A late sunday night.  Just playing around with some photo's I took earlier that day. And in the background the media center tuned to a Digitally Imported web stream.
Easy going progressive trance.  To be more exact: Max Ruby's Summer Sessions 2008.

Sony a20. Taken on ISO 800, which explains the noise in the image.

It is hard for me to imagine but nowadays there are 10 to 12 year old kids, born in the Netherlands, who have never seen frozen lakes and canals. I mean, not frozen enough so people could actually go ice skating.
But winter has returned to Holland this year. A few days ago temperatures dropped to as low as minus 20 (celcius) in some areas. And it doesn't look like temperatures will rise  anytime soon. People are ice skating everywhere.

So at night we take our pet rabbit inside and put her in the coldest room in the house. The rabbit (named after a well known Belgian beer :D) looked so miserable the other day that we felt sorry for her and we decided that during the coldest hours she should be a little warmer.

That this is not unnecessary  was proven to me today when I found a dead bird in the parking lot at work. The beautiful animal seemed to have been frozen to death. As I browsed the internet to determine the species, I learned that it was a greenshank, a wading bird. And I also learned that she shouldn't have been here to begin with. It is a migrating bird and she should have left for Africa weeks or maybe even months ago. For some reason she never did leave and paid for it with her life. It left me feeling sad.

Fog and frost. Image taken by my g/f. Shot with a Sony a200 + kitlens

Frozen to death greenshank. Shot with an HTC Touch diamond mobile phone

Frosty spiderweb. The spider was likely long gone... Shot with a Canon 30d +Sigma 17-70 DC

More current winter images (not shot by me) are found here

Me and my girlfriend decided we could do with a few weeks of sunshine. The summer here in the Netherlands sucked with lots of rain and low temperatures. Egypt in September however still had blue skies and temperatures close to 40 degrees celsius ( 104 Fahrenheit).   I wanted to learn how to scuba dive and snorkeling opportunities were supposed to be great as well. And they sure were !

Read on and see more underwater images.

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I went fishing the other day with a friend of mine. We went for a venue that is only accessible during low tides. As we were happily fishing away while the sun set, we caught one black bream after the other. Taking them from shore, and in these numbers is quite remarkable for the Northsea.

They were all juvenile ones, but pretty angry when they were taken out of the water. Often they refused to open their (needle-teeth filled) mouth, so unhooking them became a bit of a challenge.


They were all returned to the sea, to go and feed some more at the patches of seaweed that are close by.  When they grow a little bigger (between 1 and 2 feet)  they   leave the coast  for deeper waters and can the often be found swimming around wrecks. 
It is a tasty fish (once bigger in size then the ones we caught) and is excellent when grilled for instance.  Here in Holland the fishmongers sell them as 'Dorade'.