Welcome on the homepage of Wouter van den Hoogen Photography! On this website Wouter’s work is displayed and he shares his ideas about current work. Enjoy your visit and leave a comment to let Wouter know what you think of his work.
An hour full of golden hues
As described in the previous post, on januari 14th 2012 I was in luck for a great sunset lasting over an hour.
While the previous post was all about using my newly aqcuired ND500 filter eating up 9 stops, in this post I wanted to display one image from the timelapse series (roughly 450 images in all) illustrating the beautiful golden hues that iluminated the skies before and after sunset. I had set up the slider so that the camera could move low over the surface of the water creating a strong 3D effect for the time-lapse. While I picked this image, truth be told, each and every image of the series was a pleasure to see while back at home.
Can you image these colors just refusing to dwindle? Just gorgeous!
Nikon D700 24-70/2.8, ISO 400, f22, 1/30s, Slider
Long Sunset
This evening I went out to try my luck at the ongoing project: getting a time-lapse of the sun setting on the heathland close to home. While I was doubtful when leaving home I cannot put it in any other way than that I hit the jackpot. While normally some color would be expected, rarely does it last for over an hour. This time was a special occasion. Really over an hour of gorgeous blues, yellows, gold and orange colored skies drowning in the purple hues marking the end of the sky parade of color.
The resulting image (the top one) is one that fits well with the longevity of the sunset. Just after finishing the time-lapse with the slider (I hope to be able to post some images of the TL, or the video itself soon) the colors were still abundant. Having recently purchased a 9 stop ND filter (Lightcraft Workshop ND500 MC HRC) I decided to try something different: max out on the exposure time. I set the camera to f11, added the filter and guessed my way to a exposure time of 11 and a half minutes (yes, minutes). The guess was a bit off. I tried to take into account the dwindling daylight but ended up missing almost one full stop. Well a bit pp in Lightroom combined with the very good image sensor on the D700 made relatively short work of this lack of light.
It is almost as if everything gets blended together that changes over time in just one shot, especially when compared to a more standard image (bottom image). The clouds obviously move, but the color also fade into each other with more and more blues being added towards the sun, and the water gets smoother than it actually is. All in all I like the effect very much.
Top: Nikon D700, ISO400, 16-35 VR/4, f11, 11,5 minutes, tripod, ND500 (9 stop)
Bottom: Nikon D700, ISO400, 16-35 VR/4, f11, 2s, tripod
Moon playing hide and seek
It has been quite a while, years for sure, that I had been trying to capture a lunar eclipse (partial or whole) on film. Well, december 10th 2011 was such a day, and an interesting at that. In the Netherlands we would not see totality, that much was sure, but what would we see, if anything? Weather predictions were so so, so would I be in luck? I went to a place where enough of the horizon could be seen for the partial lunar rise. Armed with 2 camera’s and lots of gear (3 ball heads, two tripods, a slider, multiple lenses, cordless power drill, a water level, and some food) I hoped to get the lunar eclipse as a time-lapse series, hopefully adding movement as well.
The time of moonrise passed and no moon. Am I looking in the right place? I was (according to stellarium and the compass on my phone) and a little later suddenly there was the moon loosening from a thin strip of clouds. Yes! Time to start the time-lapse. Oh no! Clouds, Clear, Lets start, No! Clouds… and so on. I was beginning to lose hope when a larger clearing appeared. Having one camera set up with a wide angle lens minding his own (i.e. taking some 1800 images) the other was pointed to the moon with a tele lens. The opening was just big enough to squeeze in a 10 minute series I had hoped for. As you can see in the upper right moon, the clouds were obscuring the moon again, but it was beautiful to see a partial lunar eclipse after so much time.
Nikon D200, 70-200/2.8+1.4TC, f2.8, 1/25s, ISO400, tripod
On the receiving end…
Most of the time I am behind the camera, trying to get everything on it the way I would like it to be. Of course that is what this site is about. Well, recently I (and my son Maeryn) were on the receiving end of some camera’s. While on holiday near the Veluwe National Park, we (my wife Sharon, our son Maeryn, daughter Jules and myself) went for a day-trip to the airplane museum “Aviodrome”. I had been there a long, long time ago, when I was a kid myself. So it was a nice to be back again and let my own son experience this collection of old airplanes. Having more than his share of in-flight experience he completely enjoyed having a look outside the airplanes, and actually taking place in the cockpit. You can image the unpleasant surprise when we were interviewed by national radio and learned that the park had gone bankrupt! Next came several camera crews from national television and several photographers for national and local news papers. I don’t know what we had written on the back of our head, but one way or another, they all found our way to us. Well, not being camera shy, Maeryn just played on, actually acting in front the camera. Although the reason was not so positive, it was quite an experience for him, and we got to buy next day’s newspaper as a reminder date-stamped. Well, the picture here was my version of the publicity. How often does your kid get interviewed (or at least video-taped) for national television.
Have a look at the National Broadcast from SBS6 Hart van Nederland - Evening Program featuring Aviodrome story. Click on the thumbnail for the article in the Volkskrant.
The place that was
For those who might have been somewhat puzzled by my previous post of me wondering how natural the landscapes in our dutch nature reserves actually are, it may make some more sense if you know what beautiful a spot is now in the past. Have a look at the pictures bundled together in this post, and I hope you will see the beauty of it. Ah well, beauty, nature and nature conservation simply don’t need to go together, and on the positive side, let the hunt for new interesting locations begin.
Touched by a chainsaw
I came to this spot, one I had been returning to for several years already, full of hope for a good sunset adding a time-lapse video to the project I was undertaking for this piece of nature only to find my subject to have been cut down. I can only describe my (selfish?) feelings as grrr! But what it did was make me reconsider all those cut down trees in our nature reserves I had seen, walked by when doing ‘nature’ photography. Do these nature reserves actually deserve to be considered nature at all?
Yes, I know that for conservation of a certain ecosystem we have to intervene (at least in the Netherlands we do), and it is the reply I often get when raising the question: “is there any nature in the Netherlands?”. Sure enough our nature reserves are actually considered to be semi-natural. A good description perhaps, more than I ever considered to be the case, and a description that hit home when visiting the spot on the photographs. I had been coming here for the last 3 years, in all kinds of weather. But nature implies the lack of intervention at all, at least when using the definition posted on Wikipedia:
Natura was a Latin translation of the Greek word physis (φύσις), which originally related to the intrinsic characteristics that plants, animals, and other features of the world develop of their own accord. (italics added, source: Wikipedia)
I think it is evident from the picture in this post that there was some form of intervention (I expect human since I have not seen a rabbit with a chainsaw lately) cutting the life of this tree short. To me it is evident as well that we have nature in our nature reserves, we have many species that live their lives uninterrupted. So, there is certainly nature in our reserves, but maybe the nature reserves are a bit less natural than I had wanted to believe.
Importantly, I do not have any intention to suggest in any way that these semi-natural landscapes are not valuable or that managing them in this way would be wrong. Far from it, these areas provide refuge for many species that would otherwise be hard pressed for living space, which makes us enjoy these areas. But natural it may be less than I once simply assumed.