Posts in Category: Photography

Amsterdam at Night / Delft

On August 23, 2026 0 Comments - Photography, Travel

***please try to look at these photos on a bigger screen. Your phone will crush all the details***

This is the second post in a five part series. To start at the beginning CLICK HERE.

Prinsengracht Concert in Amsterdam

Once a year, the largest free classical music concert in the Netherlands happens on a canal on the Prinsengracht. A big orchestra is set up on a floating barge in the canal where the public can gather around for a night time serenade. The rich and influential Amsterdammers get front row seats on the water and anyone else who wants to see it has to camp out all afternoon to secure a good spot. There were so many people by the time we got there that we couldn’t get close enough to see anything at all, but at least we could hear it.

Crowds of people fill the narrow streets and bridges surrounding the orchestra barge. Packed like herring!
People come out in boats to listen too. I messed up my camera settings so many of my pictures were blurry but I thought this one looked like an oil painting so I included it here. If you zoom in on the boats or the people you will see what I mean.
Night time along the canals.
Amsterdam cat way up in a window watching all the people below. I don’t see all that many cats outside in the city but lots of window kitties.
Almost all of the boaters had a table of wine, cheese and other snacks on board to enjoy with the music. I like the way the people on the bench are all watching this floating picnic pass by.
Outdoor restaurant patio right on the edge of a canal.
Patio glow. There is a lot going on in this picture if you look around. Good action and good faces too.
Quiet canals at night lit by old lamp posts and a near-full moon.

Anne Frank House

The slightly taller, lit up building with the blacked-out windows is the Anne Frank house. She and her family hid in a secret annex behind the top 2 floors for two years without ever going outside. Their hiding place is still there, just as it was when they were discovered by the Gestapo and eventually deported to Auschwitz. The furniture was removed by the Nazis after their arrest but the rooms, kitchen fixtures, the hinged bookcase hiding the annex entrance, the staircases, the attic, the toilet and Anne’s pictures which she pasted to her bedroom walls are still there. The house is now a museum open to the public where you can see all of this plus Anne’s original hand written diaries and notebooks as well as any personal effects that were left behind. I visited the museum early one morning to see all of this. It was one of the most moving experiences I have ever had. It is not really possible to describe it here so I won’t say any more. Read the book and visit in person and you will know.
A glow of blue light above the orchestra in the distance. The tall tower belongs to Westerkerk church. This is the church Anne Frank writes about in her famous diary. She could see the clock face from the attic of their hiding place and hear the church bell ring every 15 minutes which, she wrote, was a source of great comfort. The church sounds gave her some small connection to the outside world during her two years in hiding.

Day Trip to Delft

Delft is the centre of production for the famous Dutch blue on white Royal Delft Pottery. It is beautiful small town. Canals, bridges and bicycles…just like Amsterdam but on a much smaller scale. It has a slower feel to it too. Only 1 hour from Amsterdam by train, it is a nice place to spend a relaxing afternoon.

Delft City Hall is a massive building. See all the little bikes at the bottom for scale.
A pretty scene on the cobblestone sidewalk.
Delft has it’s own system of bridges and canals similar to Amsterdam but smaller and less busy.
Handsome buildings. I am now kicking myself for not buying some small piece of pottery while I was here. Next time!

Goodbye Netherlands… hope to see you again someday.

To see the next post in this series CLICK HERE.

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Amsterdam

On August 21, 2026 2 Comments - Photography, Travel

***please try to look at these photos on a bigger screen. Your phone will crush all the details***

This is the first post in a five part series. There is a link at the bottom to continue on to the next posts in chronological order.

Bicycle Kingdom

The first thing you learn as a tourist in Amsterdam is to watch out for bicycles. Bicycles have first right of way followed by public transportation then pedestrians and lastly, cars. There is long-established bike infrastructure here with separate bike roads running along every street, bridge and park. There are bikes everywhere. Everyone rides. And FAST! So, if you walk across a bike road without having a good look both ways, you might cause an accident. In the two days I have been here, I have seen near accidents a few times already. Usually it is a pedestrian unknowingly drifting into a bike lane, getting yelled at if they are lucky or run over if not. With locals, it is understood that bikes go first and they seem to have a second sense about how to get around through all the pedal traffic.

Canals and Bridges

Amsterdam has around 165 canals with a total length of around 75km. And, there are over 1500 bridges crossing the canal systems.

Typical tall, narrow house. Canals, bikes and bridges.
Houseboats along the banks of a canal. Many are permanent homes with electricity and sewage lines direct to shore.
Bikes, boats, bridges…
All the bridges have names. This is”Staalmeesterbrug”.
Storm clouds building over the river.

Central Amsterdam Buildings

Although all of the buildings have unique details and no two look exactly alike, they all share a few similarities. Most are narrow and tall with big windows and steep staircases. There are no skyscrapers here. The tallest of the houses is probably four stories plus a small attic.

Shutters are used to keep the weather out and, in the past, to keep goods safe. Most of these old buildings were once warehouses for goods (like spices) during the golden years of the Dutch East India Company. Because of flooding, the expensive product was kept on the top floors while the bottom floors were for offices and storefronts. A local we met told us that, at one time, pepper was worth more than gold and that the Dutch still have a saying “pepper expensive” for anything that commands a very high price.
Central Amsterdam is now a Unesco Heritage Site. The buildings cannot be altered in any way unless approved and absolutely necessary. Also, it is law that they must be kept in good condition. Most of the houses are beautifully maintained with pretty details and tiny gardens wherever there is space.
Some of the houses across this canal are crooked. You can see this in a few spots where they were originally built on swampy land and are now starting to lean over.
More crooked houses in the distance. There are tour boats running all day long along the canal system. We took one and it was a lot of fun. I learned so much about the city. The boat captain’s name was Frodo..no kidding.
People also have private boats docked all along the edges of every canal.
Big windows and beautiful details.
Typical street view. All the houses are different but also very much the same. At the top of every house, there is a protruding beam with a hook on it. Because the staircases are so steep and narrow it is next to impossible to move large items by that route. Instead, the Dutch devised a pulley system where things are hoisted up using the hook and brought in and out through the huge windows. This was used in the past to move goods in and out of the warehouses and today, people who are moving in to apartments use the same system to get furniture to the upper floors.

Old and New

With it’s narrow streets and bridges, tight corners and swarms of bicycles, there is no room for large cars. Instead there are lots of interesting tiny vehicles (many electric) that you do not typically see in North America.

This is a tiny electric Fiat. It is so small that you can park it sideways instead of parallel to the curb. It is so symmetrical that it is hard to tell the front from the back from a distance.
VW Bug….a tiny car from last century.

Travelling Partners:

I am lucky to be travelling around the city with my good friend and his parents (who have no issues with walking non-stop 20km/day) …as long as there is a coffee and snack break here and there : )

Tour Guide
Family meeting.
Snack break. This is the best thing I have eaten here: Netherlands style cured herring. It is not pickled like the more common herring you may have eaten. This herring is raw but…not exactly: it has the texture of a nice fatty sashimi fish.

I asked one of the fish merchants how it is made. The herring season lasts for only a month in late spring/early summer. The fish are gutted and put whole into buckets of salt water and then frozen to -40 Celsius. Before serving, they are thawed extremely slowly and then hand filleted one at a time. Here they are served with raw onion and pickle. It is a unique and delicious fish preparation. I would recommend it to anyone visiting here.

Rain, Sun, Rain

The weather here changes fast. It can be roasting and sunny for 10 minutes and then it clouds over and pours rain for 10 minutes and then back to blue skies just as fast.

This might be my favourite picture of this set. Milosz’s mom is looking up at a building from across the street while Milosz is inside buying stroopwafels with his dad. We ate them fresh and hot while standing under an awning in the pouring rain.
Rainy Amsterdam.

Our Apartment

Some nice Polish tourists walking alongside the building where we are staying. These buildings, although more modern, still have steep narrow staircases and lots of huge windows. There is never any shortage of sunshine or fresh air inside the apartments.
The house we are staying in has big bright windows on all sides. The apartment has so many nice details but, for some reason, I like this stairway the best. Like all other Amsterdam houses, this one is tall and narrow. You have to climb a total of 57 steps to get from the entrance to the bedrooms on the top floor!
Egyptian Geese beside the canal near our apartment. Not a European native, this bird was commonly depicted in ancient Egyptian art. It was first introduced to the Netherlands in 1967 and you can see them around all the canals and rivers of Amsterdam.

Public Transportation

Subways, trains, trams and busses run between every point you can imagine. Amsterdam is a very easy city to explore on foot or by train.

Subway headed to Centraal Station. Trains are quiet and clean.
There are a few trains that get tagged and they look pretty cool with some extra splashes of colour.

First Impressions of Amsterdam

Amsterdam is a highly functional city. There are people EVERYWHERE : pedestrians, cyclists and drivers but, even though there are almost no traffic lights, it all seems to work. The Dutch like to hustle along and they are good at it. Cyclists, pedestrians, cars, and trams all weave in and around each other through intersections at top speed and the natives understand and respect the system. As a visitor, it is all a little dizzying but also awesome to watch during the rush hour.

Even though it is so busy, it is relatively quiet compared to other big cities I have visited. There are very few private cars in the city centre with bicycles outnumbering cars by a huge margin. The air is noticeably fresh and clean. Many cars are electric and the government has mandated that all boats using the canal system must have electric engines within the next 2 years. Blasting music out of your store or boat is against the law. Police boats on the canal make sure that everyone complies with the rules and noise levels stay in check.

The overall effect is that central Amsterdam is a city where people can enjoy being outdoors together with almost zero noise or air pollution. I can spend hours walking through crowds on busy streets in the centre of the city and still come home feeling relaxed and refreshed.

Cyclists riding along the canal wall in the afternoon sun. This is a city built around people (and bicycles) instead of cars and you can definitely feel the difference.

More Amsterdam to come….

To see the next post in this series CLICK HERE.

If you have any comments, questions or suggestions please leave them below. I always look forward to hearing from you.

If you enjoy the content and would like to contribute towards website maintenance and development, you can make a donation here.

Natural Spotlighting

On July 28, 2026 2 Comments - Photography

***your phone will crush all the details in these photos. It is better to view this on a bigger screen***

Facing East

Every morning I make coffee and then sit at an old table to study or write. My cat hops up, curls into a ball, and sleeps beside me while I work and listen to chill music. This is my favourite time of day. At the opposite end of the room there are a few tall and narrow windows that let in the bright morning sun. This warm light filters in through the trees, slowly circles the room, and then gradually disappears. This scene changes a little bit every day and every season brings a new variation. I never get tired of looking at it. In the picture below, you can see what I see on a summer morning…

Natural Spotlighting

I began to notice moments when a ray of morning sun would pass through gaps between leaves and illuminate some small part of the room as if to say: “look at this!”. Whatever it touched would glow in this focused light. It reminded me of a spotlight on a dark stage, but made of sunlight. It was kind of a natural spotlight. I wondered if there was some way to capture this in a photograph. I was pretty sure that it wouldn’t be easy.

Technical Difficulties

When I set out to make these photos, I decided that I wouldn’t move things into a spot of light. The scenes would just have to happen on their own and it was my job to notice them and to try to capture them with my camera.

One problem was that the weather had to provide hard contrast between areas of light and shade. All of the photos below had to be taken from a shady area pierced by a strong beam of bright sunlight. Less than a big-blue-sky sunny day wouldn’t work for any of these pictures.

The bigger problem was getting my camera to see what I was seeing in my imagination. It took hundreds of photos and nearly two months to figure it out. The main subject is intensely lit, but because the photos are shot on very bright days, even the shade is full of light, So, if I exposed the spotlit subject accurately, the background would still creep into the photo.

Most of the problem was solved when I experimented with severely underexposing all of the shots (like 2 to 3 stops of underexposure!). This caused the shadows to fade to black and, as a bonus, added rich colour saturation to the main subject. This underexposure usually worked to produce the photos that I was imagining.

The Photographs

One of the first things I noticed lighting up in the morning sun was this classical guitar head stock.
This piece of Korean baekja pottery earns it’s popular name “moon jar” in this shot.
Zizkov is the neighbourhood in Praha where my family is originally from. This is an old cap or lapel pin probably worn by a streetcar operator.
Another angle on the moon jar. This simple shape changes so much in different light.
This is the corner of a massive solid red pine table (you can see it in the first photo above). The little pin holes are from cat claws poking through the tung oil finish. The wood is incredibly dense and heavy. I think it would take 100 cats 100 years to do any permanent damage. The intense sunlight brings out great texture here.
Moody photo of a dark book.
This is taken in another room that has a single north facing window. In the summer, a tiny sliver of sunlight creeps in for a short time early in the morning. This is a black and white press photo from the film Fallen Angels.
Chinese Money Plant in clay pot. The bright sun brings out the texture in the clay.
Money Plant taken from the underside of the leaves.
Unknown plant at the edge of a forest. A single sunbeam caught the top of it.
From a garden at the University of Toronto.
Ginko tree at U of T.
Lily on a lawn in Rosedale. The garden was in shade with only this flower reaching the sun.
In the forest understory. Not sure what the name of this plant is…
Red berries at the forest edge. Maybe currants?
Green seed heads. These were very small.
These tiny flowers were on long wiry stems. Because it was so windy, I had to hold the stem to keep the flowers from swaying in and out of the frame. I didn’t really want my hand in the picture but after seeing it, I like the little shadow on my finger.
Grape vine reaching for the sun.

What John Irving said…

I once read an interview with the novelist John Irving where he said that his approach to writing is to start with the ending and then figure out how to get there. That’s where the hard work is. My approach to some photography projects is similar. I start with a specific mental image of a finished photograph and then figure out how to work with natural light and the camera to get there. This is never easy but I usually end of with something unique, something I haven’t seen before. If you are interested in seeing a couple of older photo projects that came about in the same spirit as this one, have a look here and here.

The images above are simple but making them was a challenge and I am happy with the way they turned out. I don’t do any photo editing other than some slight cropping sometimes. I try to get the photos that I want directly out of the camera. It’s not that i think that there is anything wrong with post-processing. It is just a different kind of photography and I don’t enjoy doing it.

I hope you liked these photos. If you have any questions or comments or if you know the names of any of the plants up above, please feel free to leave a message in the space below. I always look forward to hearing from you.

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