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My parents invited me to come along for a visit to the Floriade, a horticultural expo that is held once in a decade. Every time it's held, the expo is situated in a different part of the country, and this time it was in Venlo.

The park was split in 5 themes: World Show Stage, Environment, Education & Innovation, Relax & Heal and Green Engine. We didn't feel like rushing through the park, so we decided to just take it easy and see where we would go. Eventually we managed to visit Environment, Education & Innovation and World Show Stage before my mom's batteries ran out and we decided to head home; so we still visited quite a big chunk of the park.

One thing worth mentioning was the catering, and in particular the "soup". As is traditional with theme parks, the catering was ridiculously expensive. When we entered the restaurant, our hunger disappeared quite fast as soon as we saw the pricetags on the menu's. They had the balls to charge € 7,- for a hamburger which roughly consisted of a bread bun, a thin slab of meat, a slice of tomato and a leaf of lettuce; condiments were to be purchased separately for € 0,50 per packet.

Eventually we decided to go for the organic tomato soup (€ 5.70 per bowl), a choice we ended up regretting quite a bit. Somehow I suspect that they opened a 1 liter can of soup, then added half a liter of coffee creamer, 5 liters of water and 500grams of vegetables to it; and that was to be the soup of the day. It was just a very lean broth with a tomato-ish flavor to it.

All in all a great day, but next time i'm bringing my own food

As i said in a previous post, there would be another open house day at dairy farms in my area. I decided to go to another farm, which was even closer by than the last one. Most of the big cows were already outside, but fortunately they had a lot of calves which are even cooler.

A little bit down the road there was a strawberry farm that also opened its doors to visitors for the occasion. I took a quick peek there, and enjoyed some free snacks and drinks.

Next open house for the dairy farms is on June 13th... on which I will visit yet another farm.

The Dutch dairy producer Campina organized an open house event at some of the farms where they get their milk from. I'm always interested in how stuff works, so I decided to check it out.

It was quite crowded, but it was fun. They had some little stands where you could try some yoghurt drinks, milks and puddings, there were some girls that were handing out free products to the visitors; which is always nice. I also took the opportunity to shoot some stills of the beautiful women that work at the farm

All in all it was a nice event. I got some nice photos, I've got some free dairy products and it kept me busy. On April 25th, there's another open house session which I will attend as well.

Nature is cruel, but very awesome. While my family was enjoying nature in the form of a nice cup of tea and oatmeal cookies, suddenly a sparrow hawk landed on a fence post in the backyard to enjoy it's lunch: a freshly caught blackbird.

I rushed towards my camera bag and took some snapshots from the bedroom window. Since the sparrow hawk didn't seem to mind that my dad and me were hanging out the bedroom window with big zoom lenses, I decided to sneak into the backyard for some close-up shots.

I managed to get within about 1 meter of the bird. At first it seemed that the sparrow hawk couldn't be bothered with my presence, and continued to nibble on the blackbird. After a while it had enough of me and flew off with the carcass still in its talons.

My second attempt at time-lapse video. The real time of this video was about 1 hour.

Today I was planning to visit an urbex location in the east of the country. The location turned out to be a dud, so I was left with some spare time to kill. Since there were some nasty clouds overhead, I figured I'd give time-lapse video a try. This means you take a photo every x seconds, and in the end you stitch them all together in a movie. Unfortunately about 30 mins into my experiment it started to rain pretty badly, so I had to abort the mission. I did manage to get about 300 photo's, though.

Because I enjoyed the music and atmosphere so much last year, I decided to attend the Amphi Festival in Köln, Germany again this year. Armed with my new camera-gear and accompanied by Fresia and Daniel, I ventured to the Tanzbrunnen congress center, where the event takes place every year.

My goal was to get some nice close-up shots of artists, like the ones I had seen on various websites. With my 70-300mm zoom lens, I figured the job should be doable; and I was right. I still need a lot of practice with this kind of photography; The shutter speeds and light measuring are totally different, because of all the bright lights behind the artists. In most cases I had to boost the ISO quite a bit to get fast shutter speeds, and this causes a bit of noise in the images.

It somewhat pleased me to see that the drinks were still (too) expensive, and the pizza was still decent (although pricy). It was a bit of a relief to see that the prices hadn't been raised this year. On Sunday I had gotten used to the weird settings a bit, and was able to shoot some more photos. Too bad it started to rain quite a bit later on in the day, which prevented me from shooting more photos.

All in all I'm pretty satisfied with the images, and can't wait to visit Amphi Festival again next year. Last year we slept over at the house of Daniel's friend Madita, but this year we decided to sleep over at Daniel's home and drive back and forth to the festival (about an hour's drive). Next year, however, I'm definitely opting for an air-conditioned hotel room, because sleeping on a sticky and crappy airbed after a long day of walking around in severe heat wasn't too good for my mood.

One of the things that I have in common with my mother, is that we both like donkeys a lot. So when my mom read in the newspaper that there was open house at a donkey shelter in the town of Baarle-Hertog, she immediately told me about it. I teamed up with my parents to check it out.

The shelter currently houses 29 donkeys that were either neglected, abused or just very, very old. I think it's good that there are places like these that help the animals that were hurt by the beasts (read: humans).

A while back I caught word about an abandoned restaurant or bar that was themed like a haunted mansion. I teamed up with Fresia to check it out, and was amazed at how cool this place really is!

After we were done with the "horror cafe", we decided to check out another place nearby. Unfortunately, this location was nothing more than an empty carcass waiting for the roof to collapse; so we didn't make any photos there. As we were driving off again, Fresia suddenly noticed a tiny farm with broken windows. We stopped to take a peek and found a cute little farmhouse with some stables attached to it.

It was a fun day on the road; and the poor lightning conditions on both locations made a fun challenge. Can't wait to see more locations like these.

Being unemployed sucks, but it also has some nice benefits. For example, I can take nice hikes through the woods and the nature reserves now. The sun was shining, I was bored.. time to shoot some photos!

Near the town of Oisterwijk, The Netherlands, I found a small pond of about 30 meters in diameter with at least 100 - 150 frogs in it that were having some kind of wild orgy. Ye gods, those guys were noisy!