An autumn walk at Landgoed Clingendael
A new blog, finally! I’ve been meaning to make one for a while and I actually have quite a list of drafts that I started but haven’t finished (and likely never will). But, with the amount of photography walks I’ve been doing in the past months, I didn’t want to miss the opportunity to at least once share a photo blog on such a walk. So let’s just pick the last one, which was an autumn walk around Landgoed Clingendael yesterday morning. Let’s go!
A welcome surprise
When I left home around 8:30am, an hour after sunrise and so much later than I’d usually go out, the weather looked clear, somewhat sunny, just a nice autumn morning. A bit chilly too, but it wasn’t until I got close to my destination of that morning, Landgoed Clingendael here in The Hague that I noticed there was still fog hanging over some fields next to the road. As any photographer will agree, fog and sunshine make for great ingredients for photography so once I did notice the fog I started paddling faster on my bicycle so I could hopefully capture some at my shooting location.
Onwards!
As you can see, I was lucky to catch some fog over the fields near the entrance of the estate before it had all disappeared. Hooray! I quickly moved on — when the conditions are so nice like this morning I tend to start moving around quite fast because I want to capture ALL OF IT EVERYWHERE. I know, not so calm and mindful, I just can’t help myself — to capture the beautiful golden morning light around the rest of the estate.
All those golden details 😍. I could literally spend an entire morning alone capturing those. But I only had a few hours and there was a specific reason I came to this place: mushrooms! It is autumn after all and around the city of The Hague where I live, this area is probably one of the best places to find those. And I did find them, which I’ll show you in a second, but not before I share a few, ehh, storytelling-ish kind of shots? Not sure about the story here, but that’s my camera, a feather, and me. Hi! :).
The quest
When I arrived around the area where I photographed several beautiful mushrooms last week, specifically fly agarics (see them here on my instagram) I couldn’t find many, let alone a fly agarics. Now I know they don’t last long, but I sort of expected new ones to pop up around the same area? I don’t know exactly how that works with mushrooms, but in this case, none were to be found where I’d saw them earlier. I did eventually spot a few others and also photographed the beautiful sunny scenes around the area.
Mushroom mania
As beautiful as the autumn landscape was, I was absolutely not leaving without a good amount of mushroom shots and some of them were going to be master mushroom of them all: the fly agaric 🍄. Luckily I had seen on Instagram that my neighbor and fellow photographer Kitty had visited Clingendael just the day before and had shared some mushroom photos. So I asked her whereabouts she’d seen them and with her help I soon arrived at what can definitely be described as the mushroom hotspot of the area. So without further ado, let’s bring on mushroom mania!
Yes, there is more:
And more…
Time to say goodbye
While I would have loved spent hours photographing all the mushrooms I found, I didn’t have much more time (admittedly, I did capture quite a few as it is) and had to say goodbye. I’ll continued my walk around the parc and passed this lovely old wooden building. I’ve seen and photographed it before in the past, it’s such a magical looking place.
There’s a small rose garden nearby that I also passed on my walk and the roses that were still in bloom looked beautiful, covered in dew and brightly colored.
Walking back to where I parked my bicycle, I passed several more buildings that are on the estate (I haven’t captured the main building, a 17th century villa called ‘Huys Clingendael’). Most notable, the small fairytale house that’s near the entrance (some background in Dutch here).
If you’ve made it this far: thanks for your attention. I hope you enjoyed the not-so-concise summary of an autumn walk that really only covered about 2 hours or so, even if the amount of photos (I shot literally hundreds in total…) suggest at least a day trip. If you want to see more of my photography, please take a look around this website or visit my instagram for the latest photos and stories.
Thanks again for stopping by!
