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Jan Paul had to visit his sister who lives in the city of Breda. It’s been a while since I was there, and we’d planned to shoot some pictures after the visit. It was pretty cold, and I shot a few pictures, but the scenery sucked compared to the rest of the week.
Oh well, it can’t all be a party.
I thought that this picture of castle Bouvigne was the better one of the bunch (too bad it was closed, I would’ve loved to visit it’s English, German and French garden).
I imported the RAW of the picture below in two stages, one sharpened, one extremely blurred. The picture itsself already had a shallow depth of field. I put one in a layer over the other, then used a mask to combine the blurry background with the sharp latern.
The sign warns that the ice is dangerous. I guess a few weeks of freezing just doesn’t help covering some dodgy moats with ice.

We went back to the geremolen the day after kinderdijk. There was still some rime on the trees and the sky was clear.
I cropped the picture below, upped the vibrance, saturation (a bit), clarity and reduced the brightness. Good shot, but I’m not sure which one I like better, the one below or this one…

I suggested to Jan Paul that we’d go to Muiderslot, a textbook type castle with a moat. So his colleagues in the US and A (sorry, bad Borat joke ) could see that ‘Holland” contained more than frozen water and windmills.
It was an interesting ride, we did the full blown walk-through-the-castle-following-the-guide tour, but weren’t allowed to take any pictures. Bummer. But very educational-I learned where some Dutch sayings originated from.
And the moat was almost completely frozen over. And better still, almost nobody had used it for ice skating, so the ice was as smooth as glass.
I told JP to go get his ice skates (he had that very same thought), ’cause how many people can claim they ice skated on a moat? So he did, and I took a whole set of pictures, mostly while lying flat on the ice.
Although it was cold, I had a blast. And so did Jan Paul.
The picture has added vibrance (screw saturation, vibrance the new saturation!) reduced brightness for a darker sky, bit of messing about with contrast and voila. On the large version Jan Paul is plain to see, but on this anti-theft size postage stamp, he may be harder to make out. And you’ve gotten a bit of Moire on the castle walls as a bonus ;).
And yes, those are shark fins. I guess somebody at the castle’s museum ahs a weird sense of humor.

The day after the Kinderdijk, we had no real plans to go anywhere, and during the night it was freezing and foggy. This put rime on virtually everything, turning the landscape totally white. Jan Paul eventually came up with an idea, suggested by his mom. This was to drive along a rural road a bit wider than the widt of a standard car. But we met up with so much traffic and we just couldn’t find a spot to park to take good pictures, so we got fed up and turned around. But the sun was already setting, bummer.
This is one of the better pictures, taken a bit before we hit that a-bit-wider-than-the-average-car road. I upped the contrast, reduced the brightness and removed a glaringly obvious contrail.

The day after we went to the viermolengang, I wanted to go to Kinderdijk. Jan Paul had an interesting route straight across the province, using roads that were probably around since before time began ( ).
Turns out he thought it was somewhere else. Didn’t matter, the trip itself was an interesting one.
There were a lot of pictures that I would call “great” but alas, the deal is that I only publish the one I think is the best of any shoot. It took some tweaking, well actually, I tried various ways of getting the most out of the picture, and I settled for “Selenium toning”, one of the development presets you can find in lightroom 2.0.
I also straightened the horizon a bit (yes, the windmill is a cousin of the tower of Pisa ). The vignetting is caused when I reduce brightness, same as with the Zaanse Schans picture- I like it. Sorry about the posterization (a.k.a. banding), that is because JPEG is only 8 bits-it can’t handle the subtle shades of purple. It looks swell in 16 bit PNG though.

The day after the Zaanse Schans, JP wanted to go to Aarlanderveen, a village on the other side of Alphen a/d Rijn, well, at least from where I live.
There was going to be an ice skating marathon, but he wanted to shoot the viermolengang, four windmills arranged so that each windmill lifts the water higher out of the polder to the river which gets rid of it in the North Sea.
The day was cloudy, totally different from the day before, and the freezing weather had turned a bit warmer, just above freezing, and the ice was like frozen snow in it’s consistency.
The marathon was called off due to the thaw.

Not that most people cared to listen to. Cars were parked by the roadside by the thousands, and scores of people were skating the route regardless of sloshing through the mushy toplayer of the ice.

It was pretty weird having hundreds of people in the middel of nowhere.

But along the way, we did what we came for, photographing the windmills.

I processed the original RAW twice, once lit exactly right, a bit saturated, vibrant and a lot of clarity. The other I made dark by reducing brightness, underexposed, upped th econtrast and pasted it in a second layer above the first.
Then I reversed the dark layer, reduced contrast and brightness, selected all light areas and removed them. Reversed the dark layer again, and put it in overlay mode, producing the picture below.

There is a tourist trap near Zaandam called “the Zaanse Schans” where it looks like they put all the old wooden buildings they have no room for anywhere else from that area. Not just any buildings, but the really old stuff from the 16th century and on, including windmills. Parking there for less than thirty minutes costs only one euro, but any time over that is seven fifty, a fortune. As you enter, some guy with an expensive Canon snaps a crappy picture of you and tries to sell a print of it surrounded by a calender for five whole euro’s.
But besides those gripes, the place is nice for taking pictures. The river Zaan was calm and virtually ice free, there was no wind. So it was a quiet, cold day, with no wind, and the ice on the ditches/canals (to the right behind the mills) was smooth (so JP and I took some time to take a few ice skating snaps)
The picture below is of a wood sawing mill, a typical example of the mills used to saw the planks to build the seventeenth century VOC fleet.
I upped the contrast, vibration and saturation in Lightroom, reduced the brightness, producing that vignetting which looks nice. With the sun to the right and the low humidity in the sky, it was already quite blue when I took the picture, and upping the contrast and vibrance and saturation added to the effect. I removed the red saturation on a buoy that was irritatingly obvious. And I used the healing brush on a white spot somewhere in the sky.

Jan Paul and I drove to the viermolengang of the river Rotte, where Rotterdam get’s it’s name from.
JP wanted me to take a few action shots of him on ice. He’s quite the ice skating fan, and as luck would have it, he’s here a bit longer than usual (he usually leaves right after new year starts) and this winter is cold enough to freeze most Dutch waterways.
As you saw in my previous post, ice skating is in, and it seems the atmosphere is “gezellig” (a Dutch word which cannot be adequately be translated into English, “cozy” comes close, but it’s like describing an “atomic bomb explosion” as a “big fireball” )
Of all the ones I took this one is the best. It’s a crop taken with my nikkor AF-S 24-70mm f/2.8. ED N
I took a lot of pictures of ice skaters whizzing past me while JP went around the track once, but it took him a long time, so he cut across the river before it entered the Rottemeren (the Rotte lakes), as it would have taken him an hour longer to get back. And it was a bit on the chilly side.

Past working week I’ve taken all the afternoons off at my job to go out and shoot the standard Dutch tourist traps with my mate, Jan Paul, who lives and works in the USA. He had some spare  time available due to ehm, shall we say, getting the papers to extend his residence permit.
It’s been colder in the Netherlands than the last say 10 years, so people en masse have been taking up skating on natural ice. It’s great to see, and if I weren’t such a (skating) pansy, I’d join them. But the truth is, that I haven’t ice skated since my twelfth year, and I’m not inclined to start now (especially when you read the papers and see the news on tv mentioning the emergency rooms are full of people with bone injuries, damaged wrists, broken wrists etc.).

I cropped the picture below, because the windmill (Rietveldse molen) was in the middle of the picture (I used the 24-70 while I should have used the 70-200 for better effect-but when it’s freezing 5 degrees Celcius / Centergrade, changing lenses is at the bottom of my list of priorities) I tweaked the colors to be vibrant, yet not saturated to give this pastel color like effect.

On the last day of the year I went to the Geremolen just outside the village I live in, together with Jan Paul, a friend of mine. We took a bunch of pictures from different angles, and the one I liked best is the one below. I tried one of Lightroom’s standard development styles, antique photo, which I edited afterward to make it more to my taste.
This picture was taken from the other side than the picture in the Geremolen link above.