The Quiet Picture

I’ve changed the name of the blog from Photography (my way) to The Quiet Picture. The old name was really just a stopgap, I couldn’t come up with anything better at the time. But now upon reflecting on my photography in the past year in this blog (especially last August), I think The Quiet Picture is more descriptive.I also considered “The Small Picture” for a moment. A play with words, you know, big picture? I prefer the detail - small picture. But in the end, a “quiet picture” is also a play with words. You figure it out.

The Quiet Picture

It’s a dull day, but not too windy so it’s great for flower photography. I had been waiting for weeks for the early coralroots to bloom and now it finally was time, so I took the gear to the forest. The early coralroot (Goodyera repens) is a common orchid and it grows plentiful in my backyard forest, but it was all the harder to find a collection of flowers that suited my pre-visualised image. I guess it would be easier to base the image on reality, than trying to find reality that matches your image… Anyway, I finally found something close enough and got to work. I was wearing mosquito-proof clothing, but they still got the better of me - they were out in obscene numbers and when you’re wearing a mesh hood, you’d better make sure that the mesh doesn’t touch your skin at any place because that’s an invitation for the mozzies to bleed you. So I took the pictures and didn’t bother to frame many different versions, just hurried home with my chin itching from the bites. But I got a keeper, so it was worth it!Since I didn’t really have any other bright ideas for a dull day, I drove to my waterlily lake, trusting that it would provide me with something to do. I wasn’t disappointed and was able to go for waterlily closeups, at one point I even had the 1.4 teleconverter attached. I was following the flower slowly drift in the wind, and noticed that it had turned favourably for some low-angle images, which would give me a green forest reflection on the water instead of the grey/black of the overcast sky (when you polarise off the reflection, the result is black water). So I got the tripod down low and I was just simply stunned at how the flower looked in the viewfinder. I just stared, feeling quite emotional for a moment, actually. I couldn’t do it justice because the difference between the dark forest reflection and the white flower is too much for the camera to record, but afterwards I was amazed at this one:

To be perfectly honest, I didn’t quite mean it to turn out this way. I thought I had the tripod low enough and took a shot (this one). Then I noticed the little bit of sky reflecting at the bottom and flattened out the tripod completely, giving me only the forest reflection as BG. But looking at the images now, it’s this one that stands out for me, thanks to the partial sky reflection and with just a hint of waves on the surface. Without the sky, even the composition would be a little bit off, but now I don’t dare to crop off any of the light (otherwise I would crop a bit from left and top). I wish I could sometimes do this on purpose, but I’ll take serendipity any day!

* * *

I updated minnak.net by adding a page for the orchids, complete with Latin, English, Swedish and Finnish names. So far it’s 11 different orchids - I’ve counted Dactylorhiza maculata and Dactylorhiza maculata fuchsii as separate, same thing with Dactylorhiza incarnata and Dactylorhiza incarnata cruenta. Not everyone seems to agree that they are different species, but I prefer 11 species rather than 9, so different they are!

What can I say, we haven’t had a particularly warm July. It has been particularly cool in fact, but now we are back to 20+ temperatures. Note, 20 something - not 30 or even 40, like in the rest of Europe. People are dying because of the heat, but up here, only the shrews seem to suffer the fate.

Found this poor thing expired on my driveway when I came home from work. What it was doing there in the first place I’ll never know… plenty of shade all around in the forest, no need to run across the hot tarmac!

Since not many people seem to enjoy the morning hours, I was fairly sure that I could photograph the flower I missed yesterday in peace and quiet this morning. It was a lovely warm weather for cycling and when I got to the lake, I found that the sun hadn’t quite reached the flowers yet, making me wait for a moment. I didn’t mind this at all - it really doesn’t get much better than sitting down by the lake with the sun warm on your face. Even the horse flies and mosquitos hadn’t woken up yet so I was really able to relax.The flower, by the way, is Mentha arvensis (corn mint / åkermynta / rantaminttu).

There’s one thing for sure about botany. When you have once seen a flower, it becomes a lot easier to see it again, even if you somehow kept missing it when it was right under your nose to start with. As I said yesterday, I had never seen the water lobelia before. But now I saw them right next to the parking - didn’t have to walk hundreds of meters along the shore to find them.

* * *

I really wanted to photograph butterflies and I hoped that the old field would yield me these winged beauties this time. Well, the field yielded something else winged - horse flies and mozzies most definitely had woken up. Protected inside my Bugshirt I was ok, even if I had to keep moving the mesh hood around when it touched my forehead and got soaked in sweat, kind of foggy to see through the viewfinder like that!

Anyways, I found another “new” flower. I have a slight frustration about yellow flowers - there are so many of them! But this yellow flower somehow seemed different, and when I got closer, I instantly recognised it as something I hadn’t recognised before. I took my pictures and had a look around for the butterflies, and finally found one. Happily I photographed it until the constant buzz of the horseflies and the sweat running down my face were driving me crazy, so I got out, trying not to trip on the numerous grooves on this old field, perfectly hidden by the thick vegetation. At its worst you just have to feel your way through, a few times I got close to tripping when I stepped in a groove when I expected level ground.The flower is Hypericum maculatum (imperforate St John’s-wort / fyrkantig johannesört / särmäkuisma).

When I got back home, the clouds were definitely gathering and it was thunder on the way. I watched the clouds pour out their contents on the far hills and waited for the storm to hit us, but somehow we got spared even if the roll of thunder was loud and clear. When the sun came back out, I decided to go cycling once more. When I got to Hembygdsgården, I saw that the tarmac was wet in some shaded places. Talk about local weather… it never rained a drop at home. After I got back home, the second thunder front finally reached us and now we also got the much needed rain. Having learned for my tv-blowup, I kept everything disconnected from the mains. Which means that I couldn’t work on my new images, but I was able to write the text for this blog using my little PowerBook on battery power. Love it!

…and then a bit later publish the post with the images, even if I still can hear the thunder in the distance.

Althought we are not suffering from such severe heat waves and drought as the rest of Europe, the water levels are low in the lakes. This provided me an opportunity to walk on the shore of the Loossjön lake, as during normal water levels you either get bog or forest right to the edge of the water, making it impossible to follow the shoreline. The lake is at least partly artificial though, I’m not entirely sure but I reckon that there used to be a small lake that was then made larger when a dam was built. The dead and sunken trees that are lining the shore are proof of this, especially all the pine roots which at some places build up large lattices and make me wish that I could take one of them home.It started to look like these roots would be the most interesting thing on the shore, when I suddenly came across some flowers growing right in the water (not waterlilies!). I was fascinated - I had never seen this flower before! Happily I settled down to photograph them and tried to ignore the multitude of horse flies that fill up the gaps that mosquitos leave when it’s sunny (although sometimes you get pestered by both). When I got home, I checked my flower book and ID’d the flower as Lobelia dortmanna (water lobelia (EN), notblomster (SW), nuottaruoho (FI)). Apparently, a fairly common flower, so I must have just been missing it until now.

* * *

I discovered another new flower on the shore as well, but close to the parking. I tidied it up and was about to get my camera from the car, when another car appeared. I just stared at the people in disbelief - they went swimming right in front of the the flowers I was going to shoot! I was so mad I could’ve screamed, this really is not the first time a similar thing has happened. I took a deep breath, counted to ten, and did my shoreline walk instead. The light was long gone by the time I got back, not that it really mattered - a new car load of people had arrived instead, swimming in front of the flowers. Oh well.

Nymphaea alba candida

• English: White Waterlily
• Swedish: Nordnäckros
• Finnish: Pohjanlumme

If I really had to name my #1 favourite flower, it would probably be the white waterlily. It goes way back to my childhood - all those endless summers at my parents’ summer house. We have a shallow, mud bottom bay nearby and I remember we used to have a few white waterlilies there. Then every year they got fewer and fewer until finally none were left, only the yellow ones remained. That was… well, must be over 20 years ago. The fact is that not many white waterlilies appear on any of the lakes I normally visit when I’m in Finland. When we’ve found then, it has always been special.Then I moved to Sweden, and found white waterlilies growing in the small lake in the middle of Ljusdal. And I found them everywhere else, as well, I just couldn’t believe it! But this abundance doesn’t mean that they are easy to photograph. The problem is mostly that they grow in water - your options are either to use a big telephoto lens from the shore, wade in (if it’s not too deep and muddy) or take a boat (precarious at best). I have tried options #1 and #2, even if one of my best waterlily images was taken with a 100mm lens looking straight down, thanks to receding water levels in a lake. Then last summer I finally found white waterlily nirvana. A small forest lake tucked away just across the Voxnan river, with waterlilies growing right at the shore in perfect reach for my 300mm lens. So now when the waterlily season is at its best, I know exactly where to go!

Last summer when I was shooting waterlilies in a nearby lake semi-popular with the bathing crowd (that was just before I discovered my waterlily pond), a woman came by and we started chatting, with her being an occasional photographer as well. When I commented on the beauty of the white waterlies, she was not impressed. They are causing the lake to get overgrown, she said. But I could never blame the white waterlilies for that. If they turn lakes into marshland, fine by me - that’s how nature works. I will just admire it!

* * *

Image specs: ISO 200, f6.3, 1/250, Canon 300mm f4L w/21mm ext. tube, Moose polarizer

I just received an email from “eBay Inc” to update my account information. The mail looks fairly authentic and I can imagine a lot of people can fall for it… but looking at the source (or converting the HTML mail to plain text) of the mail reveals some interesting data (I have removed the tags):

A href=”http://www.irwans.com/auth/” target=_parent FONT face=”Verdana, Geneva, Arial, Sans-serif” color=#0000ff size=2 https://www.signin.ebay.com/aw-cgi/eBayISAPI.dll?
SignIn&ssPageName=h:h:sin:eBaySecurityMeasures /FONT /A

Heh heh. Busted!

The mail finishes with “Copyright © 2007 eBay Inc.” The phishers are probably not as far ahead of their time as they seem to wish…

The day improved later in the afternoon so I headed for the overgrown field where I had photographed purple avens in June - I figured that the place should yield some other flowers as well and was secretly hoping for thistles. I got rewarded as there were thistles-a-plenty, with bumblebees busily working on them. I set up shop close to two big thistles so that I could easily point the camera on either one of them depending on which one was getting more of the action. And then all I needed to do was to wait for the customers to arrive and there was hardly a quiet moment! A beautiful butterfly wouldn’t have hurt, but all I got was some small(ish) brown(ish) thing that I can’t find in my bug book - my butterfly identifying skills are infinitely worse than my flower ditto.
I also tried to catch a bumblebee in flight, but I couldn’t quite figure out the trick. When the bees take off to flight, they don’t seem to prepare it in any way so I always missed the moment. This one I caught by accident - I was shooting the other three bees when a fourth arrived. Yes I know the flying one is OOF but I don’t care!

Campanula rotundifolia

• English: Harebell
• Swedish: Liten blåklocka
• Finnish: Kissankello

It’s an usually cold day for July, and then it also rained a little bit. I opted to photograph some flowers close to home and these harebells couldn’t really get much closer - about 5 metres from my front door! The wind wasn’t making this easy as the harebells have a tendency to sway from the slightest whisper of a wind, but I managed to squeeze in a few sharp shots. Out of the whole bunch of harebells growing there, these two stood out - diagonally leaning to opposite directions to create a dynamic composition, with a clean background.

* * *

Image specs: ISO 200, f5.6, 1/160, Canon 300mm f4L, 31mm ext. tube

* * *

With nothing better to do, I explored the forest and found three more of the lesser butterfly orchid, all of them quite withered. It looks like I really got lucky to find the one I did at first… because it was the only one still reasonably photogenic. There are also some old remains of more of them, so had I ventured in the forest just a couple of weeks earlier, I’m sure I would’ve found these orchids quite easily. But now I will just make a note for next year…

• White Waterlily
• Harebell
• Lesser Butterfly Orchid
• Early Marsh Orchid
• Lady’s Slipper
• Lily of the Valley
• Marsh Marigold
• Cowslip
• Hairy Wood-rush
• Daphne