Spring – Dr Tim R. Hofmeester

Photo of the Month May 2014

Fresh leaves

Spring was early this year, and halfway April, the leaves were appearing on the beech trees again. As I wrote in my text for the Photo of the Month March I wanted to spend part of my photographic time this year on the many shapes and forms made by trees. So when I saw the fresh spring leaves appearing, I immediately set out to get a photograph depicting the feeling I got from these fresh leaves. Finding the right setting took some time, but I found what I was looking for in these three leaves. What really amazed me, was that the many insects feeding on the leaves had also appeared already, as shown by the many holes in the leaves. Amazing, what a little rise in temperature and lengthening of the days does to the natural world!

Canon 5D mIII, Canon 100mm macro, 1/100 @ f/3.2, iso 400

Spring!

Spring!

Spring is in the air! Last weekend multiple records were broken, as the highest temperatures for this time of year were measured in the Netherlands. This also means that all of a sudden flowers are popping up everywhere, birds start singing and ticks are active again. Good for my research, but also great for photography. A winter without snow and ice is not very interesting for photography, so I am happy that spring has arrived.

I found some Ficaria verna next to a ditch near my home, which gave me some ideas for photographs against the sun with reflections. Unforunately, a small dike next to the ditch blocked the setting sun, so there were no light reflections, which meant I had to try some other things. In the picture above, you see the last sunlight on the trees on the dike, some reflections of the sky in the ditch, and of course many of the flowers. In the picture below, you see some of the flowers in the blue light after sunset, changing the mood completely.

Both pictures are taken with my Canon 5D mIII and Canon 100mm macro lens.

Photo of the Month June 2013

Kroondomein het Loo

Last month was totally dedicated to field work (as will be the next months). It was a very busy period with lots of blanket dragging to catch ticks for my research, and a lot of planning for the field work this summer. Fortunately, I had one day in which I had to select some new plots for a field experiment that we started, and as I wanted to have some pictures of the plots, I took my camera with me. This is a picture of one of the control plots for the experiment.

Spring time fully hit the Netherlands, everything is green again, but the weather has been changing a lot, from full rain to sunshine and back again. On this day, it was rather wet, with a lot of showers, which meant white skies on all of my pictures. In this one, I overexposed a few stops, to make the sky really white, and to show the many colours of green that were visible in the forest on that particular day.

Canon 5D mIII, 17mm, 1/80 @ f/10, iso 800

Onset of Spring

The nice thing about going to the same place again and again to sample for my research, is that I also get to see the changes that are happening in the forests during spring. The picture above is a nice example. I have camera traps (cameras with a heat and motion detector) in 10 different areas in the Netherlands to monitor the mammal fauna in forests. These camera traps take a picture every 12 hours, for me to see if the cameras were working all the time. Four weeks ago (29 April) I placed a camera trap in a forest in the Dunes near IJmuiden, and today (27 May) I collected it. When I arrived in the forest this afternoon, I did not recognize it! The forest had gone through a whole transformation. To visualize this, I took a time lapse picture from the first day, and one from the last day, and blended them together.