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

Back in Denmark, Kumquat and A New Lens :-)

I Traveled back to Denmark for Christmas and New Year as usual. The trip is a bit of a story in itself, landed after 23 hours of flying in Heathrow. Nearly got caught there because of the snow, but after sitting in the plane 1h30m they finally managed to find a truck that could pull the Hamburg flight away from the gate and we where off .. without my suitcase! The bus I had expected to take from Hamburg airport to Denmark left as I was giving the British Airways staff my Christmas address.

Took a train to Hamburg city center and found the Hauptbahnhof. Got a ticket and made it to Århus at exactly the same time as the bus I had hoped to catch was scheduled to arrive, despite the train leaving Hamburg 1h30m later! Well done DB (Deutsche Bahn). I teamed up with a nearly 2 hours late Gemma arriving from København (Copenhagen) and another 2 hours later we were in Balling. Exciting stuff - suitcase ended up being 4 days late, but what does that all matter when you are "home" for Christmas and the new lens was in Gemma's hand luggage :-)

The lens is a Sigma 150mm f/2.8 APO Macro DG HSM and is a part of the Sigma EX family of lenses. I was very much in doubt which type of lens I should go for after my initial purchase; wide or macro? There is no doubt that my setup needs something wide, I have nothing below 50mm and I shoot a camera with a crop sensor. However, my interest is not landscape and I did not need to read much about macro photography before I was sold :-)

After deciding on macro it took next to no time deciding on the 150mm f/2.8 Sigma, it is simply one of the best macro lenses out there. Photozone likes it a lot and apart from being fantastic as a macro lens it gives me the possibility of giving the Bigma a rest when birding in a dark Queensland rainforest without compromising too much on reach .. yes, I know there are better lenses for that, but they cost lots of $$$ :-)

Reality is that this macro stuff is seriously difficult. The only real macro shot in this blog post is the close-up of the Phalaenopsis. To get that dept of field (DOF) I exposed for 5s at f/16 ISO 200, the picture is straight from camera and it has not been cropped!

Considering that Danish winter days are approximately 2/3 pitch black I decided to use more time playing around with the lens wide open. I managed to capture a quite unique and delicious combo of Lise's home-bake with blue cheese and kumquat marmalade; Danish brekkie with an Australian twist .. I had forgotten the Vegemite, how lucky was that ;-)

Botany Bay - Boat Harbour - All Alone :-)

I had some seriously busy months up towards Christmas - Do not misunderstand me, it was great busyness. Little G. moved back in, dad and TK visited and we managed to squeeze in some seriously super duper trips. Good stuff, but it there is an end to everything and suddenly I was once again all alone .. different, but not all bad :-)

Boat Harbour is not necessarily the place you bring people visiting from overseas, but if you are into a bit of wader action it is an excellent spot to go this time of year. The first picture is nearly a classic by now - I always take a "close up" of the city when standing at Quibray Bay viewing platform .. Centerpoint aka Sydney Tower is according to Google Earth 18km away from the platform :-)

Waders are fantastically camouflaged, looking at the pictures this might seem hard to believe, but trust me on this one, you can easily walk around on the rock seeing absolutely nothing, but cormorants, terns and seagulls - nothing else, that is until you sit down still and start focusing on the small pools of trapped water right at the edge of the rocks and suddenly there is life all over the place.


The bird above and also in the second picture had me fired up for a while, I was nearly sure that I had not seen it before. After a look in the books, however, I am afraid that it could be a non-breeding Pacific Golden Plover - the change their "outfit" quite dramatically when breeding. In combo with the camouflage story above it all give sense, they stay hidden most of the year, but have to break cover during breeding season to attract the opposite sex.


Walking back towards the car I saw a glimpse of something I have never seen around Sydney before; dolphins! I have seen them in Queensland and Western Australia, but never home here in Sydney. I ran up the sand dune only to be immensely disappointed instead of dolphins there was a group of about 5 surfers.

Standing there feeling a bit stupid having mistaken a surfer for a dolphin, the surfers (and yours truly to a minor extent) got themselves a bit of a surprise. A group of about 5 dolphins leapt out of the water few meters from the surfers and continued swimming close to the surface in between the people in the water.

All good, maybe no new birds but when the dolphins start jumping around it does not really matter so much :-) By the way, if any wader experts are reading along can you confirm if my mystery bird is indeed the PGP? If you really want to make my day, then tell me that it is the Eurasian Golden Plover ;-)

Capertee Valley with TK

Capertee Valley never disappoints! Driving in we were greeted with a fantastic display of the sun slowly setting in the east lighting up the rocky mountains - great view! .. and a few parrots feeding on the gravel road always impress a couple of Danish boys :-)

Another Australian summer specialty is bush fires. As we approached the campsite in Glen Davis, we witnessed the efforts being undertaken to battle the fires. A helicopter fueling site had been set up on the fields just outside of Glen Davis and the river had been dug out to shorten the time needed to load water.

Setting up camp was quickly done and the good old well proven combo of gnocchi and red wine was (as always) very effective against tired legs and insomnia :-)

Early mornings in the bush are absolutely fantastic, so when you manage to get your carcass out of the tent, it is all firing left right and center. The vulture looking bird below is in fact a Noisy Friarbird.

Having Danish visitors along it was quite a relief to see a kangaroo alive, we had seen a sadly high number of dead ones lying along the roads east side of the Blue Mountains.

We also managed to acquaint our selves with some less feathery, but still flying Australian wildlife - flies! Considering that we still had quite a few hundred kilometers to proper outback I guess we were both impressed by the swarm we managed to attract ;-)

On the way home we made a couple of strategic stops at various creek crossings .. unfortunately there was no sign of the Regent Honeyeater, but we saw some impressive bridges :-)