Bas Meelker is a leading Dutch landscape photographer, writer, speaker and workshop leader. Dutch-based, he supplies a wide variety of national and international commercial clients with his Fine Art landscape prints and images. Bas has been working as a full-time professional landscape photographer since 2008 and is well-known for his striking and bold style of photography. Visit BasMeelker's profile and follow him to see more of his images.
Learn the story behind his photo "Impassable"
Inspiration
We do not often have winters cold enough to let lake IJsselmeer freeze over. But when it does and in late winter temperatures start to rize, enormous amounts of shelf ice pile up against the eastern shores of the lake. I've seen this many times before and these piles can grow as high as 6 or 7 meters. It's not hard to get inspired when you see such an arctic scenery here in The Netherlands.
Feedback
I think the best advice I can give is to become a weather man/woman. To make images like this, it is important to know a little bit about the weather so you can anticipate when and where things are starting to become interesting. Timing is everything. Photographically, images such as these aren't hard to take. Being at the right time at the right place is key.
Location
I took this photo at the shores of lake IJsselmeer in The Netherlands, just south of a small town called Stavoren.
Time
This image was taken late afternoon, just before sunset at 16:12 hours.
Lighting
Nothing special here. I used the expose to the right technique in combination with a 0.6 neutral density hard grad filter to balance the exposure. An aperture of f/14 gave me sufficient depth of field at 16mm focal length. I manually exposed the image at 1/5 sec. at iso 100.
Equipment
I used a Canon EOS 5D Mark III with a Canon EF 16-35mm f/2.8 L II lens, a Gitzo tripod, cable release and a Lee ND6 hard grad.
Editing
Yes, I've used some vibrance and sharpening in Adobe Photoshop Lightroom and color converted the image in Nik Silver Efex Pro.
In my camera bag
I mainly use a Canon EOS 5D Mark III and use a set of lenses, ranging from 16mm to 400mm. My main 'workhorses' are the EF 16-35mm f/2.8 L II, the EF 24-70mm f/2.8 L II and the EF 70-200mm f/2.8 L IS II but I also use Canon tilt and shift lenses.
Here are a few more of our favorite photos from BasMeelker's portfolio:
