The Quiet Picture

Oh wasn’t I excited about this weekend, I had two new toys to play with and head full of ideas. Some of the ideas were not even related to the new toys, so I started off on Saturday morning by setting up my squirrel feeder and squirrel-proof bird feeder. I hope that the squirrels will like their new setup and I also hope that they can’t figure out how to get to the bird food. I don’t have high hopes though, I’m sure they’ll turn up on the bird feeder sooner or later no matter what I come up with.

So that’s how I spent the beautiful and sunny Saturday morning. In the afternoon I was ready to play with the levelling base and 6-stop ND filter, so I drove to a new place which looked promising on the map. Sure enough, it looked like a great location. Except, what happened to the light? After idly waiting around for the sunset to happen, I gave up and drove to another place to see what my options were. As if by magic, the sun appeared and I got glorious evening light. Except, the this place wasn’t half as nice as the earlier one. Nevermind, I figured that the new place will look good in the morning light as well so I set my alarm clock to wake me up.

I arrived to this new location just after 8am, I knew that the first light wouldn’t get there because there was a hill shading it, but I hadn’t counted on the scarce pine forest to be all that shady so I still didn’t have light on the tiny lake by 9am and I decided to call it quits.

The forecast said that it would be windy in the afternoon, so I would have an opportunity to try the new ND filter. I drove to my favourite place, only to find it almost flooded (at least I had had the foresight of wearing wellingtons) and just to add insult to injury, even the wind was not happening. I took a 20 sec exposure and could still see the reflections on the water - it was almost calm! At this point I was ready to write off the whole weekend but decided at the last minute to check out the creek that runs out from the lake. When I saw this fallen tree, I just knew that I had to create something out of it, how chaotic it may be. It sums up my weekend, anyway.

I’ve mentioned quite a few times that I don’t like wideangle lenses because they are a compositional nightmare for me. I do however like wide views - panoramas. A stitched panorama shows so much more than a panorama crop of a picture taken with an extreme wideangle lens.

The biggest problem with creating panoramas is to create a seamless join between the frames. The left edge of the first frame is never a 100% match of the right edge of the second frame, so if you’re creating your panorama manually, it becomes very time consuming to manipulate the pictures in order to hide the seam. I’ve tried a few panorama programs in the past but nothing worked to my satisfaction (or the program was so complicated to use that I gave up) so I’ve been doing my stitching the hard way, which is not only tedious but also very time consuming.

So I decided to take some measures to improve the situation. Firstly, I ordered the Acratech Leveling Base which will enable me to level the ballhead, because a perfectly level platform is the foundation of a good panorama (I just got the thing so hopefully I can say something about it after this weekend). And then I also wanted to give stitching software another chance, especially after I heard that Photoshop CS3 is very good at it so I felt that I was just making things too hard for myself by stitching manually. Unfortunately, PS is not an investment I can justify in any way, so I looked for specialist stitching software instead and I started with Canon PhotoStitch which came with the camera. I gave up after the first panorama - total crap. PhotoStitch is best used uninstalled. I browsed some photo forums to find out what software other photogs used, and saw someone recommend Microsoft’s ICE (Image Composite Editor) which apparently is just as good as Photoshop. And the price is right - it’s free.

I loaded up my panorama frames and waited for ICE to do its thing. I was amazed - I couldn’t tell where the seams were, even when I knew where they were! I have now been throwing panoramas at it for two nights in a row (I had lots of unstitched images in my catalogue), everything from 2 to 13 frames, and it seems to deliver perfect results most of the time. There are two things which seem to be an issue sometimes, one of them makes sense but the other one is a bit of a mystery.

Firstly, although all the detail in the image is seamlessly joined, ICE doesn’t always seem to be able to compensate for uneven light from one frame to another. By this I mean that if one side of the frame is slightly darker than the other (it is so slight that you don’t even know about it until you start stitching), then in stitching you will notice this when the lightness of the picture changes at the seam. ICE allows you to export the panorama in e.g. Photoshop format with layers, so for critical work, you can use adjustment layers to fix the issue. You can see an example of this problem in the panorama below - there’s a sharp change in levels a little bit right from the middle, and then about 2/5 from the right there’s a wide strip with some lighter levels. It’s good enough for me because I won’t use this image for anything other than keeping in my catalogue (and using it as an example here), but if were to e.g. print it then I would take some time in an editor to sort out the levels.

Secondly, sometimes ICE leaves out a frame in the stitch for no apparent reason at all. Initially I thought it’s doing it because there wasn’t enough overlap between the frames, but then it happened again when there was definitely enough overlap. I re-loaded the frames but it did the same thing again. The really strange thing is that ICE knew exactly what size of slice was missing in the panorama, so it left a gap which was a perfect fit to fill in Photoshop without moving any of the layers done by ICE. Weird. This happened e.g. with the above panorama.

Other than these bugs, it really doesn’t get any easier. Launch the software, select the pictures, read some news while you wait (it doesn’t take very long anyway), select the crop and how you want to save it and that’s it. I never thought I’d say this but… well done Microsoft!

The only problem I have now is what will I do when I go over to Macs next year like I’m planning to? I somehow doubt that Microsoft will make a Mac-compatible ICE!

This is a follow-up to my previous post about using slow shutter speeds. I wanted to elaborate on the water theme a little bit so here goes.

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The shutter speed to use with moving water is one of the more interesting issues in landscape photography. Some prefer a fast shutter to freeze the water, and others prefer a long shutter speed to smooth out the water. And some people prefer something in between, and then of course “it depends”.

I’ve liked the smooth water effect so much that I succeeded in taking my favourite waterfall picture already in 2004 using good old film. This is a detail of the Anderssjöåfallet waterfall in Härjedalen and believe it or not but I have not photographed the falls since then - maybe it’s because I know that I can’t improve on this one and every time I look at the falls, I just see this slide in my head. It is a fairly abstract picture, one that is stripped out of everything but the very basics (even the colour is gone, although this is not B&W), making it a very simple capture which to me is a perfect example a quiet picture. Now imagine this same image, but with a fast shutter speed which captures every drop of water. Would you still say that it is “quiet”?

I posted the Anderssjöåfallet picture on Fotosidan a few years ago and someone commented that the water was unnatural. Absolutely correct, I admit it’s 100% unnatural and I didn’t argue with them and I never will, but it got me thinking - where is it written that nature photography should be “natural”? We only have our own photographic visions, and there’s no right or wrong with them. Every vision is equally valid, every shutter speed used with moving water is equally good, the only thing different is your own taste and I respect that. Smoothing out water is just one way of manipulating the subject, but the manipulation really starts already when you choose your composition and focal length. So when is photography ever really natural? It’s all just a photographer’s vision and you choose the means which fulfill your vision. It’s all good!

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I browsed through my waterfall pictures but the pair of images above was the only one where I could actually show a comparison between slow and fast shutter speeds. Pictures are taken in June 2006 at the Sveån creek which falls into Ljusnan at Ramundberget.

For a very long time I’ve been wondering why I like to use long shutter speeds with moving water. I’ve just always liked it, from the very beginning of my photography career - it was the reason I bought my first polariser filter and I still remember the first waterfall I used it on. In the last few days I’ve been thinking about this issue, inspired by the comments for my Sunday’s post and also Miika’s waterfall post when I was writing a comment for it. Then it suddenly dawned on me and it was so obvious I can’t believe I wasn’t able to figure out a long time ago! It all comes down to my concept of “quiet picture”.

I strive to achieve harmony in my pictures (the operative word being “strive”). Ideally, everything is in balance - if something is out of place, it will stick out and disturb, be it an element that doesn’t belong, bad composition, highlight or whatever. A balanced picture is thus quiet and the less elements you have in a picture, the quieter it usually becomes. Using shallow DOF in macro photography is a way to eliminate elements in the picture. A long shutter speed achieves the same thing in landscape photography. I use a long shutterspeed even when the analytical part of my brain says that a shorter speed would be more appropiate, the picture on the left is definitely such where I recognise that freezing the water would probably work better. But now that I know why I’m using a long shutter speed, I no longer have to worry about the “right” speed to use. The right exposure is the one that comes naturally to me!

Sometimes I find a trick which I like so much that I use it for all my photos. Long exposures are my trick du jour, so now I’m taking hardly any pictures with shutter speeds lower than a second. You can never be quite sure what you get with this type of images while you’re taking them, so the idea is to take loads of pictures with varying shutter speeds and then on the computer pick out the best. Digital helps.

Might as well keep taking these until the season is over… when the leaves have fallen and grass has withered brown, it’s time to come up with something else!

The weather was sure changing today. In the morning it was heavy winds and rain, even some sleet at one point, and then at lunchtime the clouds moved away and by sunset it was almost windstill and clear skies. It worked fine for us at Hylströmmen, but sunset was a miss.

Note to self: find sunset locations!

The day dawned foggy and drizzly, but all the weather forecasts I checked said it would get better. Rather optimistically, I trusted them and set out to the Kvarnsjön lake, which is an easy 3.5 km hike from home. Only problem was that it started raining shortly after I set out, and by the time I was at the lake it was pouring. And also rather optimistically, I had opted not to wear any waterproof trousers (my jacket is (almost) waterproof). But it’s not all bad, after a while you get wet enough to stop caring if you get any more wet.

I made some lame attempts at photography, the Stormjacket was protecting the camera anyway but my enthusiasm was rapidly waning in correlation with the wet and cold creeping up on me. When I got home, I was still freezing after dry clothes, a bowl of hot soup and a cup of tea.

There’s no bad weather, there’s only bad judgement for not wearing bad weather clothes.

Try out your colour vision at FM 100 Hue Test! When I was using film, I used to have a lot of problems getting the colour balance right in the scans. Now with digital, Lightroom does a great job with white balance and if I’ve needed to adjust WB manually, I seem to get it quite nicely in the ballpark. Maybe experience does help. Anyway, considering these problems I used to have and still sometimes do, I had been thinking that my colour vision is seriously impaired. But apparently not, because I got a perfect score on this test! Can’t believe it.

Nothing special to report about September… not a lot of rain though. My barometer broke on the 9th and I haven’t bothered to replace it yet (I’m not getting much out of the barometer data anyway, I’m really only interested in the temperatures and precipitation), and then I had a week’s holiday so 6 days of observations are missing overall.

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Temperature (High): 14°C
Temperature (Low): 5°C
Temperature (Average): 9°C

Barometer (High): 1009 mbar
Barometer (Low): 984 mbar
Barometer (Avg): 998 mbar

Total of sunny days: 3

Rain: 30 mm
Days with rain: 8

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2007
January 2008
February 2008
March 2008
April 2008
May 2008
June 2008
July 2008
August 2008

In the previous post I claimed that our lakes are too small to create any real wave action to allow smoothing out the water with long exposures. Well, sometimes it pays to challenge the conclusions I jump into without having any real facts at hand, so today I headed to one of my favourite locations (or as I decided after I came back, the favourite location) while the wind was blowing at its best. I was right on the money about the one second shutter speed though, but I was able to go slower by overexposing to the point of blowing out the highlights and trusting Lightroom to recover them for me (which it did).

So, the discovery I made about the waves is that size doesn’t matter. All you need is a long enough shutter speed to smooth out whatever kind of waves are going about. But today’s exercise wasn’t really about the waves though, because I was more interested to see if I could get the reeds - or grass - to blur out. So all I needed was some fixed point (a rock will do nicely) and then a lot of grass. And would you know - it worked! Lesson learned, I only wish I had tried this before.

I mentioned that this place is now my #1 favourite. It’s good for flowers and landscape and works in any kind of weather, and today I found out that if I had the patience and/or inclination, I could even try wildlife photography there. I saw something in the water, it could swim and dive and it wasn’t a bird. Could I be so lucky that it was an otter? Or maybe a beaver. Or maybe it was something smaller, it was too quick to make it out properly. In any case, it didn’t make this place look any worse in my eyes!