The Quiet Picture

Last year I discovered one-flowered wintergreens (Moneses uniflora) and round-leaved wintergreens (Pyrola rotundifolia) too late to shoot them, so I was determined to get them this year. Only problem was, I wasn’t seeing either of them in the locations where I found them last year, but after exploring the forests around me, I found them elsewhere. So I got my one-flowered wintergreens, but none of the round-leaveds showed any immediate photographic potential so they are still on my “wanted” list. But as if to compensate for it, I have discovered two new wintergreen species - the green-flowered (Pyrola chlorantha) and then today, the common wintergreen (Pyrola minor)! That’s a lot more wintergreens that I was expecting. I don’t know why I haven’t seen these flowers before… my only theory is that now that I’m trying to learn botany, my eyes have finally opened up to see the flowers around me. It seems like not a weekend passes by without a new discovery. That can only be a good thing!

Finally, an overcast day with little wind! I had a list of eight flowers I should theoretically be able to shoot today, and when I finished my shooting, I had nine. Only four of them from my list, though! Amazing things happen… I wanted to shoot early marsh orchids and was happy to find them growing plentiful after last year, which seemed to have been an off-year for them. But I discovered something new - my #3 new orchid this year is a twayblade (Listera ovata)! I’m so proud I found it all by myself, after the two first ones which were shown to me.

Then I headed to the lesser butterfly orchid location to get some pictures in a more decent light than what I had on Friday. To get there, I have to walk a stretch through trail-less forest and I seem to be taking a different route every time because this time I came across something new. I had round-leaved wintergreens on my list, I didn’t shoot any such but now I got a green-flowered wintergreen instead! They were not in full bloom yet so I’ll be going back in a few days.

Having done the butterfly orchids, I dragged my gear up to the mine. There’s a patch of heath spotted orchids behind the main building and although it’s just about the most common orchid here, I don’t have any good pictures of it and this seemed like a perfect opportunity to get some. When I got there, I saw something bright orange at the edge of the forest - orange lilies growing here?! Well who am I to argue, of course I photographed them. And afterwards, find a co-operating heath spotted orchid to finish off my busy day. Except, I ended up with a common spotted orchid (Dactylorhiza maculata ssp. fuchsii) instead! This has always been something a grey area for me, I haven’t been 100% sure if I really had a common spotted orchid in my collection or not. But now, equipped with my new id skills, I am sure that I do.

Days just don’t get any better than this!

If I thought that yesterday was windy, then today was hopeless. All I could do was to scout, so I was all the more happier when I discovered some long-lost flowers nearby. I was actually looking for the round-leaved wintergreens (Pyrola rotundifolia) and found one (count them, o-n-e) where they were plentiful last year. At least it wasn’t withering like the ones I found last summer… But then when I least expected it, I came across a patch of one-flowered wintergreens (Moneses uniflora) and this was truly a joy, because I haven’t seen any of these either in the spot where I discovered them last year (when they were already withering). I had almost given up shooting this tiny flower at all, but it looks like the forest will continue to surprise me if only I take the trouble to keep looking.

Since the flowers were growing in a small depression in the forest, protected by trees, the wind wasn’t too bad and I decided to endure the mosquitoes that seemed to have flocked to this same sheltered spot. Photographing the one-flowered wintergreens is a lot like shooting cranberry flowers, minus the light!

There’s an interesting discussion over at NPN about “fixing” your subject, i.e. manipulation before pressing the shutter (as opposed to manipulation in post-processing). If any manipulation needs to be done, I prefer to do mine before I take the picture. I just like the idea of getting it right in the camera. But the dilemma is that if you love nature so much, why are you willing to sacrifice some plants for the benefit of your selfish pursuit? My take on the issue is that I am already damaging the plants just by being there. Say for example last night’s photo session with the lesser butterfly orchids. There was some tall grass creating distractions, so I carefully pulled out the grass until the subject was free. Then I set up the tripod in the middle of the forest undergrowth and kneeled down to look at the viewfinder. Just simply by doing that, I was also destroying grass and other plants (mind you, no orchids!). So how is it different that I pull out distractions around my subject, than trampling down grass while shooting? Goodness knows how many plants I kill just by walking in the forest.

My guiding light whenever I need to do some gardening around my subject is that the subject itself is holy. If the subject is a common flower that grows plentiful, then I might use the plamp to bend it a little to suit my composition. The rarer the subject, the holier it is. When I was shooting the calypso orchids in May, I made sure not to even touch the flowers!

From the nature point of view, I think it would be almost hypocritical to condemn the gardening you do for your subject because one way or another, you will end up destroying something. The only question that remains is more photographic - whether you find it morally acceptable to manipulate your pictures at all. And that’s a totally different discussion so let’s leave it for some other time!

Midsummer’s Eve is traditionally a half day off here in Sweden, but at some workplaces you get the whole day free. My workplace is one of them. Looking at the weather forecast, it was going to be the usual midsummer weather - rain. Only problem was that it was not raining in the afternoon like they said it would, and it was still not raining in the evening. The flowers need rain, and a flower photographer needs overcast skies! Add wind to the equation, and my extra day off was heading nowhere fast. Well, at least I got some scouting done. I found plenty of twinflower (Linnea borealis) locations and hopefully I can share a photo of this special flower soon. I was also chasing lesser butterfly orchids (Platanthera bifolia), I have received three location tips and then there’s of course the specimens I found myself last year. Rather worryingly, I’m not seeing any orchids in that location now. All the more delightful then that I was able to found both of the new locations I was looking for - they are in the forest around here. So in the evening when I noticed that the wind had died down and there was still plenty of light because it wasn’t even overcast let alone raining, I pulled on my bugshirt and headed for the closest butterfly orchids. Their Swedish name is “nattviol”, which literally translates to “night violet”. Exactly why they call it a violet is beyond me, but night is right - the flower turns on the scent taps at night to attract pollinators.

So while the rest of the Sweden was celebrating midsummer in a drunken party, I was celebrating the shortest night of the year in the forest, surrounded by mosquitos and lesser butterfly orchids. That’s all the party I need!

Somehow I’ve managed to avoid seeing any cranberry flowers until two years ago. Since then, I’ve somehow managed to avoid shooting them, but I was really hoping to correct that mistake this summer. It figures that when you’re looking for them, they’re nowhere to be found… So I stopped looking, and suddenly found a whole marsh full of cranberry flowers!

The cranberry (Vaccinium oxycoccus) is something of a challenge to shoot. Firstly, it’s a very small flower, growing just a few centimeters off the ground. Secondly, the flower points downwards. And thirdly, it grows in marshland. Put these three together and you’ll need your entire bag of tricks to get some keepers!

The angle finder proved once again to be an essential piece of kit. I had to put the camera on the mossbed (checking first that it wouldn’t be all too wet but I was still grateful for the L-plate which isolated the camera just a little bit) to get a level angle and it would’ve been impossible to twist my head to look in the viewfinder without sinking my face in the moss. But with the angle finder, I managed to pull the whole thing off with nothing more than wet knees and I even got my keeper cranberry flower pictures!

I’m proud to present my first photo exhibition this summer! My loosfoto.se site that is dedicated to this little village of ours has gained some momentum and I was asked if I’d be interested in exhibiting some of the photos in the local library. I thought that it would be a great opportunity to reach out to local botanists so I could get more tips of some wonderful flowers in the vicinity (and why not some other photographic ops as well) so I accepted the invitation.

The show opens on 26 June and ends on 9 August. The library is open Tuesdays and Thursdays 16:00 - 19:00.

Not sure if it’s worth coming from afar (like, Ljusdal), but if you’re already heading this way then I hope that you’ll have a chance to visit!

Welcome!

My goal (wish) for this summer was that I could find two new species of orchid. This region is favourable to many orchid species and we even have some rarities, although naturally not even close to the extent that is found on Gotland (big island off the south-east coast of Sweden). But, I’ll happily settle with whatever I can find here. I had marked off some pages in my “orchids of Sweden” book, but what happens? I hadn’t even marked the first orchid I got to see, I thought it was so unlikely that I would ever find it! Nevertheless, the calypso orchid became my 1-out-of-2 of new orchids.

So, I was still waiting for the orchid season to really begin so I can start hunting for the 2-out-of-2. But what happens? My neighbour greets me when I come back from a photo excursion, he says that he found some orchids behind his house and if I’d be interested in seeing them and maybe identify them? The first orchid he shows to me is a heath spotted orchid… but what’s that next one then? Haven’t seen any orchid like this before! After a short consultation with my flora books, I can now proudly add a new orchid to my list - Coeloglossum viride, frog orchid. Imagine that - this orchid had been growing less than 50 metres from my house all along. No one would ever have spotted it had my neighbour not cleared the forest and thus uncovered some treasures. A small green orchid… talk about camouflage!

So now I have already achieved my goal of two new orchids for the summer. Dare I hope that my good luck continues and I find (or someone helps me find) some more?

I had a look at the lady’s slippers to see if they would be blooming soon, even if I had decided that I would not be photographing them this year (just to avoid wearing out the area). Blooming indeed - they were already fading! In the past years they’ve been in their prime around midsummer, or slightly before. As if any proof was needed that we had a lousy winter and an early spring.

Or as the Swedes would say it, Humleblomster och en humla.

I was just setting up the rig when this bumblebee showed up. Knowing that it will not wait for me to finish setting up things, I fired the shutter and hoped that I got the exposure, sharpness and composition. Exposure, yes. Sharpness - good enough, but not pin sharp. Composition - yikes. All over the place, so I had to do some creative cropping in Lightroom to rescue what I could. So not a real keeper by any means, but I just didn’t have the heart to delete it. It was my first picture of the day, a serendipity at 9:01 on a warm Sunday morning. Life is good.

When I was aching for the 300mm lens, it was not only for the smooth backgrounds but also for the smooth foregrounds. An experienced photographer can quickly pick the subjects and backgrounds. I can pick them, slowly. But then you have this thing about foreground, and now suddenly you have three things to worry about: subject, background, and foreground. What makes the foreground such a complicated affair is two things - too close. That is (besides an unintentional phonetic pun) the foreground is too close to the subject, or it’s too close to the camera. Too close the subject, and the foreground will show as distracting detail. Too close to the camera, and the foreground either obstructs the whole subject, and then when you lift the camera to get a clear view of the subject, the foreground fade is so subtle that you hardly notice it at the bottom of the frame. And let’s not even start talking about the colours, highlights and shadows… you’ll find that the background is indeed a breeze to sort out, but the foreground will give you a headache every time. I’ve had the 300mm lens for 2 years now, and I don’t have a single picture which I would specifically remember for it’s awesome foreground.

Sometimes, just sometimes, you get lucky and you’ll find something that you can use to frame your subject. I was lucky.