The Artful Engineer

We now turn to the last phase of our 2024 European adventure—Belgium—which was organized around a Light & Land trip to Bruges. (Here is a link to the 2025 installment of this same trip, in case you are interested.) I’ll show pictures of Bruges proper in a few weeks, but this week and next will focus on the little town of Damme a few miles northeast of Bruges. We spent a mostly-gray afternoon there, starting with an area near the intersection of two canals beyond town.

This area of Belgium, certainly, is very flat. The GPS unit I use on my camera tagged all of these images right around sea level (and most of them below) so this Low Country, at least, was true to its moniker. These canals, at least, had paved paths (or roads) on both banks, and those in turn were lined on both sides by long avenues of trees. Away from the canals, the land was mostly flat farm fields. The image above gives a good sense of this overall terrain. I worked to place the younger trees in the gaps between the large ones, which I think makes a pleasing contrast. Depending on how this image is processed, it is easy to darken the trees into silhouettes, which I think would also work. I chose to lighten the trees just enough to show the detail in the bark, but the image retains its cold-and-gray, mostly-rainy day feel.

We did get a brief bit of low sunlight that lit up the rows of trees, but it didn’t last long. The image below—actually fifteen images merged together—was taken just as the sun was starting to peak through. I had enough time to shift my composition slightly and re-shoot this sequence with stronger light, but I prefer both this composition and this softer light. Usually the brighter, warmer, and sharper areas of an image are what draws the eye, but in this image the composition leads to the cooler, dimmer, and softer gap at the end of the road—it is natural, after all, to look down a road. There is a little bit of where-does-it-go mystery, too, and that one Y-shaped tree at the end has just enough contrast to stand out and be interesting. In the brighter version of this view, the foreground trees overwhelm the distant view and the image falls apart.

It is no secret that I like the shapes and patterns within a bare winter tree; this next image shows a whole ensemble of them. It is also interesting that, because of the background, the smaller trees are actually much more prominent in their reflection than in the direct view. It is also fun how the branches get distorted by the ripples in the water. What wasn’t fun was all the bright weeds on the near shore that encroached into the bottom of the frame. I spent a long time editing them out, and partway through decided to make it a little easier by cropping off the bottom edge, which resulted in this wider, 2:1 aspect ratio, version. I think this would be a great image to print large, but I would probably have to redo the editing more carefully.

The sun was still around for this next image. The full frame included the tops of the trees and both ends of the bridge, but in the end I decided that I preferred the contrasting patterns of this tighter crop. Area-wise, it is one-third of the original image; at best, a square crop will be two-thirds of the 3:2 full frame area, so this is one-half of that.

I don’t show a lot of abstract images, but I really like the one below. I’ll give everyone a chance to puzzle out how I made this. If I get a couple guesses in the comments, I’ll explain it there.

And now for something a little different, where the reflecting trees are just part of the setting:

I hope you enjoyed these images from around the canals. With the neat rows of trees and the reflections in the calm dark waters, there are a lot of photographic possibilities. Next week I’ll share some images from inside Damme itself.