So I have a confession to make, I’m stupid and nice! In this particular case all of the above apply to me. I bought the X100F last year as an allround, easy to carry and excellent image quality camera. The one that you always have in your hand or at least near you. After the summer and winter started, I got the feeling the X100F just sat on the shelf, not doing anything.

Just before summer holidays on a nice evening in June I did a short tour around our local birding area. We have a few, but this one is the closest. You can find all sorts of birds, but mainly you’ll find waterbirds. Lately some even have spotted a long-eared owl and a sparrow hawk. More commonly you’ll find besides the waterbirds, goose, seagulls and kestrels, with sometimes a buzzerd.

I have this idea, for a while now, it started with the photos on the desktop of the Microsoft surface line. Remember, the animals - owl photographed. To me it was as the birds where portrayed as a humans, a portrait almost. This intrigued me and wanted to try this for myself. So I thought let’s try to capture birds in portraits like humans, i.e. bird portrait photography.

I’ve been looking into different hiking trails in the forest area the Veluwe this time around, to capture wildlife and nature. A more forest type of photography. This was the first outing with the Fujinon 50-140F2.8 and the photos weren’t the primary goal, just a nice walk and getting to know the 50-140 and how it behaves.

After coming back from Vancouver and Vancouver island, photos will come later, I needed to test my few months old X-T3 against my former X-T2 for bird photography. So with a nice sun, wind and overall Dutch skies I went to the Groene Jonker and the Waver. See earlier blog posts on both areas here in the Netherlands.

The former island of Marken situated in the Gouwzee was connect to the main land in 1957 by a dyke. This means that visiting the island is obviously much easier now. Marken is famous for its monumental wooden houses, fishing heretic and the traditional costumes the residents wear.

Finally, finally I got to do some video editing, I keep postponing it. The video is some drone footage (DJI Mavic Air) from last autumn when I was in the dunes. Remember this post from a while ago? Early autumn in the dunes - it was a wonderful Indian summer evening, golden hour and epic light. I got some cool shots back then.

So end of last summer, yes these photos also took some time to edit, we visited Tuscany. We stayed right in the middle of the Chianti region, thus enough to eat and to drink. This was a family vacation, so not that much photography this time. However I took the Fujifilm X100F with me as a perfect travel companion.

Here we are again, winter and it’s snowing. The whole country is in chaos, traffic jams up to 2300km in total last evening. However I can only think of one thing! Get out and shoot the next day, in search of foxes in the snow. So let’s go to the dunes, again. Nature here I come.