1740

The Netherlands is famous for its windmills. Today there are still more than 1.000 mills. Nowhere in the world you will find as many windmills as near Kinderdijk. Around 1740 no less than 19 sturdy mills were built here. The mills drain the excess water from the Alblasserwaard polders - which are situated below sea-level - after which the water is sluiced into the river Lek.

In 1997 the mills of Kinderdijk were put on the World Heritage List of UNESCO.

I have been to this location several times as it is just so very photogenic. Last week the weather forecast was good, so I decided to drive there and give it a shot. Well, a lot of shots actually, as I visited the place two sunsets and one morning in a row.

I already have quite a few shots of these mills, so this time I was determined to try something different. The area is located next to a large nature reserve with lots of birds, amongst which are geese. I wanted to get a shot with not only the mills, but also some flying geese in it. But although there were plenty of geese flying around, there was a small technical challenge. In order to get maximum depth of field and low noise, I had set the camera to f/16 at iso 100. That gave me a shutter speed of 3 seconds, which of course is much too slow to freeze a flock of geese. I could have upped the iso a bit, but that would introduce noise, especially in the dark areas. And using a larger aperture would decrease depth of field and cause the mills in the background to be not as sharp as I'd want them to be. I therefore decided to shoot two exposures; one for the mills and one for the geese. First, I took the shot of the mills. When I saw the geese coming in the distance, I set the iso slightly higher and opened up the aperture to f/5.6 which would give enough depth of field for just the geese at this focal length. I set the shutter to continuous and kept shooting the moment they entered the frame. Later, I just blended the two exposures in PS.

D2X, AF-S 28-70/2.8, GND grad, tripod, remote release