Strabrechtse Heide

For the month of August I decided to do some serious landscape photography and especially to keep an eye on the local moorland “Strabrechtse Heide”. I admit the summer period is not ideal for nature photography. First of all, you have to set the alarm clock at an unreasonable idiot time (I am not a morning person). Secondly, the quality of light is often not as good as in winter times. The sun rises quickly to a high elevation. But on the other hand, since I have been a teacher I have plenty of time in the summer holiday and often the warm weather causes thunderstorms at the end of the day. So the plan was to focus on heavy weather and the flowering heath. Here is a small selection of the results.

• Photo 1 – August 3^rd: I saw this monstrous shower coming. Thanks to mobile technology with a rain radar app. I was just on time on the right spot to photograph this shelf cloud.
• Photo 2 – August 5^th: A traditional heath-with-fog wide-angle shot.
• Photo 3 – August 17^th: This place on the Strabrechtse Heide was new for me. When I first visited the spot a week earlier I immediately sensed its potential. I wanted flowering heath on the sand with heavy clouds full of rain above it. I took me a couple of return visits before I encountered the right circumstances.

The latter photo was also selected by the Roots nature magazine on their Facebook account as one of best flowering heath photos of this year.

* Canon EOS 5D Mark II, 17-40mm/f4 @ 17mm; ISO-50, f16, 1.6s; ND2 hard gradient filter; tripod.
* Canon EOS 5D Mark II, 17-40mm/f4 @ 17mm; ISO-50, f16, 0.5s; ND2 hard gradient + ND3 hard gradient filter; tripod.
* Canon EOS 5D Mark II, 17-40mm/f4 @ 20mm; ISO-50, f18, 2s; +0.7 stop; flash, ND3 hard gradient filter; tripod.