Denmark - Part 2 - Garden Macro Photography

What a difference 6 month makes :-) The picture above is from our usual walk around Balling - take a look here to see how all that greenness was white last winter when we did one of our danish winter bushwalks.

Nature truly puts on a show during the summer months back home in Denmark! Long sunny days and water galore keeps the plants happy and flowering, which attracts an incredible variety of insects, which again supply birds and other wildlife with a good protein source. The shortness of summer makes it feel like all that life is buzzing around at turbo speed - having to sort out all the tasks of an entire life in a matter of a few summer months.


Bird are wary back home, it is much harder getting good bird photos in DK than down here in Australia. Birds will take off early when you try to sneak in on them and deep dark thick foliage makes it nearly impossible to pick birds hiding in trees and bushes. However, lots of other stuff is happening just outside the door, so armed with my macro lens I used quite a few hours in the garden.


Bumblebees, hornets and insects with half body-length tails - Good stuff! :-) The long tailed insect is a female Pimplinae indet. and I can reveal that the "tail" is not used for stinging! Indeed it is an elongated ovipositor used by the female to lay its egg in hard to reach places. I must admit that I never really used the time to intensely study and learn to name all the small stuff that lived around me when I grew up in DK, but boy it is truly a magnificent world to look into - I finally see the idea in having a garden .. and a macro lens to look at it through ;-)


Apart from fulfilling your wildest dreams as a macro "studio" a Danish summer garden also doubles as an excellent location for your food consumption needs. Danes are very good at maximizing the time outside in the daylight during summer, it is like fueling the body with energy before the arrival of the darkness of winter. Only the transmission of (important?) sports events on the television can lure the Danish back into their dark burrows :-D

Farewell Denmark - See You Soon Again

That was it! We had to leave Denmark and all the snow behind and once again make our way down south and a bit out to the right to our lives in Sydney. Having been en-gifted with a 16GB memory card I suddenly had heaps of room to play and was embracing the new found freedom with a bit of memory hungry high dynamic range (HDR) photography. Shoot for example 5 raw photos of the same scene, at -2, -1, 0, +1 and +2 stops exposure compensation, My Nikon D300 has a bracketing function that will allow you to do this automatically (up to 9 photos at various exposure intervals), but it is easily done manually. Combining all the photos with some HDR handling software (I use Photomatix Pro) you get a picture, where the details in the dark as well as in the light have been preserved, making the scene more similar to how our eyes see - actually our eyes cheat by changing the aperture (the diameter of the pupil) when switching between bright and dark areas not much different from how you cheat when making a HDR photo :-)

Stacking 5 pictures, however, is very revealing when it comes to exposing how dirty your sensor is .. so before I get a flood of comments about the spot(s) in the photo I can just as well admit that it is about time the good old Nikon gets a scrub - most was handled with a simple image sensor vibration, but I might have to do a wet clean one of these days - if you think the HDR looks dirty, I can assure you that having acquired a macro lens is even more revealing than HDR stacking :-/

Geddal Tidal Meadow and Sønder Lem Creek

I never knew while I was living in Denmark, but apparently I have had one of the absolute best Danish birding locations in my backyard - less than 8km from home is Sønder Lem vig & Geddal strandenge. The Danish ornithological society has been so kind to produce a proper English guide to the Danish birding hotspots, which include SLV & GS. The guide can be accessed by following this link SLV & GS is fourth on the list.

This quite restricted area, only covering 1670 hectares, boasts an absolutely astonishing 227 species seen at the location, that is about half of the bird species in Denmark - all crammed into a bit of wetland close to home - Guess it will be a bit of fun if I ever make it to Denmark during the summer months! :-)

Once again the birds were super shy and unless this gets better during the summer months I will have to consider gearing up with a teleconverter and some solid support, since as you can see above and below, the bigma was pushed to the limit .. The Grey Heron (Fiskehejre) above was, according to Google Earth, 210 meters away - not optimal conditions :-D

Time in Denmark was slowly running out and we decided to give the walk around Balling a final go. I still hoped to get a better picture of the Common Snipe and there is always the possibility of something unexpected jumping out in front of us, as a final reason we would be walking in the afternoon giving a very different type of light compared to what we had been treated with during our morning walks.

We had a great trip! The white bum above was this years first proper(?) picture of a deer. During our walks we probably saw deer 5 times, but always at a far distance. This one was close and gone in 3 photos :-)

Also, I finally managed to get pictures of both Blue Tit (Blåmejse) and Great Tit (Musvit) not rare at all, but considering how I struggled during the first week, I actually started feeling that I was getting a bit of an edge on the temperamental Danish wildlife.

Great stuff! It will be fantastically exciting to see the valley again this summer, no doubt it will be different and hopefully there will be a bit more light around.

As I mentioned earlier we were walking in the afternoon and in the end of the walk the sun was hanging very low in the sky, exactly the conditions I had hoped for. Out of the valley you have to go up this sunken road with scrubby windblown trees on the western side, one of the days we had had the most fantastic light going up there - and I had forgotten the camera! Not this time though. :-)

Christmas and a Stroll Along the Beach

And suddenly Christmas hit! :-) Once again our little tag team was well prepared and ready at all battle stations. Getting ready for Christmas is actually a large part of the joy. In reality it hardly qualifies as a strenuous task, the team in combo boast an impressive amount of life experience - The two-man desert team alone manages to push the counter up towards 180 years of accumulated skills - no wonder it tastes delicious! :-)

Indeed we were so much on top of the game that we started experimenting, letting our sole foreign team member be in charge of the production of something as Danish as the pebernødder! :-) The recipe in the link is not the one we used, I will try to get the Larsen method online at some point - if not before, then Christmas 2010. One of the key steps in the process is to get the time in the oven just right - Looking at the pictures it is needless to say that this crucial final step was being monitored very carefully :-D - no reason to worry though, they came out just as delicious as usual.

We managed to pull of another home run Christmas night with a great mix of classical and slightly innovative dishes. The photo does not give the menu the credit it deserves, I blame it on the lack of a fast super wide angle zoom .. and stitching a panorama was no option, since food disappeared faster than the shutter speed of the D300. ;-)

All that food spurred a healthy hunger for a bit of exercise and what is better than a trip to the beach? The summerhouse is located at Ålbæk strand, which sports some excellent walking opportunities and as much of the Danish countryside during winter, there is not much human activity out there.

Danish birds are significantly more careful than their Australian counterparts. In combo with a good solid low hanging mist it was very difficult conditions for bird photography .. quite a few waterbirds were around, but kept beyond the reach of the Bigma.

The Mute Swans (Knopsvane) below would have been a bit of a scoop in Australia, but unfortunately it does not counts as a rarity in DK. In fact it has been chosen as the "National Bird of Denmark".

If you are sitting out there wondering what bird your country has chosen, use this link: List of National Birds.
Great walk! Unimaginably quiet! The mist and the snow kills any bit of sound in such a fantastic way.

Back in the garden in Balling all those "domesticated" birds were much easier to approach, in a snow covered landscape it does not take many days before the presence of berries in the trees makes the bird forget about the danger associated with a freezing, Bigma slinging, Australian summer acclimatized bird paparazzi Dane.

Blizzard Over Balling And Another Walk

We got a fantastic load of snow! Winters are so much better when white, it extends the day by many hours, brightening up those otherwise pitch black mornings and afternoons. Another benefit is that you have to drag your lazy Christmas-food-filled-carcass away from the top spot in front of the telly - probably loosing that very special extra comfy chair to an even lazier relative - to do your duty and clean the footpath.

The first couple of times every year it is actually quite fun and there is nothing wrong with the exercise. This year we had hired some exceptionally eager foreign labor aka little G. Who by pure spirit and determination easily compensated for her less than mediocre broom handling skills :-) She indeed enjoyed the task so much that it is still talked about how the snow, in a miraculous manner, disappered from around Casa Larsen that Christmas 2009.

Shoveling the footpath is one thing, cleaning the roads is another! As the layer of snow thickened we were actually getting slightly worried that we would have trouble making our way down to the "summerhouse" where we had our accommodation. However driving in snow is much better than driving on ice, so as long as you do not go at an excessive speed you have quite good grip in newly fallen snow.

We easily maneuvered the Volvo and ourselves through the most fantastically cozy winter landscape anybody can imagine :-)

Apart from battling snow in various ways, we managed to do good solid walk nearly every day. As stated in the earlier post there is wildlife around, however, it is not always straight forward to "capture" it. The dobbeltbekkasin (Common Snipe) was particularly difficult - during the two weeks I was home I saw maybe 20, but the best picture I got is the one below :-/ Those Danish birds are smart ones! :-)

A less secretive bird roaming the Danish landscape during winter is the Common Buzzard (Musvåge). Driving around you will see them sitting next to the roads at elevated posts scouting for anything mouse-sized and edible, they will sit there for hours .. or until you step out of the car and start fiddling with the camera gear and they are gone.

Lots of snow is, however, great news for mouse-sized edible creatures, since the buzzard along with most other predators have a hard time hunting creatures hidden by 25cm of snow - 2010 will be a big mouse year :-)

Danish Winter "Bushwalk"

One of the things you learn as a Dane is to seize the day - carpe diem - at least during winter! The day is so short that you just have to get out there and do stuff while the sun is visible or you will hit a winter depression as dark as a ploughed field around Balling - we got some super rich dark soil up there! :-)

Jet-lagged or not, quitting was no option and we hit the fields for a brisk "bushwalk" around Balling - the brisk part was mostly just to keep warm ;-)

Walking around down here in Australia, I cannot help falling into the trap of remembering Denmark as a place without nature. That is absolutely rubbish, of course we have! However we have only tiny tiny bits of nature that have been allowed to develop freely since the last ice age (ice ages have the habit of resetting the countryside in a quite dramatic way - a bit like wiping a blackboard clean). All the human manipulated nature is not all bad though, heaps of wildlife lurking around; deer, hare, fox and lots of birds - even during winter.

Ah well, enough of all this nature talk lets see some windmills I can imagine you asking(?) Jep, jep - no worries any landscape photographer in Denmark (at least in the dark end of Jutland) will either have to be a contortionist or skilled in the art of Photoshop to avoid catching a few mills per picture .. that is obviously not right .. if you are standing in a valley :-)

It was a fantastic day for walking. We started out with the mist lying so thick that we should have brought machetes to cut through, as we moved along on our two hour hike, it cleared up so well that conditions were nearly rivaling a blue-blue Australian desert sky.


Great guns, super duper walk and as we arrived at the house I managed to take advantage of the light by taking some close-ups in the garden. A bit of snow brightens up everything including pictures and plants are excellent stand ins as models they do not complain and will stand still if conditions are right :-)

While I was running around I noticed that I started getting streaks in the photos from snow flakes falling down, strange we had just managed to get a blue sky and everyone knows that snow never stays around Denmark for long .. and then it started to snow for real!! to be continued