In September I visited the famous village of Kinderdijk. Kinderdijk is a village in the Netherlands, belonging to the municipality of Molenwaard, in the province South Holland, about 15 km east of Rotterdam. Kinderdijk is situated in a polder in the Alblasserwaard at the confluence of the Lek andNoord rivers. To drain the polder, a system of 19 windmills was built around 1740. This group of mills is the largest concentration of old windmills in the Netherlands. The windmills of Kinderdijk are one of the best-known Dutch tourist sites. They have been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1997. (from wikipedia)
Kinderdijk Windmill
Each year, for a week during September, the windmills are lit by floodlight, and the aim of my visit was to take some pictures of the windmills around dusk time, to hopefully get the sunset and then see the effect of flood lights on the windmills. I arrived around 7pm so that I could take some photos during good light, and then stayed around until after sunset. I decided to shoot with the Leica M-E and my Summicron 28mm, mounted on a tripod. In retrospect, that wasn’t the best choice of equipment, and I would have been better taking my SLR along with a zoom lens, or at least a wider range of primes, as a lot of the windmills would have worked better with tighter framing.
Kinderdijk Windmill
I only ended up with a couple of photos that I was happy with, and most of these were after using HDR Efex Pro in post processing. The results might not look completely natural, but I felt the light on the day was a bit flat, and the unprocessed images just weren’t working for me. I don’t like to overuse HDR as a technique, and I don’t like the overly fake HDRs that some photographers create, but at the end of the day, the photography should be an artistic expression, and not necessarily an accurate recording of the scene ‘as was’. One of my favourite aspects of HDR is the effect that it has on the sky – it can turn a relatively flat or boring sky into something quite dramatic by finding cloud structures that aren’t to be seen in a single correctly exposed image.
Kinderdijk Windmill
You’ll see from the images here that I didn’t end up with many of the floodlit windmills 🙂 I wasn’t that impressed and just wasn’t able to shoot anything that I liked. Maybe down to the choice of equipment, maybe just an off day. But nevertheless, it was a fun evening using the M-E on a tripod, something that I don’t do that often.
Incidentally, I use a Markins ball head with an Arca-Swiss clamp. I looked around for a suitable base plate for the Leica M-E, but was unable to find one, so instead I went for the Really Right Stuff BM9-B replacement base plate. It has the Arca-Swiss plate built into the base plate, and looks good on the M-E.
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