This weekend featured two wonderful mornings with beautiful sunrise and dense groundfog. Despite this ideal weather for landscape photography, I had other plans and with pain in my photographic heart, had to ignore the foggy world around me.
On Friday, I visited a small but worthwile nature reserve close to home. I had not been there for a long time and had forgotten about its beauty. The Bog Myrtle (gagel in Dutch) glowed like an orange fire in the backlight of the rising sun.
Combined with the fresh greens of spring leaves and the choir of singing birds all around me, it was a wonderful experience. I photographed ducks on foggy bog waters and got some nice shots of displaying Bluethroat (the reason for visiting). It seems they behave different locally, something to remember.
On Saturday, I teamed up with three other local photographers and went to photograph Black-necked Grebes. A bit further from home than I usually go, but as these normally very wary birds are completely relaxed with human presence and great in numbers (I counted 18), it is arguably the best place in the Netherlands to photograph them. Here’s one fixing its glance on a potential breakfast. Spoiler alert: it did catch the insect, the next photograph in the series shows the Grebe with the insect in the bill. With their black head, glowing red eye and yellow ear plumes, they look like little devils.
Black-necked Grebe; Canon 1D Mark III with 500/4 IS and 1.4x; 1/200s at F5.6 and ISO 400; beanbag from ground