Sunday morning I drove to Brabant, in the south of the Netherlands, to spend an hour or so in Kampina, a nature reserve with stream valleys, heather and a bit of forest. It was just after sunrise, and my niece (who accompanied me) and me were looking for the magical light. There were almost no clouds and no wind, so the water looked just like a mirror. In fact, in the photo above it almost feels as if the grass polls are floating on air!
I have been known to take photos early in the morning against the sun 🙂 (gallery), but as there were hardly any clouds, I needed something else to help block the sun. In the photo above the small tree on the right served this purpose. It is not that I have an uncontrollable urge to take backlight photos, it’s just that I don’t want to limit myself to the directions away from the sun. The consequence is that I need to do more post-processing to get some color out of the dark parts in the photo.
The photo below was not taken directly into the sun, but still with a lot of contrast. I still like the result, although I closed the aperture too far to deal with the sun. The result is a bit of motion blur in the foreground.
In Kampina is an outlook post, and my companion and me decided to give that a try. It wasn’t very high, so no extreme physical effort required 😉 ! Below you see the outlook post with the sun behind it. Note the cow on the right! I think she got nervous, so she made herself scarce… The next photo shows the view from the post, with a bit of flare from the lens.
This is a more straight-into-the-sun photo, I normally don’t make them this light, but you have to try different things, right?
On the way back the sun was already getting quite high (relatively, it’s winter!), so I am not sure if this really qualifies as golden hour anymore, but the light still looks nice enough to me.
I’ll finish with another photo of a water-grasspoll field (how do you call that?), because I like the difference in texture between the mirror-smooth water and the fuzzy polls. Again with a tree blocking the sun. Love the colors of the sunrise!
