Oisterwijkse Bossen en Vennen - Part 1
In mid-January Ann and I decided to take our first 3-day road trip of 2024. Nothing spectacular, nothing long, just a short road trip to sort ourselves out. The type of thing you need to do a few times to figure out how things work (well, more find out what doesn’t work) before you’re on a big trip and it counts. We’re finally in a position to start the long-trip planning, so you have to have to have that first run at figuring out the details of daily life. Both photographically and for the rig. And we needed it, because there is a lot of polishing up to do before we feel like we’re ready for a long adventure.
It being the middle of winter shouldn’t have surprised anyone that it was cold. Strangely though, we’d had a cold blast the week before the trip. But all that meant was we were going to find out how good our vehicle was at heating (superb!), The drawback was that we decided we were not going to fill our water tanks up, and basically carried some water in large containers with us.
Ann had found a nice natural area near the town of Oisterwijk a little over an hour south-west of us. It’s basically a series of small lakes just south of the town with a series of trails that run between and around them. It looked like a location that would give us a bit of woodland photography and a bit of lakeside photography. As you’ll see though, it seems that it’s consistently a bit colder there than in Didam, and the lakes there were frozen solid, which is ok I guess, but was a big surprise for us. There were a few open camping areas in the vicinity (most were closed), so we were largely set. We had a couple of places to check out for spending a couple of nights, as well as a couple of areas we could park for our photography wanderings. What more do you need?
It took us longer to pack than expected on Friday morning (which should surprise no one given this was our first outing in a long while), so we arrived in Oisterwijk a bit later than we’d expected (and after not going down an impossibly narrow road that our GPS assured us was the way to go, and winding up doing a nice tour through various neighborhoods of Oisterwijk which seems to have no roads that run all the way through town). We decided that getting our place to stay was a priority, which was easily accomplished because campgrounds tend to be . . . lightly occupied during winter. After that, we set off to photograph one of the lakes we drove by on our way to the campground.
As I noted above, everything was frozen. And since it was getting late in the day (as far as the sun was concerned), we had some very nice light to work with.
Hopping into a new place, knowing you have not too long before the sun sets isn’t the most relaxing of starts to a photography trip, but at least the sun gave us options.
And as I mentioned above, we were quite pleasantly surprised to find the lakes frozen, which offered us a quite different view from what we were expecting.
Sunset quickly came and we headed over to a dinner place Google Maps said should be pretty good. Google was wrong . . . dinner was excellent. I had a farmer’s stew that was delicious!
The clouds rolled in overnight, so we had no need to rush out for early morning light. Still, we drove to our parking location for the day while it was still dark, largely because we didn’t know the parking situation there and we are still getting used to parking with the rig (we still do not have a name for the bimobil). I’m glad we did because we found the perfect parking space, long enough for the rig and out of the way of incoming traffic.
We set out on our hike, following a combination of a small map I’d printed out and the All Trails app on my phone.
The landscape presented itself very differently that morning as one might expect with heavily overcast skies. Since this was a practice run I guess we really didn’t mind very much (our photographic expectations were very low for the trip), but a bit better light would have been nicer. Still, I managed the best I could to make interesting images.
Sometimes a landscape is much more beautiful than it will photograph.
Fortunately, while it was cold, it wasn’t terribly freezing due to lack of wind, so we didn’t mind wandering around a bit to search for images. And given my recent woodland images, I was looking into the woods as often as I was into the lakes for images. At one point I found an interesting tree branch with snow on it about 50 yards off the trail, so naturally I tromped over to it.
We had planned to circle one lake, but about half-way around we hit a massive flooded area with no bridge and ice that kindly gave clear cracking sounds as a warning to not try to walk over it. So we reversed direction to explore the other side of the lake.
We were quite pleased with the variety of trees and, to be honest, while not easy to work with, the subjects did give us something to photograph.
And naturally, our lack of practice came into play as we reviewed our photographs afterwards and noticed little things we should have done differently.
We were quite surprised at the number of people that came out on a cold Saturday morning. So as the morning progressed, we ran into more and more people as we photographed.
It seemed that every time the clouds looked like they were about to break, they would thicken back up. We resigned ourselves to working with flat light.
At one point, a woman stopped by to talk to us, ask us about what we like to photograph and recommended a park not too far north of Oisterwijk. I wrote the name of the place down and commented we might stop by on our way home - it wasn’t too far out of the way.
Ann and I continued photographing for a bit until we decided we were really hungry and wanted to bit of a break. Within the park there are several cafes and we stopped by one in the center of the park not far from where we’d been photographing. It wasn’t quite 11, but the lunch menu was up and I lucked out again. The meatball was excellent! And yes, that is singular. The Dutch don’t have meatballs as in Swedish meatballs, they serve a single meatball about the size of a baseball, usually with a bit of juice/gravy on top. Quite hearty and desired on a cold January day.
After our lunch (and warm up of coffee) we headed out for another hike, seeking more photographic opportunities.
It wasn’t long before we came across this stunning tree just off the hiking trail. You could see it from a distance, but an interesting photograph was impossible because of overhanging branches and other obstacles. The only thing was to get close to the tree and do the best one could.
This was the tree where a couple of women asked me what I was photographing and why. After explaining to them what compelled me to pull out the camera, and showing them the framing of the image, they talked back and forth very quickly in Dutch, seemingly in approval. But now that I think about it, they could have just as likely been commenting on the nutty American. Who knows?!? My Dutch is pathetic.
It seemed that the tree was a magnet for oddities. Because as I was setting up my image, a group of people with about a dozen Pomeranians walked by. And then another, and another, and another. And then an even bigger group of them. Ann had gone way up the trail, but I could see her looking back in amazement. We decided to call it a parade of Pomeranians, because that’s what it was.
We continued our hike as it passed by one small pond and progressed to the next. Whenever I saw something I thought might make an interesting image, I stopped to make it. There’s something nice about leisurely wandering around an area looking for images without any expectations. Sometimes it’s difficult to make any sense out of the chaos of the underbrush, but it’s pleasing being out in nature and trying.
We eventually arrived at a pond that had a couple of open vistas and a background that was close enough to readily incorporate into the image.
The clouds seemed to be thinning, so the landscape didn’t look so dull and the grasses and tree trunks seemed to liven up.
As Ann was concentrating on an image on the lake, I moved down the trail just a bit to focus on more intimate images.
Other Dutch folks stopped to talk about what we were doing, one of them a wildlife photographer who gave us yet another location tip (actually, a couple). And then the skies suddenly cleared. Ann made a few more images from her location, but an image I’d set up hoping for some soft directional light suddenly became nothing but bright spots and shadows. So I packed up my gear.
As Ann and I continued on our hike, we suddenly faced the near-impossible dilemma of photographing woodland with clear skies. Bright light shining through a forest (non) canopy rarely makes for good images. So we kept hiking, enjoying our walk through the woods, and then having to re-route yet again due to more flooded areas.
Eventually we made our way back towards the parking area, but the Bossen en Vennen wasn’t done with us yet. Not far from the parking area we came across an open area of beech trees with very little underbrush. The light was lowering, losing its harshness, and I decided I needed to make a couple of more images.
The low light was elegant on the silvery bark, particularly with the elegant shadows cast by the branches. How could one not enjoy it?
And then some of the trees were just spectacular.
Eventually we called it quits and walked back to the bimobil.
Deciding on dinner wasn’t hard at all. When we find a good place to eat, we tend to stick with it, so we headed back to where we had dinner the previous night, and then back to our campground for a good night’s sleep and an early morning rise.