Baltic Holidays - Day 12 - Amsterdam

Day 12.
The final Day of our Baltic Cruise and holiday and we are to spend it in Amsterdam.

Needless to say Rembrandt and Van Gogh were on the menu.

Straight off we hunted for the Rijksmuseum(wiki-link) knowing that it was an infamously popular destination. Upon arrival though it was clear the queue just to get a ticket to go in was going to take at least half an hour and they were already putting up signs saying that tickets were only available for later in the afternoon. Bearing in mind we'd have to be back on board the ship that afternoon it seemed unlikely that we were going to get in at all, cut our losses and went to get lunch at the hard rock cafe that was about a block away.

After that was when we stumbled on a canal cruise ride that included a package that promised access to the Rijksmuseum afterwards with no time restraints or queuing at all, so we snapped it up.
The following batch of shots are from the canal ride.

Due to the number of images please see the rest of this post beyond the break...

Photograph of the Week #059

"When not scribbling away in a sketch book or dabbling on a Wacom tablet i'm invariably fiddling around with exposure settings on my Nikon D90 trying to capture moments in aesthetically pleasing ways.

So here we have "Photograph of the week" a (mostly) weekly feature showcasing my favourite photo of the week."

I'm running way to far behind on Photograph of the week this year. It's quite disapointing but, this week I've got something new.
This one is a new experiment that i'm going to play around with some more.
I was on my way home from a friends house late at night when I felt the need to try and shoot some stars over a river/flood-land. It's not a perfect shot of the location and the passing cars cause a massive over-exposure in the middle but the main experiment is above in the sky.

This is my first attempt at purposeful star-trails. The intention was not to get static sharp stars but clear trails that highlight the movement going on. I'm happy with this first experiment though I'll likely retry the location from a different spot next time.

Down by the river...

This afternoon I went for a quick trip down to the river Stour near where I live. One side of the river is a lot more accessable than the other so I went to the quieter side, it's late winter at the moment so whilst the sun wasn't setting, as such, it was pretty low in the sky, dragging out shadows and giving some nice orangey tones to the scenery depending on whether a cloud slipped in the way or not.

It wasn't a terribly warm day and it was a little windy. All the plants were mostly dead and withered but the sky was fairly dramatic, the river was partly flooded and there was great textures, shapes and colours to try and photograph. I also wanted to make sure i captured a bit of winter before spring starts and I try my hand at getting blossom and all those springtime things which I usually don't get round to.