Landscape photography can be very frustrating. Getting up at silly ‘o clock for a sunrise shoot, only to see a thick layer of clouds blocking the sun. No blue hour magic, just a dull grey world. Pre-visualizing a shot, driving to the location, then finding out that the trees that were standing in such a nice line have been chopped. A dead battery at exactly the time Mother Nature decides it’s showtime. You get the picture, right?
But then there are days when everything just seems to fall into place. It’s still winter, but the weather forecast tells thaw is coming. I better get out for one more winter shoot while it still lasts. Plans are made. Herman and I decide to go to Stavoren to see and capture the frozen IJsselmeer. We contact Niels and he is coming too. Then Ron contacts us on Twitter: he would like to join us as well. Sure, the more the better. I prepare my gear and then leave to pick up Herman. As we get closer to our destination, the landscape changes and gets more beautiful by the minute. Then, between Laaksum and Stavoren, the road goes up onto the dike. We see what we came for: a huge frozen lake, where the wind has formed bizarre sculptures of plates of ice.
I park my car at ‘It Reade Klif’ and Herman and I plan to get down the dike to check out the ice. A man gets out of the car that is parked next to mine. It’s Ron. We don’t even need to give him a call; he found us without even trying… We check out the scene and then decide there’s plenty of time for hot chocolate before we start shooting. When we return, I email our location to Niels. Then we walk down to the lake and start shooting. The light is still a bit hard but the ice sculptures are just amazing. When Niels arrives, the light starts to get better and the world becomes more and more unreal. Are we still on planet Earth?
We continue shooting and more and more photographers arrive at the scene. We venture further and further onto the lake to get the best possible shots. When the sun sinks below the horizon, I hear people shouting. I look behind me and notice many people on the dike, all here to watch nature’s greatest light show. Then the sun disappears beyond the horizon and with the sun, all the other people disappear as well. It’s just our small group; we seem to be the only ones who know it’s usually worth hanging around after sunset.
Shutter speeds get longer, the temperature gets lower and lower. About 45 minutes after sunset, we stop. Three hours of intense photography in the best possible conditions come to an end. We look at our cameras and we can’t wait to see the results on our computers. We take one last look at the unreal ice world we were in for the last three hours and then head back to our cars. What an amazing experience. Nothing beats landscape photography on days like this!
