HDR Photography
Travelers of all kinds pause for a moment in Amsterdam, and this long-distance bicyclist (see his touring rig hiding at the left side of the image) is no different. I like this moment apart, with a lone figure in the foreground but a massive crowd on the bridge and boat in the background.
Snow hit Connecticut last night, but for today I’m looking back on street photography from a surprisingly cool summer day in Amsterdam.
The call of a perfect summer afternoon on a bike crossing Amsterdam—dodging crowds, slipping from old building to new building, under a blanket of white clouds and green trees—sounds utopian.
The retro-futurist art of Simon Stålenhag places intimate, perhaps even old-fashioned scenes in the foreground of images with strange, alien machines in the distance. A lone pair of nighttime snackers waiting at a slab-sided friterie trailer in the environs of the authentically 1950s Atomium represented such a real-world manifestation of the phenomenon that I had to stop and capture the scene.
No idea how this standard Amsterdam bicycle came to rest in the middle of a canal bridge, but the combination of transportation modes speaks to the Dutch experience pretty effectively.
Does anything say “international intrigue” like a fancy hotel in a European capital?
Cycling on the streets of Amsterdam already strikes me as an act of bravery, but doing so with framed art (presumably with glass on the opposite side) is more optimistic.
Rules make for symmetry-breaking behavior. Bicycles traveling above 30 kph in the Netherlands require the rider to have a helmet. This means that bikes are either clearly much slower or, once they’re fast enough to demand a helmet, a lot faster.
Amid the historic architecture, the riot of midsummer greenery, and the chaos of boats on the canals of Amsterdam, I appreciated the stillness and calm of the man relaxing in the window.
I was semi-impressed to see the pigeons waiting patiently far away from this lunch-enjoyer in Amsterdam, but then I saw the green writing as his feet. While I’m sure that simple graffiti or utility markings are the true meaning of the lines, I like to imagine instead that they represent some kind of arcane invocation that protects his sandwich from avian interference.
This winning moment from CSI Ommen’s Saturday-night puissance (jumping an increasingly tall wall of hollow blocks) is impressive to me for two reasons. The most obvious is the incredible height this horse is successfully clearing. Just as amazing to this American is the huge turnout of spectators present in both the foreground and background—far beyond what is seen at most US events.
Utopian mornings begin with a friendly boat trip into town.
Windmill, bicycle paths, boats… This is an extremely Dutch picture.
The dramatic slashes of clouds and scattered sunlight behind the control tower of Schiphol Airport make a dramatic cap above the mundane concrete and steel.
The looks of excitement and joy on the faces of visitors to the Living Desert as they feed lettuce to the giraffes is pretty infectious.
Decaseconds 