My Art Workshop

Spring sun is out today again. It’s Sunday and the camera needed exercising. My kid and I went for a walk, where we found BMX riders plunging with warp speed to their near deaths in the nearest abandoned huge gravel pit.

Some of the riders were getting through the marked track with impressive jumps and landings on two wheels at the finish line. Some of them ended up plowing the ground – head first. Good thing they were wearing helmets, though it still looked painful.

I have learnt today that action photos require shutter speeds around 1/800 in a sunny day to not get blurry. I wish I had learnt that sooner than by my last pictures today! Still I got a few acceptable shots of the daredevils.

Later I caught a couple of random critters in my driveway: Bumblebee and a sparkling young European peacock. I am happy we spotted it. Last year the peacocks were sorely missing in my garden, but perhaps they will be back this year 🙂

My kid and I went for a walk today and we discovered a new footpath to follow! We only got a tiny bit lost, had to climb an electric fence at one point and lost the foot path in a forest I never knew existed, less than one kilometer from our house 😀

The wood anemones are in bloom! and the forest looks like it’s been snowing again. I also had fun teaching my kid about the golden ratio. He brought my husbands camera and snatched a ton of great photos.

I am happy to report we found the foot path again and survived the ordeal, despite meeting wild ferocious animals (we met two deers, a common pheasant and a crow…)

Yesterday was an amazingly beautiful day with subzero temperatures and a thick fog. I went walking my usual morning walk as soon as the light came. Everything was quiet, dampened by the fog perhaps. Not a branch or blade of grass moved. It felt like the entire world was asleep – pure magic. As I reached my small local forest I had to turn back home to get my camera. I encountered this fairy tale landscape you see, and I just had to capture it.

Later that day I wanted to draw, using the same technique, I used when I drew the wolf cubs. I clicked randomly on my photo folders, with my eyes closed, till one photo popped up on my screen. Quite fittingly for today’s weather, it turned out to be a photo of a snow lantern, that my kid and I once built.

Higher resolution

We went to Arles today. I visited that city three times, and still I could barely recognize it, when we went there today. It seemed so large and busy compared to when I went there by interrail and later by bike and stayed at the camp site. The city center is still tiny narrow streets with colorful windows, flowers, cafés and washing lines. We strolled around the city, and I had fun taking photographs.
We found the yellow café, which Vincent van Gogh painted. It was drowning in a swarm of tourists, but we saw it 🙂
The Roman arena is an amazing build that used to hold up to 20.000 people. It is being carefully restored to its former glory, but as it is still in use today. The builders are facing a challenge to rebuild a roman ruin with modern facilities and security. These days the forum only holds around 12.000 people, which is still pretty impressive.
And finally on our way home I caught them, the white Camargue horses in their natural habitat. Foals are born black and change to white coat around 5 years of age, so meeting a herd of horses will show all kinds of color variations from black over grey to white.

Yesterday we went to see Pont du Gard. We went there years back, when we went to Provence on a biking trip. Back then we walked in the river all the way from our campsite to the aquaduct. Yesterday we took the easier -though less adventurous path- by car, since the river was too wild to walk in at this point, after the floods. This place is magic. It is amazing that the Romans were able to build something this large and impressive, that still stands today, 2060 years later. And it reminds me of the wonderful first summer with my husband.

Today we went to the Camargue again.
From a walk between the ocean and the brackish water of the Camargue at a thin strip of land, just east of Saint Marie de la Mer. The red grass is a fantastic contrast to the blue water and the yellowish mudflats.
I finally caught a good picture of the white heron. We spotted so many of them today.
And of course the flamingos were there – hundreds of them.
This little blue wonder was hard to catch. I am not sure of the exact species. It has quite distinct tails, but searching google gave me no good guess, so lets just call it a blue. I had to donate quite a lot of blood to the Camargue, while standing still long enough to capture this guy. The mosquitoes here are ferocious!
Our kid spotted this incredible green lizard.
I still have no great pictures of the white Camargue horses. This is best shot so far. Shot through the car window at 90 km/hour. Not that we did not get close to them, but most of them are held in enclosures, and I want a photo of them in the wild.

The black bulls though I got! Well …nearly in the wild anyway.

I finally made it! We went to the Camargue and I am absolutely ecstatic about it! What an amazingly beautiful place. Three times before in my life I went to Arles, Southern France, and each time something went wrong, so I never got to see this natural wonder. But today I found myself in the heart of it, and it was everything I dreamt of – and then more! So bear with me, this will be a marathon post of photos.

On our way to Camargue my kid spotted this! Never in my life did I see this many storks gathered in one place in the wild. We do have these birds in Denmark. But they are so rare that the newspapers write about, it if a pair of storks decides to build a nest in Denmark.
From there on it was just one little wonder after the other. As a biologist and photographer this was just heaven.
Eurasian coots resting on the shallow turquoise water. We were looking for flamingos, but these guys were beautiful too!
Great crested grebe and great cormorant were around too.
Eurasian coot, great crested grebe and great cormorant are all common in Denmark. Still they are a pretty sight. But we were looking for flamingos and suddenly there they were in all their pink glory.
It looks like I just snatched one pic and there I had it all perfect huh? Yea…no. I think I snatched a hundred if not more of the flamingos (and of the storks too by the way) To choose only one for the blog was next to impossible! But this next photo was exactly that: One super lucky shot where I had one chance and one second to point, focus, shoot. The next moment all what was left was a small ripple in the water and mud.
It is a ladder snake. Wikipedia later told us it is a common snake in the region. It is very aggressive and territorial and non venomous (we think). The three of us were totally ecstatic when we spotted it in a small muddy shallow stream.

From there on we stumbled on a lot of other critters: A coypu, which is an introduced pest from South American and really should be killed on sight. But this guy was incredibly friendly and walked right up to us, with a gorgeous, yellow, tooth, charming, smile. He lived to see another day. Down the path we found butterflies – red admiral and a speckled wood butterfly – a frog and a white heron. We saw prints in the mud from wild boar. We also got a few quick flashes of the bright blue kingfisher, sadly way too quick to catch for a photo, and of course there were herds of black bulls and white Camargue horses all over.
We went to Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer for lunch. The waves at the harbor there were impressive.
From there we went to Aigues Mortes to see the medieval city, and the impressive medieval city wall and to take a stroll on it. The pink water that surrounds this village nicely illustrates where the flamingo gets it’s color from.
And then, bathing in the evening sun it stood there, glaring at us, waiting for me to snatch its portrait. So of course I did 🙂

It is a pretty foggy day today. It is cold and it smells of fall. But as I was looking out from the livingroom wrinkling my nose going “eeew”, I spotted a tiny wonder. I had to grab my camera and go catch it. So today there will be photographs in the blog. I have a few from the past weeks that I would like to put here too.

The old tractor has a twin, which we think once upon a time might have been blue… or yellow … or green…

And finally I went to the Scandinavian Zoo a couple of weeks back. “Snowball” and his mate are just beautiful, even in their Summer coat. And his blue eyes are just amazing.

I met a determined Mentor in photography from Ireland. So I might be spending a bit more time learning about photography for a while. I need to learn of aperature and shutter speed and ISO numbers and what not, to learn to use my camera right.

First lesson was to take pictures with the “TV” setting on my camera, meaning I can only adjust shutter speed. Here are a few of the results from that exercise from my walk yesterday.
Two faeries were dancing (and kissing?) in a meadow. Beautiful and wild they were.
The cutest, little, curious, foal. He was shy and struggling to reach the grass to eat. His legs were too long and his neck too short – poor little giraffe.
The ferocious guard dog at the local riding school. He never knew I was there. Zzz.

My garden is looking fantastic right now – everything is in bloom. This particular pink poppy I have been planning to snatch a pic of for days. One flower alone is larger than my two fists together! And then there are the lavenders. They are like an ocean in front of our house. Last year they were pathetically half dead because of the long winter, but this year they seem to be larger and thicker and bluer than ever before. Bees and butterflies love them and I an happy they all have a safe haven here in my garden.

Today I had a visitor. Actually he (or she) came by yesterday too. But today my guest stayed for hours thoroughly enjoying the visit and I just had to take advantage of that. So today’s sketch turned into today’s photographs instead. May I present “Lepus europaeus” also known as European hare.