At this location the battle at Kijkduin was fought. It was a sea battle between a Dutch and a French-English fleet on August 11, 1673. The fortress near the town of Den Helder was built between 1811-1813 on the orders of Napoleon. Artisans from all over the province of North Holland and hundreds of Spanish prisoners of war worked on the fortress. It consists of a large fortification with the aim to defend the fortress, a guard house and the fortress guards house. T

In a vault, there are telegraph cabins used by the soldiers sent messages to the gun emplacement of Fortress Kijkduin and a large cast iron dome, built in 1897, which forms the centre of the fortress. From the domed are one can have a beautiful view across the dunes, the North Sea, the Island Texel and the largest sandbank of Europe ‘’de Razende Bol’’.

In some of these shots you will also see a unique lighthouse called "Lange Jaap" (or "tall Jack"), unique in that it is in its entirety made of cast iron. Prior to 1636 the dunes around where the fortress is already had wood and coal fire for the purpose of supervision of shipping. On October 29, 1822 the lighthouse at fortress Kijkduin was put into operation but its weight created cracks in the fortress so another location had to be found. On April 1, 1878 the current cast iron lighthouse ‘’de lange Jaap’’ was commissioned and the lighthouse at fortress Kijkduin was demolished.

I was extremely lucky that existing weather conditions, bright sunlight and clouds and lots of moisture in the air from a few showers throughout the day caused a beautiful rainbow to the North in the direction of the island of Texel. In some images it stood out more than others and I have spent some time in processing to bring it out a bit more. Due to the extreme dynamic range (really dark, almost black rainclouds and extremely bright sunlight in between) I used a lot of exposure brackets with HDR tonemapping in post to keep as much detail in shadows as well as highlights.

All shot on the K-70 with Sigma 8-16 and Pentax 16-85 lenses. Post-processing in LuminanceHDR, Gimp and Digikam.

[eaglem]

A very good series of shots.........