Rotterdam (or Anywhere) – Page 62 – Adventures in the Netherlands & around the world

Inari

25/04/2012 Hanneke

Just after Easter, we went on a trip to Inari in Finland. Paul had been skiing from Alta to Karasjok during Easter (while I was at work), so on Sunday I drove to Karasjok to pick him up. Only an 8 hour drive 😉 I was very happy I’d thought of buying an audio book to listen to while driving, this made a huge difference! From Karasjok it’s a 1.5 hour drive to Inari. We found this wonderful hotel called Kultahovi where we rented a room with views over the river, and our very own sauna 🙂 wonderful! We also got half-board, so we had dinner in the hotel’s restaurant every evening. A very relaxing trip 🙂

Our first day in Inari was very sunny, and we enjoyed a leisurely ski tour along the partly frozen river. For most of the way, you could ski on the ice of the river, but sometimes the river narrowed and there were rapids, so you’d have to get on the shore to pass. It was really pretty 🙂 And one of the first creatures we met was this cute little bird that I remembered from our trip to Kiruna. It’s a white-throated dipper, and apparently Norway’s national bird – but I’ve only seen it in Sweden and Finland 😀 They can sing very prettily, a welcome sound after Tromsø where you mostly hear seagulls, crows and magpies who don’t exactly sing 😉 If you want to see some really good photos of this bird: check here and here.

We had a nice long break in the sunshine looking over the river. We met only a handful of other people all day, either skiing or ice fishing.

The river was a paradise for macro photography, I had lots of fun capturing these icicles. In the afternoon, it got more cloudy and the temperatures dropped. We headed back to the hotel – sauna time!

It cleared up again in the evening, and I was keen to try and see the aurora. Inari is at about the same latitude as Tromsø, and the days are getting very long now. At midnight, the sky had this incredible deep blue colour that silhouetted the trees on the other side of the river. Magical! And to add to the magic, even the aurora showed up 🙂 very briefly though, so unfortunately I didn’t get any good photos. Still, I love the colour of the sky in these photos.

The next day started very sunny, and we went for a ski tour on lake Inari. This is the third-largest lake in Finland, and that means it’s BIG! But first I found some small bushes with branches covered in ice crystals…

When we left, I could see a front of clouds on the horizon. Unfortunately, it moved really fast and within about an hour it had become overcast. Without the sunshine, it was quite chilly.

We didn’t stay out for very long once it got cold and cloudy, but I did take some more photos of the different shapes of ice… wonderful 🙂

The next day was our last full day in Inari, and we went for another ski trip. It was a cloudy, snowy day, and we kept getting lost in the forest (guess we are spoilt in Tromsø where you hardly ever have to use a map :D). Soon the sauna was calling 😉 We visited the museum (Siida) shop in the afternoon, though not the museum itself. I think it’s one of the best museums in the world (seriously) but we had already visited 2 years ago on our way to Murmansk. I started to regret that decision when browsing around the shop, as they had a temporary exhibition of paintings by a Swiss artist called Séverine Cuénod. I only got to see her work through the postcards they were selling (it was almost closing time), but I LOVED it. I can’t find much information about her, but here you can see a few more works. We also visited the local supermarket, where I was amazed to find that they sold rolls of film and FLOPPY DISKS. Wow – this place is frozen in time 😀

The next day it was time to leave… It’s a 650 km drive back to Tromsø, so it was great to stop in Kautokeino for a bit. I had been looking forward to visiting Juhls Silver gallery for quite some time 🙂 On our last visit (2 years ago), we were really short on time. Of course I didn’t leave empty handed 🙂 I bought some really pretty glass birds to hang in front of the window.

The rest of the drive home was long but uneventful. As real Norwegians, we made sure to stock up on wine in Finland 🙂 Finland is a lot cheaper than Norway. It was a great little trip, and we’re thinking of coming back to Inari in summer to explore the lake by boat 🙂

Drop Photography

22/04/2012 Hanneke

In March I joined a really fun workshop on drop photography, which took place over 2 (long) evenings. On the first evening, we got an introduction to the basics of this type of photography, and then it was time to try for ourselves! Taking photos of droplets works quite different from what I imagined. I thought you’d have to use bright light and fast shutter speeds, but in reality we used exposure times of 2 seconds in darkness that was only lit up by an external flash. So instead of using a fast shutter speed on your camera, you let the flash determine the shutter speed. The tricky bit is to get the flash to fire at exactly the right moment… It didn’t take long to realise that the most important thing for drop photography is PATIENCE and perseverance 🙂

That first evening, our goal was to get a picture of the so-called “crown”, the splash when the drop has hit the water. After a lot of trial and error, we managed 🙂

We also played around with dripping milk into our red liquid (water with food colouring), which gives quite neat results! As a sneak preview of what we were going to do on the second evening, they showed us the drop machine. The really impressive drop photos are the result of 1 drop hitting the water, bouncing back, and then being hit by a second drop, creating a sort of umbrella. This is very hard to do by yourself, so you can buy a drop machine (controlled by a computer), which enables you to set the size of each drop, the time between firing the drops, how many drops you want, etc… In the photo below we used milk dripping into a cup of coffee 🙂

The next evening we got to play with the drop machine ourselves. Turns out it’s still very tricky to get it set right. We struggled for quite a while to get the famous “umbrella” photo, similar to the one above.

But it’s all good fun, even when the timing goes wrong…

At some point we created a soap bubble over our glass. We tried to get an umbrella image within the bubble, which took some attempts before we got it right. But again, the failed attempts are just as impressive – and I thought it was really cool to see how drops can pass through a soap bubble!

It was a really fun workshop! I’d love to do more, but I am a bit overwhelmed by the equipment you need (though they showed us how to build our own with cheap materials) and maybe most of all: how much patience is required. Patience has never been my strongest virtue 😉 But just take a look at Corrie White‘s to see where patience and perseverance can take you 🙂 amazing!

Buren

05/04/2012 Hanneke

One of the reasons we went fishing on Sunday were our sore muscles from a ski/snowshoe trip the day before. Eelke and Roy invited us to climb Buren (802 m), and it was the perfect day for it! A fresh layer of snow, and plenty of sunshine 🙂

I was a bit nervous as I was the only one on snowshoes, and this mountain was a lot steeper than what I’d done before. The first bit wasn’t much of a problem though, and on the steep bits it’s actually easier on snowshoes as the crampons help you to go straight up instead of having to zig-zag.

On the second half, the snow was quite deep and I started to struggle. Even though we were able to follow a well established track made by all the early birds, I was still sinking in a bit with every step, and that made it quite tiring. Still, I enjoyed the beautiful landscape and the sunshine.

After a short lunch break, I was tempted to give up and let the other three get to the top without me. It’s hard to give up though, with the top in sight and not much further to go 😀 so I just kept going. And I made it! Well, we never made it to the actual top as the last 20 meters are very steep and exposed, and we decided not to risk it.

We had a great view from our pre-top and enjoyed a long break 🙂

And heres a panorama of the great view we had:

Our shadows were getting longer and it was time to come down… Paul, Eelke and Roy went straight down, while I took the same route as we had taken up, to avoid the very steep slopes through deep snow.

I tried to end up underneath a slope to take photos of the others skiing down, which isn’t easy when you’re a lot slower 😀 but I did succeed in the end…

It had taken me more than 3.5 hours to reach the top, but the way down was a lot faster: 1.5 hours. I was completely exhausted when I got back to the car though, this mountain was not quite in sync with my fitness level 😉 But it was a fantastic day!

For those who want to see even more photos (or read about the same trip from a different perspective :D) here is the blog post by Roy about the same day (in Dutch).