Scotland Holiday 2009

Two and a half weeks driving around in Scotland. The weather was extremely good, which we didn't anticipate, so we didn't have enough t-shirts etc. Who would have thought that over two weeks of sunshine was possible in Scotland?

Saw lots of ruins, castles, sheep, churches, sun, beer, whisky, ruins, castles and stuff. No need to get bored when you're over there. Only downside to the extremely good weather was that I wasn't able to shoot many of those typical cloudy/rainy Scotland photo's.

The trip started with the ferry IJmuiden-New Castle. After that it was Dumfries, Oban, Spean Bridge, Struan (Isle of Sky), Ullapool, Thurso, Ballater, Glenrothes, and back to New Castle. Basically a trip covering the best parts of Scotland (we did miss the Orkneys though).



Also available on my flickr page or here.

More Forks

This is the final version which I presented during the cutlery results evening. One of the local camera club assignments.

Twins

More photos on my flickr page.

Fork Experiment

An assignment from the local camera club.... No idea if this is gonna be the final result. We'll see. I've got till March for this assignment.

More photos on my flickr page.

Back From 'The Canaries'

We went to the Canary Islands (Spain) last week. One whole week of sleep, sun, eat, and drink (all-inclusive). Today.... back to work. Damn, that's hard.

I didn't take that many pictures. Mostly some experimenting with slow shutterspeeds, and HDR (and the occasional sunset).

More photos on my flickr page.

Experimenting with HDR

The HDR consists of a 5 image series (-2EV -> +2EV) taken last Saturday in Goedereede.

More photos from the Goedereede shoot are available on my flickr page.

Lucky shot

I spotted the airplane just in time. It's a KLM airplane heading south. The image is not manipulated (apart from the conversion to black&white).

More photos at my flickr page.

Reflecting Windmills

Taken @ Kinderdijk, the Netherlands

More photos at my flickr page

A Day at the Beach

We went to the beach @ Bergen aan Zee last Sunday. Weather was almost perfect. The wind and sandblasting sucked a bit. Especially for the kids. His enthusiasm lasted only for a couple of minutes.

On the beach (the wet sand) the sandblasting itself was gone... Until we had to head back home.

Fortunately, I didn't change lenses during this trip. If I would have, I'd probably had a body full of fine sand and salt. The circular polarizing filter I used did need a proper cleansing.
Wind, sand, and salt... not a good combination. The 'salt-damage' on the polarizer would have made a nice macro, if I would have thought of it :) . Thankfully, it's clean again.

More photos at my flickr page

Dark clouds over Papendorp

A HDR (High Dynamic Range) photo taken from the office.

The HDR looks relatively normal. Not that bad if you think that I shot the 9 images with the bare hands.

More HDR on my flickr page

Photoshop Actions FTW

Have been experimenting with photoshop actions the last couple of days. The latest action (a vintage look) I created (with some help / ideas I found on the Internet.

Combine this with the border/watermarking action and you get the following result.

Learning a bit every day.