How were these "Mysterious Dutch Light" photos made?

Question

I stumbled on this photo on flickr. The complete "The mysterious Dutch light" set has a strange feeling about it. I'm not even sure if it is a photograph or painting.

So my questions, what is so mysterious about dutch light, if that is the most important component to achieve this effect? If not then what is going on behind these images. Are they heavily post-processed, are they multi-exposure stacked images for HDR?

Answer

It's important to appreciate that what you're looking at in this flickr set is a gallery prints for sale, probably the work of several years by a professional photographer.

To answer your question as best I can...

As far as I know, light in the Netherlands is of the same nature as light in any other place of comparable latitude! Clearly the photographer has spent a long time scouting locations and waiting for exactly the right atmospheric conditions, but even so there's clearly some sort of filtration going on.

It's hard to say whether it's all Photoshop, or lens mounted filters, or a combination of both. The detail and contrast in the sky points to either multi-exposure HDR, or graduated filters. There's a lot of vignetting in some of the images, which is either done with filters or in Photoshop. The overall soft look and warm colours certainly resembles a blurred layer with the blending mode set to overlay, but that's probably not the only way to get the effect.

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