Tenerife - Icod el Alto

View over the Orotava valley from a viewpoint at Icod el Alto.

Tenerife - Loro Parque

Portrait of a Gorilla in the Loro Parque zoo, Puerto de la Cruz, Tenerife.

Hallig Gröde - Sunset

Finally, the sun is about to set in the west, illuminating the clouds with a range of warm colors from yellow to red.

The really nice thing about our accomodation on Gröde was this view. The bedroom windows were facing west, so sunset photography was very comfortable. ;-) This image concludes the Hallig Gröde series in my PhotoLog. A complete album of the Gröde images is now online (first version, better structure to come). A new visit to Hallig Gröde is planned for September 2004, so stay tuned for more images to come in the future.

Hallig Gröde - Evening Light

One of the houses on the Knudswarft in the red light of the sinking sun.

In total, there are five houses on Gröde, four of them on the Knudswarft and one on the Kirchwarft. All of them have a thatched roof, which means you have to be a bit careful with a barbecue in the summer ;-), but also gives the houses the typical look harmonically complementing the landscape.

Hallig Gröde - Sunrise

Another day, half an hour earlier. North-east of the Knudswarft, some pools provide a great setting for the rising sun.

These pools, even though they are very near to the houses and the “highway” connecting the Knudswarft to Appelland and the jetty on the east side, are a good place to watch various kinds of wading birds during daytime.

A clear night sky on November 9th allowed to take some decent pictures of the total lunar eclipse.

The image is a composition of two separate pictures, the left one taken during totality, the right one a few minutes after totality with the moon moving out of Earth’s umbra. The problem with lunar eclipse photography is long exposure times. Even a bright eclipse such as this one, photographed with ISO 400 film and f/8, required 3s exposure time, which already introduces some motion blur. At 600mm the moon is moving quite fast across the frame! So for the new composition I took two circular cut-outs of the original scanned images, removing some of the horizontal motion blur and the halo of brightly iluminated part of the moon in the penumbra. For more stuff on lunar eclipse photography I highly recommend MrEclipse.com.

Hallig Gröde - Morning Light

In the morning at 5am the world’s still a complete idyll. The world being Gröde with the salt meadows, the ring dyke and the houses on the Knudswarft in the soft light just after sunrise.

Nothing disturbs the wonderful atmosphere of the early morning, only a few cows and sheep look a bit dumbfounded at the human being sneaking throught the salt meadows. Even with a camera! But it’s really worth to get up that early, the magic of the wonderful soft morning light only lasts for a short period. After that, you can go back to bed. ;-)

Hallig Gröde - Sea

On Hallig Gröde the sea is not far away. Even if the wadden sea normally looks flat and calm, high tide and a little bit of wind will change that and quickly remind you of the natural forces.

The holm is (almost) completely surrounded by a stone brink, but this one is only as high as the water level with normal high tide. There is no dike protecting from storm tides. With high tide and wind coming from the right direction, the sea will spill over the brink as can be seen here at the jetty on the west side. Of course, real “Landunter” wasn’t on the agenda during our stay in May, this typically happens during the autumn and winter storms.

Hallig Gröde - Arrival

But let’s start at the beginning … after a short trip with the MS Rungholt, Hallig Gröde appears into sight as a thin line on the wadden see with the prominent dwelling mounds and houses, which are already visible from the mainland.

Seen from the see side, it appears to be a very small speck of land, which has to brave the rough North Sea. Actually, it is 277 ha of land, grown together from the old holms Gröde and Appelland, so the correct name for the living place of currently 17 inhabitants is Hallig Gröde-Appelland. Which by the way is the smallest municipality in Germany.

Hallig Gröde

The stars on the beautiful holm Hallig Gröde in the German National Park Wattenmeer (North Sea) are the birds. So this picture of an arctic tern is somehow the natural start for a series from our vacation in May 2003.

Going on vacation with a small child in Germany almost automatically ;-) means the North Sea coast. And that’s where we went with our daughter Jenny. More precisely we went to North Friesland, starting with the Eiderstedt peninsula, in 2001 to St. Peter-Ording (which we didn’t like that much, too expensive, too many tourists) and then in 2002 to Westhever (very beautiful, scenic lighthouse, alas renting the same appartment for 2003 didn’t work, and all the really nice houses near the dike are under Hamburgian control). In May 2003 we were more adventurous and took an accomodation for 2 weeks on a holm … (to be continued)