven’t seen any animals here for quite a while.  I don’t know where they are hiding! I see lots of sheep and cattle poop, but not the animals themselves.  I did find a hole in the side of a hill where I think the fox lives.  Maybe I’ll have to do a stakeout and see if he comes out.

trees in dunes

winter lake

…And…We’re Back

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After being away from home for 3 weeks (except for a short day in between trips), it’s taking me a while to get everything organized at home and back in some kind of normal order. I’m still doing piles of laundry and sorting through piles of photos. Today I’m fighting with the “new” Flickr and still haven’t managed to upload my 400+ photos from my travels.

The photo above was taken in my mom’s garden. She has lots of beautiful flowers with birds and bees and butterflies zooming around through the plants. We had fantastic weather the 2 weeks we were there. It was so nice to get warmed up from the never ending winter in the Netherlands.

While in sunny CA we went to Chico to see my niece and her husband, to Yosemite National Park for Sunday Brunch at the Awahnee Hotel, and to Santa Cruz to meet some knitting friends and put my toes in the cold Pacific waters. Of course all during this time I was busy knitting away on my “Twice Born” shawl that is part of Mad May on Ravelry.  I have photos of all these events, but you’ll have to be patient. I’m trying to be patient with flickr.

I also spent 5 glorious days in Estonia for a conference on Traditional Knitted Sweaters Around the Baltic Sea. This was a fantastic experience that was over far too quickly. The weather was perfect, the people so friendly, the knitting and handwork beautiful and inspiring. Add good music and food and you have a little bit of perfection in 5 days. I would love to go back to Estonia to see more and learn more. Of course I have hundreds of photos of this event, but you’ll have to hold on and be satisfied with just this one, that I’ve taken from J.’s FB page.

I’m heading back to flickr now to see how things are progressing with my photo uploads.  More exciting stories and photos will be posted here in a day or so.

Winter in the Dunes

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Yes, it is still winter here.  I don’t even see buds on the trees in the dunes yet and since there aren’t any bulbs occurring naturally here, there are no little flowers popping up either.  There are, however, lots of interesting tree shapes.

These photos were taken Sunday while DB was running and I was walking in Zuid-Kennermerland National Park, just a short 10 minute drive from our house.  If you continue west through the dunes you end up at the beach, either Bloemendaal or Parnassia.

I saw several trees with bark rubbed or cut off.  How did this happen?  I think either humans or the Highlands Cattle that roam around here did this.  I can’t imagine why a human would have wanted to do this but I can imagine that a bovine with an itchy head and horns would do this.  Or maybe the deer with new antlers.

After about 40 minutes of wandering around, DB came running up.  These photos make it look like we had the whole dunes to ourselves. Not quite.  There were actually a lot of runners on Sunday.  It’s a popular place to walk and run, even on a grey, cold winter day.

Photo Shoot

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This afternoon DB and I headed into the dunes from Parnassia to take photos of me and my 2 new sweaters.  We had sun but it was very cold.  Unfortunately, few of the photos are any good.  I’m no model and DB is new to photography.  We do our best.  We did learn a lot and will head back out there to try again with the information gathered from this first try.  It would also be good if I could lose 15 pounds (6kg) in the next couple of weeks, but that’s not likely.

After the photo shoot, while walking back to the car, I took the above photo.  I don’t know what possessed me to change it to B&W since I don’t normally do B&W, but I’m glad I gave it a try.  I think it’s much nicer this way.  Here’s the original:

Over the next week I’ll see what I can salvage from the sweater photos and see what magic I can do in Photoshop.  Hey, if magazines can make models look “perfect”, I should be able to do the same, right?

Here’s my best photo from the day:

Indulgence on Friday

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I had been meaning to get to the FOAM for months now to see the Diane Arbus exhibit there.  Today we finally made it.  We got there early before it got busy, which is good.  The FOAM is small with lots of hallways taking you from one small room to the next and I imagine if it’s crowded it wouldn’t be much fun.  I hate having to negotiate space with people in order to see things on walls.

If you want to see this exhibit, hurry, it ends 14 January.  There are not only photos taken by Dian Arbus, but what I found really interesting was the section about her life, how she became a photographer, what cameras she used, who hired her and what media she was involved with.

What DB and I both found curious about the photos chosen for the exhibit is that they were all so somber.  Looking at the books in the shop later, and looking at her original proof sheets on display, she had a lot of photos of happy looking people.  For some reason, whoever chose these particular photos to hang on the walls, didn’t use them.  No happy people allowed.  Curious.

Like all highly acclaimed artists, she makes her art look easy.  If you didn’t know better you’d come away thinking “well, I could have taken those photos”.  Well, no you couldn’t.  Look at how she used light.  Look how she used contrast.  What has she chosen to include, and more importantly exclude, in the picture frame.  That takes an eye that nearly everyone else doesn’t have.  When you look at the cameras she used it is even more amazing that she got those shots.  Even with all our fancy camera equipment available these days, that is fairly affordable, we take snapshots that no one will look twice at.  And I won’t even start about Instagram, something I really hate….

Looking at her first Nikon on display I had a momentary longing for my first 35mm camera, a Pentax with a 50mm lens.  Totally manual.  I took B&W film and developed the negatives and made prints in the darkroom at school.  It would take me days, even weeks, to come up with something I liked and would show anyone else.  A far cry from our instant everything digital world.

Going to this exhibit was inspiring for me.  If nothing else, it made me realize again that I need to carry my camera with me at all times.  Using my iPhone camera is just plain laziness.

Oh, btw, after the FOAM, we had lunch at an Irish pub.  We pretended to be tourists and had the full Irish breakfast.

Then we went to Soap and had hour long massages.  It was indeed a self indulgent day.

End of Summer

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You’d never know that last weekend we had summer-like weather and had to smear on sunscreen all weekend.  Gone.  All gone.  This morning I went to the beach to walk and take photos.  I took my big camera for a change.

I parked at Bloemendaal, where I took the above photo.  You can see that they are starting to tear down the summer restaurants.  Here too, a little further up the beach:

You can see how grey the morning was.  It was windy, but it wasn’t cold.  I walked up the beach to Parnassia.  It was a lot more lively than Bloemendaal, for one reason only….. DOGS!

There were little bitty dogs

Funny dogs:

and really really BIG dogs:

Herds of dogs, such as

6 Golden Labs owned by one family

3 Bernese Mountain dogs owned by one man and his son

2 very large poodle looking dogs owned by one couple

There was the very proud dog owner.  This man was smiling ear to ear with his little dog.  He was busy making movies of the dog fetching a stick.  Ahhhhh.

Eventually I ran out of dog beach and doubled back to head up into the dunes from Parnassia.  I figured, I wasn’t running, I needed the exercise, I already had my camera with me, so go into the dunes and walk to the little lake and see what you find.

The first thing I found was a herd of horses.  These wild horses roam around the dunes, north to south.  I don’t know if they are ever moved around by people or if they belong to anyone besides the National Park (this being Kennemer National Park).  I hadn’t seen them for nearly the whole summer.

And then there were the trees and flowers and grasses of the dunes:

As you can see in the last 2 photos, the sun finally did come out by the end of my walk.  And by the end of my walk I was TIRED!  I had not intended to walk for nearly 2 hours, but once you are that far from your car you have no choice but to walk back.  I often have this problem.  I want to walk farther and farther and I deny to myself that getting back will be long and tiring.  I always make it back though.

When I left the house I was feeling kind of bad because I wasn’t running or biking.  I felt like a lazy slug, taking the car and a camera.  But by the time I had walked all that way through sand and hills, I realized how good it was for me and how well it cleared my head.  And I have the photos as a bonus!

Critters

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While at Lake Almanor I tried to take some photos of deer and chipmunks and birds.  My telephoto lens was broken so all I had was my 50mm lens.  Bummer.

The deer were so shy and ran way at the mere sniff of you.  I managed to get this photo of one hiding from us, but watching us closely.  See her in the background?

No? Well, blown up maybe?

There were also chipmunks running around near our little cabin (and don’t get the idea this was a little cabin in the middle of no where; there were other cabins and trailers parked in a little neighborhood all around us).  I tried to get photos of them, but they were so fast and I was so slow.

Here’s one in motion.  Super Chipmunk!

I don’t have any decent bird photos to show you, but we saw redheaded woodpeckers and a meadow bird with bright orange under his wings and several other kinds of jays and hawks and pelicans and egrets.  Maybe next trip I’ll get better photos.

Things to Learn

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Yesterday was Sunday and Sundays are always running days at our house.  This is our “long run” day, even if a “long run” consists of only several kilometers.  Sundays are always the longest runs of the week.

Lately I’ve been suffering, shall we say, age related issues.  I have headaches every day.  Hot flashes.  I can’t sleep.  I’m tired and fed up.  I’m always on the verge of a migraine.  I felt like this yesterday and decided that I just wasn’t up to running, no matter how far.  We went to the dunes anyway, DB ran, and I walked and took some photos.  At least I got outside and moved a bit.

I hope you aren’t tired of my dunes and polder photos yet, because here come some more.  I’m still learning about my new camera and trying out things.  One thing I learned is that those birds who sing so sweetly are almost impossible to take photos of.  They are fast and very small.  I started off taking photos of things that were barely moving.

My best tree photo:

My best flower photo:

My best animal photo:

My best bird photo.  Do you know what kind of bird this is?  I don’t.  I was following the sound of a woodpecker, but this doesn’t look like a woodpecker.  Please let me know if you know!

Just when we were about to leave the walking path suddenly there was a rush of sound, hooves pounding the ground and four deer ran across the path behind us.  I tried to get a good photo but they were very fast.  This is the best I could do.  There were two adults and two young ones still with spots on their backs.

They looked just like White Tail Deer that we have in the U.S.  They weren’t as big as Mule Deer and their ears weren’t that big either. Their while tails flicked up when they ran.

And that’s my story of my not-run from yesterday.  I have made a doctor appointment for this week to get my hormone situation sorted out.  I’m hoping for drugs and instant relief.

Wild in Your Own Back Yard

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Yesterday afternoon I braved the weather to go for a walk and take some photos.  Don’t let the sunshine fool you.  It was windy and very chilly.  I ended up walking for 2 hours and was so tired when I got home.  I got a few nice photos for my troubles.

Herons are so common around here.  In Amsterdam they are scavengers and hang around the street markets waiting for the fish sellers to pack up for the day so they can get any fallen scraps.  These in our local fields are more wild.  They are actually hunting in the little creeks.

There are geese everywhere.  Further out in the fields they are hidden in higher grass and it’s really hard to see if they have any goslings or not.  I managed to see these….

Yes, those are WWII bunkers in the background.  They are still a common site in this part of the Netherlands.

I also saw these birds, which I first called ducks, but DB quickly corrected me and informed me they are ‘fuut’ or grebe in English.

Even though there are a lot of wild birds in the area, it’s not really a wild area.  There are people everywhere and that means people trash.  Some birds are really good at scavenging human waste.  This bird was pulling out everything he found in this trash bin, located next to the path along the Spaarne.  I can imagine people will walk by and blame the fishermen or teenagers for the mess, but they’d be wrong.

When I was nearly home I saw the local black swans again.  Today I saw 4 of them.  I think there are 5 in total in the area.

They are very difficult to photograph.  Their feathers seem to swallow all the light and I either get black holes or reflected shiny light off their backs.

Next walking trip I need to head into the dunes and wait patiently for rabbits, foxes and woodpeckers!