Vanhoudt Michiel Photography

13/06/2026

A Eurasian Wren weighs less than a 2-euro coin, but spend five minutes near one and you'll forget that completely. They are one of the loudest birds you'll run into in these regions.
The Wren is one of Belgium's most heard but least photographed birds. Have you ever managed to get one in frame?

12/06/2026

The rain didn't let up all day, but this raptor stayed put on a rotting stump to tear into a kill. Swipe through the carousel to see the progression from the initial look to the feeding behavior and the final call.
Getting a clean shot of dark feathers in heavy overcast rain is always an exposure headache.

10/06/2026

Great spotted woodpecker (🇳🇱Grote bonte specht) feeding its fledgling on a mossy branch in Flanders, Belgium. This carousel tracks the frantic handoff behavior between parent and young in a dense woodland canopy.
Swipe across the slides to see the exact moment the adult passes food to the juvenile, and how the young bird grabs the branch to stabilize itself.
Shot this on the Sony a7R V with the Sigma 500mm prime lens, locked at f/5.6. The lighting under the canopy was highly erratic. I had to let the ISO float on Auto to maintain a fast enough shutter speed to freeze the rapid beak movements without sacrificing sharpness on the 61-megapixel sensor. The adult was constantly hopping back and forth, requiring continuous tracking and a high burst rate to catch the brief contact frames.

07/06/2026

Photographing the red squirrel. Yesterday's session got hectic when four separate squirrels converged on the spot outside the blind at the exact same time. Swipe through the frames to see how the perspective shifts from the profile feeding shot to that direct, full-frontal eye contact in the final frame.

The blind gives you close proximity, but the weather yesterday stripped away all the light. I shot these with the Sony A7R5 and the Sigma 500mm wide open at f/5.6. Because of the heavy overcast and constant rain, I had to push the noise ceiling to ISO 6400 and drop the shutter speed down to 1/250s. That is dangerously slow for a twitchy mammal. The strategy inside a blind under these conditions is sitting completely frozen and timing your bursts to the exact millisecond they pause to chew look up.

PS: feel free to send me a 300-600 F4 to test

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05/06/2026

Filming the red squirrel during a break in the rain.

Getting a clean mirror effect like this requires dropping your lens axis down to the absolute water line. If you sit too high, you lose the reflection completely and just get a muddy brown background. I was shooting from a low-profile setup, waiting out the heavy downpours for hours. When the rain finally stopped, the water surface went completely still, creating the perfect mirror just before the squirrel came down to forage.
Technical Specs
Body: Sony A7RV
Lens: Sigma 500mm f5.6
Shutter Speed: 1/100s (shot in video mode)
Aperture: f/5.6
ISO: 800
The light under the wet canopy was incredibly flat after the storm. I kept the lens wide open at f/5.6 to draw enough light into the sensor without letting the ISO digital noise ruin the texture of the wet fur.

01/06/2026

31/05/2026

Sometimes even the best can get stuck. This had a bit of a struggle trying to follow his partner through a fence 😂😂😂

25/05/2026

Stepping out of a narrow walkway and into the clearing, I found myself just feet away from this beautiful roe deer. In a landscape this open, keeping a low profile was impossible. She instantly lifted her head, caught my scent, paused for this brief, breathless moment of eye contact, and bounded off into the brush.
Did you know? Roe deer are incredibly reliant on their sense of smell. They possess a highly developed olfactory system used not just for detecting predators, but also for communication, leaving scent cues from glands on their hooves and foreheads to map out their territory.

25/05/2026

Let me know which photo you like best!
While tucked away inside some Scotch broom, this male Bluethroat decided to treat me to an unforgettable encounter, hopping as close as four meters away. Completely unfazed by my lens, he was on a strict mission: hyper-focused on foraging insects to feed his hungry nestlings (swipe to the last frame to see the prize!).
Despite their brilliant, electric-blue plumage, Bluethroats are notoriously secretive birds that spend most of their time skulking deep within dense vegetation and reed beds, making an open, close-up encounter like this incredibly rare. Beyond their looks, they are master vocal mimics, frequently stealing the songs of neighboring bird species and blending them into their own complex melodies to defend their territory.