The 71-year-old amateur photographer Sytse Schoustra passed away on Terschelling yesterday. Images by the fanatical weather photographer have been shown several times in the NOS Journaal in recent years.
Schoustra owned a catering company on Terschelling and also regularly photographed the sky above the island. The harbor of West-Terschelling and the wide view over the Wadden Sea were favorite subjects of his. Thunderclouds, clear blue skies and rain showers over the harbor alternated on his social media pages.
Schoustra started photographing in the 1970s. He found the beautiful skies he saw while working on a production tanker fascinating, he told RTL Nieuws this month. “I wanted to capture that.” He told RTL that he shot his favorite image in 2018, of mother-of-pearl clouds above the island: a rare phenomenon. Those images also made it to the NOS Journaal.
A selection of the work that Sytse Schoustra has submitted to NOS in recent years, selected by weather presenter Marco Verhoef:
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Sytse Schoustra / NOSA photo submitted by Sytse Schoustra on September 1, 2020 -
Sytse Schoustra / NOSA photo submitted by Sytse Schoustra on August 3, 2020 -
Sytse Schoustra / NOSA photo that Sytse Schoustra submitted on March 5, 2018 -
Sytse Schoustra / NOSA photo that Sytse Schoustra submitted on February 9, 2019 -
Sytse Schoustra / NOSA photo that Sytse Schoustra submitted on October 12, 2018 -
Sytse Schoustra / NOSA photo that Sytse Schoustra submitted on March 16, 2019 -
Sytse Schoustra / NOSA photo submitted by Sytse Schoustra on February 27, 2019 -
Sytse Schoustra / NOSA photo submitted by Sytse Schoustra on February 28, 2022
In February, Schoustra was diagnosed with an aggressive form of the muscle disease ALS. He announced this via Twitter a month later, after he said he had received numerous messages from people who missed his weather photos. “The world is turned upside down now,” Schoustra wrote about his illness.
Nevertheless, the Terschellinger continued to take photos and share them online. At the end of April, however, he wrote that shooting was becoming increasingly difficult: “I’m barely able to hold the camera anymore”. On April 20, he posted his last photo online, of a light cloud cover above Terschelling.
In recent years, Schoustra has sent at least fifty images to NOS, according to weather presenter Marco Verhoef. “Schoustra was a special photographer, in a beautiful place in the Netherlands. We will certainly miss his contributions.”
- Mother-of-pearl clouds over Terschelling and Den Helder
