The Quiet Picture

It was another great day with overcast weather. The difference to yesterday is that there was no fog, but it was snowing a little bit from a thin cloud cover. That cloud cover provided a very special light that made the snow radiate in pure white in contrast with the different hues in the sky. Towards the sun, the clouds were yellowish grey. In the opposite direction, they were blueish grey with just a touch of sky showing behind the clouds. And between these, it was just plain old grey. That luminescent snow is just awesome and when it happens, you have to be out there to enjoy it. It was a brilliant day – both figuratively and literally!

I’ve been thinking that January has been quite disappointing so far, but just one weekend like this and it turns around the whole month. Sure, I’m not creating any masterpieces here, but the funny thing is that I’m also skiing for the sake of skiing and not just to take pictures. Before I moved to Loos, that would’ve been unthinkable!

Couldn’t ask for anything better than this. In the dead of winter, these overcast and slightly foggy days with snow on the trees and cold temperatures are my favourites. In the spring winter when the days are getting warmer, those sunny days with snow on trees are preferred… but it’s only January now and I spent three hours skiing and shooting and enjoying every second of it. Well almost, by the end of it I was absolutely starving and wondered why I didn’t pack any snacks when I knew that I would do this long trip. Tomorrow then… it should be an equally nice day!

This must be a personal record. I’ve waited until Thursday to upload Sunday’s pictures! The reason is quite simply that last weekend was not very good for photography. Saturday was completely wasted (good for skiing, but not for photo) and on Sunday it started snowing a little bit, but not enough to decorate the trees to any significant degree. I just took some snapshots but since this blog also serves as some kind of diary for myself, I’m posting one of those snaps. So that in the future when I try to remember what the weather was like in the middle of January in 2012, I can refer to this one…

On Friday when I was skiing, I noticed that some others had been skiing the same trails. I was very surprised, because normally nobody skis these trails except me so I thought maybe some new people have moved into the village (as unlikely as it sounds). Then today when I was skiing, I met no less than three other skiers. That’s like… three more than I’ve ever met on these trails, all winters combined. It turned out that they were visiting relatives, so that explains that. We chatted a little bit and agreed that it’s a crying shame that the locals don’t take advantage of these fine trails, other than for snowmobiling, of course. They made a perfect analysis of the villagers’ mindset – “åker snöskoter, fiskar, grillar korv och blir feta” (ride snowmobiles, ice fish, grill sausages and get fat).

Since these visitors were going back home today, the trails will be my own again. Except for the snowmobiles and their sausage chomping riders.

The day had started overcast but by the time I came back, the clouds had started to dissipate. The sky cleared completely by moonrise so I had a go at it. I’m getting really annoyed that I can’t find any good spots for moonrise/moonset or sunrise/sunset within an easy walking distance from home, so doing anything like that on a short notice is almost impossible. There is no lack of good viewpoints, but good foregrounds are conspicuous in their absence. And to be honest, I haven’t found any good viewpoints without any signs of logging within a reasonable driving distance either, so I’m always in trouble with the full moon scenery. It has almost lead me to hoping it would be overcast weather every full moon so I don’t even have to search for a spot…

With the late winter and some bad weather in between, I haven’t done any skiing this winter. Until today! I was so excited about going out that I was on the move before sunrise and it really was great to be back on track. I was happy to see that I wasn’t completely out of shape either, so I did a small extension to my trip instead of taking the shortest route back home. But now that I’m writing this, the trip is catching up with me and I’m half tempted to go to bed already and it’s not even 9pm yet.

And yes, I know that the copyright stamp in the pictures is old, but I’m way too tired to fix that now!

Time to do my traditional sum-up of the year in pictures! As usual, I’m posting my favourite from each month and because not all months are created equal, these may not necessarily be my 12 best pictures of the year. 2011 was a bit of a revolutionary year for me. There were two major things that happened, the biggest surprise was that I discovered wideangle photography which resulted in me buying no less than two wideangle lenses, when to my utter surprise I found out that my first wideangle wasn’t wide enough. Who would’ve thought? The second thing that happened was that I found myself liking black&white photography. I’ve always said that colour is important to me as a nature photographer, because what is nature without colour? It turned out that it’s form and pattern and it’s quite nice, when used right.

* * *

January
Winter 2010-11 was unusually cold. When the cold weather arrived in November, it never let go until February and when it was cold, it was really cold. And without any warmer periods, the snow just kept piling up. This picture is from one of my many skiing trips, during a day with overcast skies and a little bit of snowfall. That kind of weather turns the world into monochrome, which gives you good opportunities to strip the pictures to the bare necessities. I’ve reprocessed the picture since first publishing it, deliberately overexposed and then converted to b&w (there was only very little colour in the branches to start with).

* * *

February
February full moon was an amazing event. The landscape was looking at its winter’s best and the night was clear (and cold). It was almost surreal to be walking around in the moonlight but unfortunately I don’t have any great landscape options within a convenient walking distance from home and I didn’t feel like going for a long hike at night. Next time this happens, I will have to do that hike because it will sure be worth it!

* * *

March
I was starting to think that I wouldn’t photograph the squirrel this year, but the squirrel had other ideas. I noticed how it would run up the tree when it got nervous, and then climb back down a moment later. I tried to be ready for it but it’s not easy because those things move really fast… so needless to say how amazed I was to see that I had actually nailed the sharpness on this one and didn’t clip off any body parts. The composition wasn’t ideal though with the space being really tight on the left and at the bottom, so I needed to invest a few hours of work to increase the space and in the end I think it was well worth the effort. This pose definitely stands out from my other squirrel pictures.

* * *

April
After all that cold weather and snow, I thought that spring would be late this year but it came with a bang instead and we had summer temperatures at easter. The crocuses, as always, launched the flower photography season and even if my crocuses are not very numerous or big, I found this one individual which gave me a great macro opportunity. I love a frame filler!

* * *

May
It shouldn’t be possible but May was actually a cooler month than April. Or rather, the warmest day in April was warmer than any day in May, but the medium temperatures were obviously creeping up and the nature blossomed out. Traditionally my May favourite should be a flower… but this year it was a tiger! We visited the Orsa Björnpark zoo, mainly because we wanted to see the snow leopard which is a new addition in the zoo. It was close to the closing time before the snow leopard showed itself and I got one fairly bad picture out of it, but it seems like the tigers always put up a good show. And they are magnificent animals! If the picture looks dark, it’s deliberate. A trained eye will see the pattern from the chain link fence but by selectively underexposing, I can hide it a little bit and bring focus on the face instead.

* * *

June
Surprisingly, no orchids in the list this year. It starts to feel like I’ve done all I can with them, so I have to think of some new ideas. In the meanwhile, other flowers will do – like the twinflower, which were growing so numerous that they formed a white carpet on the forest floor in some places. I have a big patch of them growing right behind my garage so sometimes you don’t have to go far to get great pictures. Speaking of which, the crocus from April was shot under my kitchen window, and the March squirrel from my living room…

* * *

July
July was a great month. It normally always is, with great opportunities for both flowers and landscape. If I did a top 10 list of the year instead of by month, I could probably fill half of the list with pictures from July. But my favourite is this sunset picture with layers, it was the last picture on an evening that was one of the best photography sessions I’ve ever had. Warm, sunny and calm – the stuff memories are made of.

* * *

August
If July was a great month, then August was bad. As usual. We had a great full moon opportunity and while I had this incredible fortune of having the sun come out just at the right moment to light up the foreground, I screwed up the picture by missing the DOF. So what looks great at first look, doesn’t really pass a closer inspection. And the pictures which have the DOF are lacking the light or the composition. So it was a tough choice. But this time I let the visual aspect come before the technical aspect, so my photo of the month is the DOF impaired full moon composition.

* * *

September
I had really counted on September to give me great pictures. I mean, with the mountains and autumn colours, how could you fail? Well, take out the autumn colours and suddenly you’re looking at a landscape which is twice as dull, instead of twice as great. A fungal disease started killing the birch leaves already in August, leaving nothing for September. I did the best I could, under the circumstances, and once you accept that you can’t change the situation, then it’s just a matter of making the most of it and I ended up having a great vacation anyway. But the conditions did affect my choice of the favourite picture so instead of a grand landscape with glorious autumn colours, I chose a black&white intimate scene. This is a turning point – if you had told me last year that one of my favourite pictures would be a monochrome taken with a wideangle lens, I would’ve laughed at you!

* * *

October
For a long time, a crested tit held the favourite spot for October. But the more I look at this squirrel picture which is obviously a total fluke, the more I like it. Nothing is sharp in the frame, not even the perch in the lower right corner (shaken by the jumping squirrel). But I mean… what are the odds of getting this? A perfect diagonal direction, the tail, the “just right” motion blur… I’m sure that people will think that this is a joke, and that’s fine by me. I think it’s a good joke!

* * *

November
November, my nemesis. On average, the worst month of the year by a wide margin. It wasn’t a particularly productive month this year either, but I got a few surprisingly good frames. And now you see what I meant about me and monochrome – I’m actually starting to get the hang of it! I knew I had a keeper the moment I saw this root, and I also knew it would do great in B&W.

* * *

December
In 2010, winter came early. In 2011, winter was late. But then finally in early December, we got a lot of snow and things started looking up, giving me a few days of good photography. But these good days were followed by warm days with a touch of rain and finally culminated in a big storm on Boxing Day that wreaked havoc and left a destroyed landscape behind it. Today, on the last day of the year, it is a sorry sight that I can see from my window. The forecast says that it will snow tomorrow, so I hope that I can get the year 2012 photography off to a running start!

With the landscape looking like it does, I decided to concentrate on the birds this morning. I struck out, the birds just wouldn’t settle on the perch, nothing I can do about it. But to my great surprise, the squirrel turned up. I mean, this is me standing in full view without any camouflage, and still the squirrel came down to eat. Must’ve been really hungry! It even allowed me to change the camera orientation from horizontal to vertical and shift my position a little bit, never happened before. But then I started moving more and more, checking the limits of the squirrel’s tolerance, and it finally had enough and fled.

While I was waiting for the birds, I looked behind me to check the sun’s position. I saw that the distant hills were layered nicely in the morning light, so I turned the camera around and did some landscape photography with the 300mm lens, and wished that it would been even longer so I could’ve gotten a tight horizontal composition on the hill.

I liked the way the sky changed colour from orange to blue, so I went for a vertical stitch. When it was time to put the pictures together, I just couldn’t make the transition from orange to blue work properly (not an issue with the stitch itself, but just the way the natural gradient came out) so in the end I sampled both the blue and orange colours and used an artificial gradient instead. Since the colour is an exact match, almost the only difference between the original sky and the fake one is that the muddy transition part in the original is now clean. Would you miss the muddy transition if you didn’t know it was removed?

Last night we got hit by a storm. I had trouble sleeping because the wind was screaming in the forest and I heard some cracking sounds which told me that trees were falling or breaking off. I was really nervous that a tree would fall on the house, but as far as I could see when I looked outside, the wind was blowing in a rough west-east direction which meant that the only part of the house at risk of a fallen tree is my neighbour’s flat (this house consists of two flats). I also check the weather forecast and it said the same thing, winds blowing from west or south-west. So I finally decided to put on earplugs to get some sleep anyway.

In the morning as soon as there was enough light, I looked out the window and saw that a tree had fallen outside the bedroom, almost touching the house. I went outside and found almost total destruction – well over half of the trees in that part of the forest had fallen or broken off. More so, the direction they had fallen was north-south, which means that they had all come down towards the house! I was happy about the earplugs… had I heard what’s going on, it would’ve frightened the living daylights out of me for sure. This forest closest to the house, they did some logging here a couple of years ago so the forest wasn’t very dense to start with, thus making it more vulnerable to the winds. And now it’s obviously even less dense and the few trees that are left standing are probably weaker than they were before. Which means that when the next storm arrives, there’s a big risk that more trees will fall even without a tornado. There is safety in numbers, but those numbers don’t exist any more.

When I walked around, I started getting a better picture of the night’s events. In some parts of the forest there were only a few trees fallen, but they were in the west-east direction, thus following the direction of the storm. But the areas which had suffered the worst damage were more in the north-south axis and I can even plot the path this tornado took through the forest and my house was right in the middle of it! So I’m counting myself lucky that no damage was done to the house. I just hope that my cabin fared as well, considering that the storm was even worse in that region. Maybe I should go and take a look next weekend… in my new car…

Considering the havoc from a photographer’s perspective, things are looking pretty bleak. If I thought yesterday that the snowcover was spoiled, then today you can hardly even see the snow from under all the debris. But maybe in some places which were spared from the hurricane, new snow can still rescue the landscape and give me something to shoot this winter. But this forest closest to me, which has given me so many pictures through the years, it’s gone. It’s just a wide open space now.

Isn’t it wonderful, the days are getting longer already! But the winter has hardly begun, we still have to get over January which really is the dead of winter. Today however, it reminded me more of a day in March with mild temperatures, bare trees and totally spoiled snow cover. Definitely no conditions for landscape photography but I had the Powershot with me just in case. And would you know, you can always find something. If the nature doesn’t provide, then make it yourself…