high water levels in the Netherlands

The people who have been following my flickr probably have noticed that the last posts all showed the high water level in the Netherlands. Well that’s right, the water is pretty high, in every river flowing through the Netherlands. I only have photographs of the Rhine because a tributary of the Rhine goes past Wageningen. (which is were I live). The tributary is called the Neder-rijn (literary translated down-rhine). To prevent the river from flooding there are floodplains. These are areas of land which are between the summer dike (when the water level is lower) and the winter dike (when the water is higher, this dike is higher in case there is a high water level)

The water level is high enough to flood the floodplains causing some small problems. One of the problems is that some people live there. In the Netherlands we like to think that we can control the water for 100% and build houses in the floodplains. Well not a lot of houses, but a few people experience problems due to the water.

Living almost at the winterdike I have taken photographs of the high water level as much as I could. The problem of taking photographs of the flooded floodplains is the weather. It has been raining for the last week so I had to be careful not to soak my camera.

The first precaution I took was to screw a uv filter on every lens that I took with me. If I can avoid having to clean my lenses. I rather have a few uv filters with smudges because of cleaning than that these smudges are on my lenses. Than I took my tripod and my ND filter to be able to take some long exposures.

When I arrived at the floodplains for the first time I just had to look at the scene for some time. It is so weird to look at land where you have been able to walk on the week before be flooded with water. And the water is really high to! It comes to this branch: 

The thing I looked for was to show that it was flooded. Because if you have never been in Wageningen before you might think that it’s beside a lake or something like that. I had to show flooded roads, trees etc. to be able to show that the area is actually flooded and normally is dry.

I made only long exposures because I wanted to show the force of the water. This might seem odd but when there were waves in the water I tried to get my exposure just long enough to blur the waves but not too long to make the waves disappear. This turned out to be rather tricky since the wind kept changing all the time.

Well that’s about it for the high water level in the Netherlands, I hope for some good weather since I want to redo my sunrise shot because I’m not entirely satisfied how the composition turned out. And it might be wishful thinking but I hope for -10 centigrades so I can iceskate in the floodplains :)