Abstract Amsterdam
Our trip to The Netherlands was productive, albeit with twists and turns as one might expect. Returning home has been filled with the usual catch-up from being away, plus the follow-up work needing to be done from our trip. Oh yeah, and we’ve got Phil and Roberta coming to visit (by the time you read this, they’re already here). I’ve been so busy I didn’t even download my images until Wednesday afternoon, and we got back on Saturday night. That’s just my way of saying this is a filler post, focused on a few images. You’ll get the fuller story (I hope) after things settle down again. Then again, I should also have posts from our adventures with Phil and Roberta! For now . . .
Ann and I wanted to go “light” on our trip, so I brought just the Q2MR and the Lumix (I think my Fuji is getting tired of being left behind . . . or rather looking forward to when I’m doing landscape trips again and the X-Pro and my tripod return to being my tools of choice). The two cameras fit nicely into any number of small bags and they were with us most of the time, even if not used.
Amsterdam is a city of canals (makes me wonder what wandering through Venice is like), which you cannot avoid if you do any sort of walking. And we did a lot of walking. The first image comes from one of our free days, where we pretty much walked around the downtown area. As is my way, I started looking at details and, on occasion, abstractions I could create (I promise, no doors this time). On one of the bridges, as I was making a more traditional photograph, I realized the potential in the reflected water and immediately started focusing on the patterns below.
You never know what you’ll get with these types of pattern images. They’re so transient that by the time you see them, you can’t photograph them. You have to just find a good spot that has a balance of the overall lighter and darker areas, and then take a series of images, leaving it to chance that the transient patterns do something interesting when you’ve depressed the shutter. My approach is to form that general composition, and then to take 2-4 rapid shots (all with me pressing the shutter instead of using a burst mode [just one more unnecessary setting to fiddle with]). I think the above is the best of the sets of the images, given the leaves in the water, and the stray dark streaks in the brighter water areas.
What do you do when your AirBNB checkout is at 11:00 and your flight isn’t until 20:00? You find a place to drop off your luggage and then figure out something to do for a few hours. That’s what we did on our last day.
Amsterdam is truly a lovely city. We enjoyed it (particularly the food in the neighborhood we stayed at). However, it is a city and Ann and I had had enough of people. So on the night before our departure, I started scanning the web to find something for us to do that might avoid the crowds and perhaps give us a bit of nature. I found the perfect spot - the Hortus Botanical Gardens.
Ann and I spent just over 2 hours wandering the gardens, in no real rush to do anything but to look at plants (fall had settled in, so many plants were already in winter mode) and to pull out our cameras to play around a bit. In some ways, I think Ann and I are pretty bad tourists - we hate the running around and, most of all, the crowds. But give us a nice, quiet, natural environment, we can be happier than pigs in the mud, and of course have a field day photographically.
Now, don’t think that all the images I made were in black and white (though there are plenty of those). The LUMIX had its fair share of images too. And like I mentioned during our Madeira trip, it really can be an impressive camera. It came in handy for the image below when the Q2MR b&w image just couldn’t convey the same feeling that the color of the ginkgo leaves gave me when looking at them.
A beautiful ginkgo tree had dropped its leaves, and both Ann and I walked around the area for quite some time looking for the best pattern of leaves to photograph (I suspect others though we’d dropped something and were looking for it). I think watching all of those Simon Booth videos has paid off. He always says look for the exception in the patterns and focus around that. In this case, it was of course the feather that caught my eye.
I’ll leave with one last image from the gardens. Really, there’s nothing much about it but patterns for the eye to wander through, with the occasional in-focus area to cause the eye to pause for a moment.
It’s strange. We really didn’t “photograph” a lot this trip, but looking at the downloaded images, I think there are several nice ones. Hopefully, it’s an indication that there will be a lot of fruitful photographic opportunities for us once we’re up there.