The Quiet Picture

Shock, horror, how could I forget to post pale pasque flower pictures when on Monday I finally, after so many years, got to see them again? Having searched for them high and low, and then missed the timing a few times, the happiness was total when the location at Gröntjärn had a grand display on offer. Alright, granted, it was only a few flowering individuals… but after all these years, I’d have been overjoyed to see just one!

Experience tells me that background control with these large-flowered but low-stemmed beauties is a problem, so I came equipped with a light tent. I used the high key effect with wood anemones a few years ago and was happy with the results so I figured it will work now. And it does, but it’s an effect that’s best used in moderation. The white background kinda makes the flowers look like they standing in a vase in a studio because the natural environment is not seen. But trust me, no flowers were harmed in the process! But other than the studio feeling, I like the high-key effect. I wonder what they would look like against a black background… hmm…

There’s a lot of agriculture in Föne, or at least has been. A lot of fields, some of them clearly abandoned by now, some that might or might not be used, and some with electric fences. Will be interesting to see what happens in the summer and what kind of animals and how many will be grazing in the fields.

Anyway, I have one of these fields right below my house. I’m saying “below”, because the field slopes down from house. I had some hopes of seeing cranes here when the snow melted, but it didn’t happen and I gave up on them.

Today when I came home, there were two cranes! After I took the pictures, I was thinking that hopefully one day I will also get pictures of the fox that I’ve seen many times by now, and the roe deer.

A moment later I saw the fox! So I just got out the deck again and grabbed some shots while I watched the fox follow the scent trail of the cranes that were long gone by then.

Obviously, not an ideal place for photography but it can hardly get any more convenient when all I need is to open the door…

The sun is out today so I went cycling. Even though the thermometre didn’t show any impressive numbers, I knew from experience that it would soon feel warm so I wore a t-shirt and a thin wind jacket and fingerless gloves. This time however it didn’t help me no matter how hard I was pedalling, the wind was cold and the sun hadn’t heated up the ground sufficiently (still some snow left from yesterday) so my fingers and ears started to freeze.

I made a brief stop at a sunny and wind-protected spot to thaw out, hoping that it would get warmer as the sun was getting higher in the sky. As it turned out, the opposite happened – clouds drifted in and I realised that I was cycling into rain. I just hoped that I would make it to the Färila Hembygdsgården before the rain to sit it out there.

But I needn’t have worried about the rain. It started snowing instead. My clothes were feeling increasingly inadequate but at least I wasn’t getting wet, so I ignored the wind shelter and used the opportunity to shoot the snowfall at the Hembygdsgården.

The snow cloud drifted past quite quickly, and the sunshine felt all the warmer when I started cycling back home. But oh goodness me, how good it felt to get inside and have some hot soup for lunch!

Bad weather is supposed to be the photographer’s best friend but today I have serious doubts about it. Snow, sleet, rain. Not that it would stop me, of course, so I went for a walk. Since there’s almost nothing to see anywhere at this point in time, I walked down to the flood plains (don’t know what else to call them) and came across a whooper swan there. It was calmly walking away from me, no panic, so I took my chances and tried to get a bit closer, keeping some trees between me and the swan. Well, predictably, the swan didn’t care for my company and took off (sorry!) but before disappearing, it circled around the field and gave me an opportunity to try a flight shot. Things were happening too quickly to change any settings in the camera so the shutter speed was too slow for the approach shots, but when it was flying past me, I just followed it with the camera and the panning actually worked! Not a prize winner, obviously, but I don’t have enough flight or panning shots to get picky as yet.

As I mentioned yesterday, I did a bicycle trip to check out some new places. Cycling the tarmac roads is boring, so I took the gravel road that runs almost parallel with the paved road. There are loads and loads of small roads around here, part of them thanks to the military installations that were decommissioned a few years ago. And those tarmac roads are thanks to the airplane landing strips, which are finally visible on the maps and satellite pictures after the military decommission. I was quite surprised the first time I came across the air strips when there was no hint on the map that such exist!

But I digress.

So I was cycling along this gravel road when I came across a spot where the Boxing Day storm had felled a bunch of trees, transforming the road into an obstacle course. I could’ve turned back and taken the tarmac road instead, but like I said, it’s boring. So I carried the bike over the tree trunks, or went around them, or in some cases, crawled under. With the bike. The worst of the storm damage is normally concentrated on separated spots, so I figured that the rest of the road can’t be as bad. It turned out that it was… luckily it wasn’t too far until it joined the tarmac road again and I could actually start riding the bike.

I wanted to check out some of the riverside features, so I took a tiny little side road. Of course, that road was covered with fallen trees as well, but I got there in the end. The Ljusnanleden trail follows close to the river here, so I followed it to see what I could find. I found a steep embankment where the trails goes all the way down to the water. The embankment is about 35-40m high at this point and got me wondering why the storm only uprooted the trees across the road and not here where it would’ve created an open view… Anyway, the trail was tricky at first with the pine needles and cones rolling under foot.  And then it got worse. Even steeper, and now covered with fine sand. I mean, there’s steep and then there’s steep. Any steeper and they might as well put out some parachutes and let people jump down! There’s a railing though, which is starting to rot badly and in some places it had already fallen down, but it provided some support anyway. Mostly I just glided from tree to tree and hung on for dear life. On the way up, without that railing you’d have to get down on hands and knees to get a safe hold. Not kidding!

There was one nice looking island in the river but this was completely the wrong time of day to shoot it. I only had the Powershot with me anyway, for scouting purposes. Considering the direction where the river runs here, I’m a little bit on the wrong side. I get backlight most of the day, so it would have to be an early morning or late evening shoot to make these spots work. Maybe one day I will.

I was going to check out some more spots, but every single forest road I took had windfalls on them. It got downright ridiculous – I was there to ride the bike, not carry it! So I gave up and took the tarmac road back home. A boring ride was better than no ride.

Labour day weekend! Well not really, I did a brief appearance at work on Monday but it’s been a lot of time off anyway. So let’s see… On Saturday we drove to Gröntjärn, thinking that for sure we would see some pale pasque flowers. Yes we did, only problem was that they’re still budding. Gotta wait until next weekend then.

I did get to start the macro season on Sunday though. Finally! I’ve really been starving to see some flowers other than coltsfoot, problem with living in a new place is that I don’t know where all the flowers are. I’m sure there’s some hepatica around here, just no idea exactly where. But it doesn’t really matter, I’ve had enough of hepatica as well. So happy days when I found some golden saxifrage just down from the house! There’s a small brook that runs on the other side of the field which is behind my house, and the saxifrage was growing in large numbers there. I spent a full hour with them, it was very satisfying to be seeing the world through 150mm again!

On Monday on the way home, I made small detour to the Djupbäcken nature reserve near Färila. The description says that the pale pasque flower grows there, and it specifies the spot “where the path comes into the reserve from the north”. The big storm we had on Boxing Day was very evident in this nature reserve as well, so I was constantly climbing over or crawling under the fallen trees, but I definitely found the place where the “path comes into the reserve from the north”. No pale pasque flowers though. I looked for juniper bushes because experience tells me that the flowers like junipers. It took me a while, but finally I found three junipers. Count them. Three. No pale pasque flowers. Just to be sure, I zigzagged the area twice, and then zigzagged it again but covering an even larger area. No pale pasque flowers. Now, I have some experience in searching for pale pasque flowers and I was pretty good at it, if I say so myself. Needle in a haystack good. So either I’ve totally lost my mojo or there are no pale pasque flowers here any more. Look at it this way. The sign that says that the flowers grow there is about… maybe 20 years old? 20 years ago there were hundreds of pale pasque flowers in the location near Rullbo in Loos. Now there’s only a couple of leaves left of them. So I’m gonna go out on a limb here and declare Djupbäcken a dead location.

I got to use the macro lens again though. In the evening I spotted a bonfire from my kitchen window (the Swedes light up bonfires on Labour Day eve, we Finns spare ours for the midsummer) so I took the macro lens on the deck and shot some frames.

The Labour Day itself was unusually sunny and warm (it feels like it’s always cold and rainy on 1st May) so I went cycling and exploring new places. The trip turned out to be a lot more complicated than I had anticipated so I’m gonna save that story for another blog post!

Here in Sweden we have a concept called aprilväder, April weather. It could be anything – cold and snowing, warm and sunny, and anything in between. Sometimes during the same day. Last year around this time I was wearing a t-shirt while cycling. Today it was snowing. Well ok to be fair, it was the 25th when I was wearing a t-shirt last year and the weather can change a few times and back again in four days. But for the looks of it, the t-shirt has to wait.

I think every April for as long as I’ve been writing this blog, I’ve complained how difficult it is to find anything to shoot. The landscape is looking just awful and only the earliest flowers are in bloom (but how exciting is it to shoot crocuses and coltsfoot every year?). There’s one major exception to the dreariness - snowfall. The April snow can pile up quickly and it can disappear almost as soon so you have to make the most of it while it’s there. I took my first picture before 8 am, although it’s almost cheating… this old wagon is standing right outside my house. I thought I would wait until summer to shoot it, but now as it was covered in snow, it made a fine subject. And just as well that I shot it early, because by the time I came back, the snow on it had already melted.

When I got down to the floodplains by the river, I found a pair of cranes. They were on the other side of this small patch of wetland so I had trouble reaching them with my 125mm but I’m wondering if they’re actually nesting there. They were not in a hurry to move away, one of them walked back and forth for a couple of times before it disappeared. But those floodplains… could be worth the effort to take the 300mm lens there some day.

<Shameless self-promotion>

At the Ljusdal camera club, we have a Photographer of the Month and Photo of the Month. The photographer is selected months in advance and it basically just rotates between the members, but the photo of the month is based on votes. There’s a theme for every month, the members submit pictures and then we vote for the favourite in the monthly meeting.

The theme for March was pets, and although I don’t have any pets myself, I do have some pictures of them. So for the first time, I submitted pictures and would you know it, my leaping dalmatian won a landslide victory! And the second place… is also mine! Talk about an ego boost.

All at the same time, I’m also the Photographer of the month for April. I have a small exhibition at the Ljusdal library and I’ve received some positive feedback for it, which doesn’t have to mean anything though because people normally don’t say on your face that your pictures suck. But it’s ok, it’s nice to hear nice things and it helps me to take the edge off my constant self-criticism and allows me to be happy about my pictures, just for a short while anyway.

</Shameless self-promotion>

There’s one trail in Funäsfjällen that is advertised as the “sunshine trip”, solskensturen. Called so because in the spring when you ski it from Ramundberget to Tänndalen, you’ll have the sun on your face all the way. It’s a long trip (23 km) and I’ve always wanted to do it but reluctant to do it alone. I was happy to finally find company for the trip so today was the day!

The weather looked half promising, it was very windy in Ramundberget and there was snow in the air but the cloud cover was breaking in places so I hoped that it would improve.

We got to the Össjöstugan cabin before it opened, so we just continued towards Walles. There would be a trail than branches off from the Össjö valley going south towards Tänndalen, but when we got there we found it was completely oversnown and there wasn’t really any trail visible at all. So we used Plan B and skiied via Kariknallen instead, and this is when the weather got really tough. There’s quite an uphill from Bruksvallarna to Kariknallen and as if that wasn’t enough, we had the wind in our faces and the snowing had intensified so we got beaten by these small needles all the way. The wind also meant that there was quite a snow pileup on the trail so at first we had to pulse through that soft snow but once we got higher up, the exposed tundra was almost free of snow instead so we concluded that it would be easier just to pick up the skis and walk.

We enjoyed a much needed lunch at Kariknallen and the energy levels thus restored, tackled the second half of the trip. It felt like the wind had only gotten worse while we were eating and it was starting to get a little bit miserable, actually. But we persevered through the oversnowed trail (with hindsight, the trail we passed up was exactly like this but we thought it was through lack of use and not the force of nature) and after Svalåstugan when the trail made a slight turn, we got the wind from the side instead and it gave immediate relief. The closer to Andersborg we got, the better the weather and we suspected that it had been like this all day – the wind and snowing was on the north side of the mountain plateau while here on the south side we finally got a taste of the name of the trip.

I was hungry again so I ate a waffle and all the sugar in the jam did miracles for my energy. I had started to feel the effort we had put it so far and I had a tough time going up the hills, but I wasn’t otherwise tired as such. What should’ve been a 23 km trip turned out to be 28 km because of the Kariknallen detour and that’s officially the most I’ve ever skiied in a day. The strange part is that I wasn’t exhausted… it’s only those uphill parts that got my thighs complaining but other than that, I could easily have skiied further.

A very good trip; it wasn’t all the sunshine as in the advertisement but I wouldn’t have it any other way. Awesome to have done it!