Fabulous tulip flight above Bollenstreek, lost in Dutch spring colours 2015

 

Its difficult to (even try to) describe the magnificent flower-glory one could see this year end of April while flying over the Bollenstreek. Luckily for us, tulips and hyacinths were decorating the fields at the same time  in all possible colours. Add a clear blue sky, nice sunshine and a friendly pilot and you have a great spring experience for years to remember. Enjoy the colour flower-power!!!

Dutch tulips (and flowers) fields 2015...

This year, as of mid April the Dutch flower fields around Haarlem,Noordwijkerhout and Sassenheim became an amazingly colourful mosaic again! Happily for us, photographers, most of the bulb flowers (daffodils, hyacinths and all sorts of tulips) decided to come out and bloom at the same time. From white to dark purple, from light lavender through yellow and orange till flashy red and romantic blue, the Bollenstreek-area and parts of Flevoland are currently magical places to visit! Have a look for yourself...A lot of my visitors have difficulties to believe that most of the flowers are simply cut as the reason why they are planted is to get the bulb, not to sell the flower themselves.Once you are in the flower field the question comes: how to take the best pictures. Some love to take the lines, otherwise go for close-up/ carpets of colours. This year I tried more exotic positions, such as going down on the ground for a full portrait of flower+blue sky and for some macro fun with my toy (35mm, f 2.8)...

Yangon: golden beauty and colonial architecture in dust and heat

Welcome to Yangon...a city with over 5-million inhabitants, ex-capital of Myanmar (from 2006) and the place with most colonial buildings in the Asian region, as per Wikipedia! Yangon (known also previously as Rangon) is often referred to as an extremely busy, overly loud, full with (too) many run-down buildings and ugly electricity cable balls (next to shiny golden pagodas) at every third buildings corner! And sometimes the city is simply too hot, humid and sticky (and all this of course at the same time).

Charming Terschelling: 5 out of 5 Dutch islands visited

The third Dutch island of the five Frisian islands was a charming, sunny and pretty windy encounter end of this September... The island surprised us with fantastic seafood-restaurants, creative&cozy bars, big forest of pine trees (planted over 100 years ago), high sand dunes. By bike one can do best sightseeing as on all of the other 4 islands.

Nothing unusual for Holland were the long and huge white sand beaches. In the harbour of the West-Terschelling beautiful shimps-fishing-boats are on display, crabs are running around and tons of colourful buoys shine their strong colourd...My favorites however stay Vlieland and Schiermonnikoog, the two car-free islands (nr 2 and 5) :-)

Flower-Power: Bloemencorso 2014, colours, sun and wind!

This year the famous flower parade was a bit later than usual, on the first weekend of May. As often before we went to Noordwijkerhout on Friday eve and enjoyed the sea of flowers, colours+perfumes! Dive in, can you smell them ? :-)