At the end of each year, an uncomfortable yet familiar feeling starts creeping up on me that perhaps, yet again, I have not created as much as I would have liked or thought I should have. In the past few years, this has been even more evident as I have been caring for my husband and my focus was entirely on getting him back to the life he used to lead as soon as possible, to facilitate him getting back to work. It all seemed to go very well, he did go back to work, very slowly, in the beginning of 2024 and then....it proved too much. This was a huge disappointment to him, us. I tried very hard to balance things out, to be his safety net, to relieve him of all other things that he needed to do, which of course inevitably lead to me being overstretched and burnt out. 

The year had not even started when we lost our beloved Kayla, who meant the world to us. I was flabbergasted, I had not seen this coming at all. She was happy and fit. Days before she died she ran over the hills of the Posbank, like she always did. All of a sudden, she was not there and this meant our biggest source of joy had gone. 

With my husband's situation and me being overwhelmed a new puppy did not seem the most sensible thing to do, but after a somewhat unfortunate trip to Terschelling we decided that our experiences seemed empty without a dog to share them with. Before this trip I had decided to distract myself from my sorrow by doing something new, which was photographing birds. I hoped that the learning would take my mind off things and so I got a small, blazing fast camera that I could take with me all the time and an all purpose and a dedicated long telephoto lens and I started taking pictures of birds on the south side of the island. It was a welcome distraction from all the problems in our lives. And then all of a sudden a puppy became available, almost 5 months old. That is how we ended up with another Tibetan Spaniel, a very naughty adolescent who is also very fond of cuddling. Of course we always forget just how labour intensive it is to have a new puppy, so it took a few months before I could go out again, into the forests, but finally in September I got my spirit back. Yes, my spirit and inspiration are larger than my energy levels, but I was determined to make up for lost time and from October forward I went out almost every single day. 

And that is how I managed to build up my portfolio in the last months of the year. I fully subscribe to the idea that it is all about the experience of being in nature, but I have a lingering restless feeling inside of me when I can not create. I have had this for as long as I can remember. I just really need to create, otherwise I will end up being depressed or cranky or both. For that reason the experience of being in nature, no matter how fulfilling it is, is not enough for me. I need time to create, because without that time and opportunity something starts to smolder inside of me which inevitably leads to a short circuit in my brain. It is as if something inside of me is being imprisoned if I do not create.

When the end of the year approached way too fast as usual, I started to look at my photos and that uncomfortable feeling of not having done as much as I had wanted started to resurface, but when I started to cull all the work (which I had just more or less offloaded onto my harddrives), I saw that I had indeed made up for lost time a bit in the last months of the year. 

This is why my favourite images of 2024 were mostly made in the last 3 months and that there are hardly any winter, spring or summer photos in this collection. I could not pick just 10 favourites and I also had a hard time trying to rank them. They are all special to me as they are all the results of me trying to get my life back on track, of my enjoying the forests and of my connection to those forests that I hold dear, whom I share my roots with. 

So here they are....not in any particular order

Defying Gravity

This picture is from a blissful morning I spent in the forest when the real fog lingered elsewhere in the country. I had driven through dense fog for an hour, but knew that no matter if this forest was foggy or not, I would enjoy it, because it was the first day that I could just go out and make images for myself and be away from home for as long as I wanted. This might be so normal for other people, but for me it is a luxury which I cherish. This picture was made when the other photographers had gone home. I can still feel the sheer joy of being there, in a state of flow that I have not experienced for perhaps 6 years. It was one of the best days of 2024, one that I am deeply grateful for.

Cornucopia

This picture is also really special to me. I have a very deep connection to this place as I was born and raised here. I met my husband here and he took me to this forest very often. He rode the bicycle with me on the back. I took my camera with me and have photographs of my then boyfriend with his face speckled with pimples pretending to be Tarzan. Our families still live there and every step I take there has memories attached to it that go far beyond that feeling of getting a nice photograph. This morning there was a really dense fog, which I must admit, I have not seen there very often. It usually lingers on the nearby moors, but is quickly absorbed in the forest. This therefore was a special treat, to see my forest in mystical conditions.

Performance

Another image from the same day as the first photograph. A day spent in a state of total flow....

Refuge

This is also a special picture for me, taken in the summer of 2024 on one of the rare occasions that I went out to the forest by myself in an attempt to regain my health. I took my small camera with me that I take whenever I go on longer hikes, because no matter how great my Lumix S1R is, it is very heavy. On this occasion I had brought my tripod and even though I have been to this place hundreds of times, I never saw it like this. I set up my tripod and a deer walked into the frame. Of course I was so astounded that I forgot to act quickly and change the settings of the camera and when I had done so, the deer had left again. (taken with OM1 Mark II and 12-100 F4 Pro lens)

Winter Darkness

By the time it was December I was out and about with the camera every single day, blissfully working in grey, dreary, rainy, drizzly weather and then I got treated to dense fog in this familiar forest . It is miraculous how some scenes just do not exist in other conditions. This one just jumped out to me because of the combination of small birch trees and the tall pines. 

Erstwhile

This is an image I made during a workshop with a client in autumn. Autumn was earlier than usual this past year and the mixture of all the colours with a hint of fog made this scene so appealing. I have known this forest my entire life. I have always loved it and it is hard to see it in such decline, but the trees are still majestic, even those who are now dead. They are giants of my past and they still inspire me to bring time to a standstill by using my camera.

Mystification

This photograph was made on a very foggy morning, but when we arrived in the forest, the fog was soon dissipated by the sun. The moment that sun and fog meet is always magical and leads to utterly painterly conditions and this is exactly when this photograph was made. 

Summer's Crown

Another picture from the same day as Refuge. It was a blissful day where all of a sudden I saw this forest differently. All those very familiar scenes looked new and exciting. This was also made with the OM1 Mark II and the 12-100 F4 Pro lens

Reapparance

The fog was so dense that this scene played hide and seek with me for a while. At times I could not see the trees in the background at all and I needed those to be in the picture, so I waited for them to reappear. In the meantime some people had stopped to ask me if I had seen a bird or something. I explained that I was photographing trees, which puzzled them. The woman then said that perhaps I was looking for cobwebs to photograph. By that time I thought it was best to stop explaining that I really was photographing trees :)

Winter Solstice

A still unpublished photo of one of the last days of 2024. It was made on the same day as Winter Darkness and it was yet another day spent in a state of flow, which has been so absent since 2018. Being this immersed in my work is something that I truly cherish. I came to this forest to photograph beech trees, yet came away with the best pictures being the ones who convey the stillness and serenity of a forest in hibernation. 

Connections

This picture was made on the same day as Erstwhile. I have tried to make a decent photograph of these trees for years and I have felt a kind of urgency as the trees are well past their prime now and are in rapid decline. This time I managed to make a photograph that shows the connections between the trees and hopefully my connection to them as well

Werifesteria

Another photograph from the same day as the first picture in this blog post. The amount of mushrooms in the forest was mind staggering and only when I started editing the photo I saw many more than I had seen when I was there

Midwinter

This picture was made on the same day as Winter Solstice. I had left the house without knowing where I would be going. I often do this. I trust on a whim to guide me to where I need to go. When I arrived I thought I was going to photograph beech trees, but ended up being mesmerized by the little pines and larch trees with their still silhouettes appearing from the fog. 

Encounter

Even though I was fortunate to get treated to some foggy days in the forest, the rest of this winter has been mostly drizzly, rainy and grey, which was totally ok. On this day we escaped the fireworks in our village and went for a long walk on the moors. I had just my Om1 Mark II and the 12-100 lens with me and had left the tripod in the car, which is of course when you end up needing it. It was raining continuously, but it was quiet, which we loved. I spotted this oak tree with its branches covered in lichen and could not resist taking this image. 

Crescendo

In October we took a trip to the Teutoburgerwald in Germany, mostly for me to practice driving longer distances, which I have to do all by myself these days. We had our puppy with us and took him for hikes up the steep rocky hills in the area and he turned out to be a relaxed hiker. One day I found this tree in the forest and I had to work with the light I had. I was awestruck by its sudden appearance and spent quite a while trying to photograph it. How splendid is this?

Ineffable

In the summer of 2024 I noticed to my utter horror and disbelief that my best photos of 2023 had disappeared from my hard drive and that the automatic backup had failed. I tried to recover the files, but it did not work and I had just formatted the SD card with the photos on it. In the end I sent the SD card to a data recovery company, but it was not looking good and so I decided to go back to the places where I took the photos and try to recreate some of them. This morning I was in the Speulderbos doing exactly that and to my surprise there was a workshop going on lead by someone that sounded quite familiar. I needed to focus on my task though and tried to steer clear from the group, but when the group was sticking around in the area where I needed to be, I approached them and jokingly said : "Are you still here???" The workshop leader was sitting on the ground kneeling to explain mushroom photography and I did not want to interfere, but had this weird feeling that I knew him. I searched on the internet on his website and sure enough, he was teaching a workshop on that day and so I walked back and said : "Daniel!!" He got up quickly and yes, it was Daniel Laan, my co-author of Woodscapes. We must both be very immune to our surroundings to not have realized before that we were both there. Anyway, I had already made this photograph earlier that morning, which was not at all a scene that I had set out to photograph, but one must never hold onto intentions too rigorously. Enchantment had made me create the best images of 2023 that I had lost and enchantment made me create new work in 2024. In the end the company recovered all my data, for which I am eternally grateful and it was a reminder how important photography and my work is to me. It made me pick up my photography and pursue it vigorously in the following months. 

Early Autumn Mood

This photograph was made on the very same day as the previous one just before I decided to look up Daniels website to see if it could possibly be him teaching that workshop.The light was amazing that morning and autumn was starting to show its first signs. The sun rays were a cooler colour than I am used to seeing, which resulted in a mysterious mood. The Speulderbos is left to its own devices as far as fallen trees are concerned. They are left on the forest floor and it is not possible to make clean images without the deadfall showing. This is something I have had to learn to embrace. I have learned to accept that my inclination to have everything in its right place and neatly ordered is not synonymous with perfection. This decay is nature's perfection, the cycle of life and who am I to label this as chaotic and imperfect...

Melancholia

A foggy day on the moors created a melancholic atmosphere which suited this birch tree and its shape perfectly. The hanging branches, the muted colours, the dense fog, everything looked beautiful in its gloominess. 

Crowded

This is a very recent image that took me a lot of effort to get right. In this area there are several parts of the forest where birches live in large clusters, but no matter how beautiful it looks, it is actually not that easy to make a picture that conveys the mesmerizing and almost disorientating feeling you get when you are standing there. I had to find a spot where chaos would be reduced to a minimum and noticed that the dense fog that had been there just before I had set up the camera was actually not helping. I needed to find some arrangement that would exclude the sky and that reduced the chaos that I was seeing on my LCD screen. When you are standing there, it looks very structured and neat, which is a result of all the repeating shapes and lines, but once you start looking through the viewfinder it becomes obvious that the mind plays tricks on you because of this repetition and that it lets you believe the trees are very neatly arranged. I ended up with this vertical image that I like quite a bit

All pictures were made with the Lumix S1R (except those that have another camera mentioned in the description).
 

The following photographs are a few of my favourite mushroom pictures of the past year. I did not make that many unfortunately, which I aim to do more of in the upcoming year. These were all focus stacked images that the OM1 Mark II created in camera. 

And what about those bird photos? Well, I am not any good yet at photographing birds, but I am going to share some of them with you, just because I mentioned them ;) Dedicated bird photographers can do a much better job of course, but I enjoyed my first attempt photographing the birds on Terschelling. These were taken with the OM1 Mark II and the Zuiko 100-400 lens (which is a 200-800 in full frame terms)

I have many more photographs that I am very fond of, but I am not ready to share them yet. They are part of an ongoing project that I am very excited about. Some photos feel like your brain children and they are too precious to be shared with the world immediately. 

Thank you so much for your support during the previous year(s). I hope that now that I am back to work, I will be able to write essays and articles on a regular schedule. The end of the tunnel is getting in sight and my inspiration and motivation are back. Hopefully this year will bring us some much needed rest from all the insecurities and sorrows that plagued our minds, no matter how positive we are determined to be.

A huge thank you to everyone who trusted me to be their mentor, their teacher. It has been a great privilege. 

If you feel compelled to support my work, please consider buying a print or my eBook The Magic of Forest Photography. Prints are now available for many more countries in the EU. If you would like to buy a print and can't find the image in my print shop, please let me know and I'll try to make it available.

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