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Armillaria ‘unplugged’

This is probably my last mushroom shot of this season. It’s been a pretty succesful season, considering that macro photography is one of my weak points and I never experimented with artificial light in nature photography before.

Now we move on to winter. Snow is quite rare here, so it’s more like having four extra months of autumn before spring kicks in again. But without the beautiful autumn colors. I’ll be posting more archived shots in the coming months.

About the shot itself: I believe the mushroom species is Armillaria Mellea, although the band around the stem isn’t visible here.  In this case I didn’t use any artificial light, but I did (again) use a 36mm extension tube to get as close as possible.

Armillaria Mellea stem on green out of focus background
Armillaria 3 – Dijkgatsbos, Netherlands – October 28th 2018
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Close up, closer up, closest up

The same kind of mushroom as in “Mushroom hunt continues…“, shot on the same day in the same area. But much closer thanks to a 36mm extension tube. Again I used a speedlight to light up the mushroom, but without a color filter. In this case it’s just as easy to create the warm foreground/cold background effect in post processing.

Armillaria Mellea stem in warm light on cool background
Armillaria 2 – Dijkgatsbos, Netherlands – October 28th 2018

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Tranquil Lake

We are now entering a bit of a boring time for nature photography, where the beautiful fall colors are gone and winter has not yet begun. So I’ll take this moment to show some older shots. This one is the oldest shot that I still think is worth showing. Shot with my first DSLR and my very first lens: a Canon EOS 10D and a Tamron 24-135mm f/3.5-5.6 AD Aspherical IF Macro SP AF 40th Anniversary Edition. And yes, it is also the lens with the longest name I ever had. ;-)

Tranquil lake in early morning
Tranquil Lake – Geestmerambacht, Netherlands – May 29th, 2003

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Woodlouse Ghost

Camera pointing at a dead woodlouse
Woodlouse Ghost Setup – Robbenoordbos, Netherlands – October 22nd, 2018

Amazing what you can find when hunting for mushrooms… I bet this woodlouse has a very interesting story to tell about the way he died.

Shot with a 36mm extension tube to get as close as possible. Converted to greyscale with a blue filter. Removing all red and green from the image made the tree trunk a lot darker. As usual, everthing else is in the EXIF data.

Front half white shell of a dead woodlouse against dark background
Woodlouse Ghost – Robbenoordbos, Netherlands – October 22nd, 2018

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Mushroom hunt continues…

As posted two weeks ago, I wanted to shoot some mushrooms this autumn. I don’t do a lot of macro stuff, but after reading some articles about using artificial light in nature photography (and macro in particular) I got excited. So here it is: the first time I ever used a flash in a natural environment. And the results make me want to do more!

Most technical information is stored in the EXIF data (of the full size version), except for the flash. I used an off-camera speedlight (Canon 430EX II) at 1/16th strength, manually fired, with Full CTO filter. There’s a blank sheet of (A4) paper between flash and mushroom acting as a softbox. After partial white balance correction, the mushroom retains some extra warmth while the background turns cold blue.

Armillaria Mellea in warm light on cool background
Armillaria – Dijkgatsbos, Netherlands – October 28th 2018

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Sand Waves

Another image from the same area, the Schoorlse Duinen in the Netherlands. You’ll be seing a lot more from this place simply because it’s close to home. Landscape photographers tend to think about travelling the world, ticking off their bucket list of locations like Horse Shoe Bend, Spitsbergen, Iceland, Cinque Terre, etc. But the truth is you can never compete with a local who is able to visit that place every day. So I prefer sticking to sites close to my home that I can visit every day and where my photographs can make a difference.

Anyway, back to the actual image. In dunescapes, the landscape is constantly changing. Sand flows through the area much like water does, including the waves. But at a much slower pace, ofcourse. In this image you can see the effect of those waves on the landscape. The pine tree gets engulfed in a wave of about 4 meters (13 feet) high.

pine tree almost drowns in sand wave
Sandy Waves – Schoorlse Duinen, Netherlands – February 22nd 2009

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Pine Tree Silhouette

So, here’s my first real post on the new site. Let’s start off with the most recent image, shot 9th of October 2018. That evening I was actually looking for mushrooms to do some macro photography. Apparently I was too early though; mushrooms were very hard to find. So when the sun was about to set I switched to plan B, and when silhouette-hunting.

pine tree silhouette
Pine Tree Silhouette – Schoorlse Duinen, Netherlands – October 9th 2018

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Hello world!

Nearly there… As mentioned previously, the gallery CMS I used is no longer supported by my hosting provider. A new and improved site will be up soon.