A grey morning with fog in Winter. If the pandemic learned me something, it is that you do not have to go far to find beautiful items for photography. I can not wait to get out in the world again, but this is 500 meters away from where I live, on route to the supermarket. This week’s theme for the Lens Artists Photo Challenge #184 is ‘Travel has taught me’.
Before the pandemic I used to cross this canal twice a day, and I took loads of photos of it, but just recently I found out about its history and historical purpose.
As most of you probably know the Dutch have a long relationship with water, and learned how water could be managed over the ages. About half of The Netherlands is below sea level; the question was and is how to keep it dry? Some say that God created the world but the Dutch created The Netherlands. In reality we manage water. In days of climate change that gets more complex. Not only the amount of water coming in by rivers and rain is growing, the soil of The Netherlands sinks as well.
In 1840 this canal was build. From 1848 the former lake the Haarlemmermeer was turned into the Haarlemmermeerpolder and this canal was used to dump the water of that lake into the North Sea. Schiphol (ship hell) was a spot in that former lake notorious for ship wrecks as the story goes.
Nowadays the canal takes out the water from the West of The Netherlands to the sea at Katwijk.
The Autumn was short this year. High temperatures were pleasant, but the amazing colors on leaves that are normal for this time of year, were not present. And when the weather changed the leaves came off the trees very fast. Luckily the sunsets are always there.
Christmas is coming. Some people can’t wait to set up their gardens with light figures. Here is one I would consider, if I would decorate the garden. For this week’s Lens Artists Photo Challenge #175 Follow your bliss.
About the B4 retouch series: I browsed my archive for pictures to publish. Some of them are partly retouched but most do have scratches, dust and stains.
The picture was originally shot with Pentax K1000 on Kodak Plusx, scanned from negative and tweaked using Snapseed and Marksta. Click the picture for a larger version.
This artificial lake used to be meadow. The lake was created by dredging sand, that was needed for roads, new build areas and a railway line. And now it is a recreational area, Klinkenberger Plas.
This week’s Lens Artists Photo Challenge (#162) is ‘all about the light’. Maybe not a photo you would expcect when it is about ‘light’. But it is. I always love reading quotes from people on blogs, but I am too lazy to look up this one. Someone said: photography is painting with light. Which is true basically, glass, metal or later film was made to be sensitive to light to store images. Sensors do the same, but we are not aware of that process. Just the result. Last weeks I was looking at the sky more and more because a friend (I call him a friend even though I have not yet him personally for our first beer) Andy Townend ‘shoots a sky a day’ on his Facebook and IG account. A sky with clouds is a painting in light. I long to see blue skies, it is too wet and grey this Summer.