For most tourists the Netherlands are known for their mills, wooden shoes and off course tulips. In April and May vast amounts of tulip fields start to blossom. As there are thousands of species growing, these fields have all kinds of beautiful colours. The most well known fields lie alongside the dunes in Zuid-Holland and the West-Friese polders.

This photograph is taken in a tulip field near the town of Purmerend. The tulips are nicely aligned and the fields have small aisles for seasonal workers to be able to cut the tulips.

For this photograph I have made some modifications with Photoshop. The day I took this photo the sky was heavily clouded and therefore I shot with ISO at 800 and the widest aperture at f/4.  I shot the photo with the Canon EF 17-40mm L f/4 USM wide angle lens at a focal length of 17mm.

I used photoshop to copy a more cheerful sky into the photo. After that I used Lightroom to adjust a little in the tone curve, brightness, contrast, clarity and saturation. Usually I’m not using photoshop to alter photographs this much, but this was a nice experiment and the result gives a better feeling of Spring.

I went to London for two days meeting some fund managers. I’d like to make regular visits to the City as part of Optimix’ manager selection process. The results of these visits were sufficient, as I found some fund managers which are eligible to add to our client portfolio’s and I came home with some useful insights.

Between the meetings I fortunately had some time to enjoy the city. For that I had brought my camera equiped with the Canon EF 17-40mm L f/4 USM wide angle lens. This combination fitted easily in my single bag hand luggage. The weather on the two days was lovely and I’m happy with some of the photographs I was able to shoot. The first photograph is typical for London, it’s cab. I tried to make a more abstract photo, using the technique of zooming during the lenght of exposure while panning the movement of the cab. I like the result.