From the Diary: Moravia

Friday, 13.04.2018
Finally, based in Kyjov. We got a nice Airbnb apartment near one of the best restaurants in town and I have to say, their home-brewed beer is pretty good to. Time to do some work. As the weather was cloudy in the morning, we decided to skip the sunrise session as it was not worth to wake up after a long 6 hour drive through Austria yesterday. I was actually very surprised to see the first fields already close to Großknut village, where we stopped and took the first shots.
The day focus was in the fields of Šardice valley, a nice scenic road with plenty of photography stops and opportunities. Luckily the sun started to shine and it was very windy as well, quite unpleasant on the field but good for the combination of light and shadows as there were still clouds in the sky. First time in Moravia and I was already impressed by the beauty of the spring landscape in this region of Czech Republic. We parked the car next to the road several times and took some photographs, being passed by the collegues from Poland, parked in the mud and used mostly the heavy telephoto lenses for the images. We were informed that if you want to get decent images without too many distracting objects, you need at least 200mm on crop sensor (300mm on FF), to work with. Fujifilm Slovenia gratefully offered us their XF 100-400mm f4.5-5.6 OIS lens to borrow and we were using XF 55-200mm f/3.5-4.8 for the second camera so the images look pretty decent. Both lenses are monsters in sharpness. Discovering the area, we followed an untrusted muddy road, which was very wet because of the night rain and with the help of the 4WD, we reached a pond in the middle of the fields, where we stopped for a break. Again, the car will be dirty all the way up to the roof...
The afternoon was getting quite warm, and still with the annoying wind it made us tired, but we insisted to cruise around and got some nice shots of the fields as well as some wildlife. There are plenty of deers, rabbits and pheasants on the fields and some of the