The Quiet Picture

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!

Since it was a windy day yesterday, I wanted to try some long exposures with wind blown objects. I had just the place in mind, a lake with a small island and a rickety old bridge inbetween. It was overcast weather and quite dark, so the polariser and ND8 filters stacked gave me a whopping 25 sec exposure at f16. I was a bit surprised to see the result - the water surface is smooth, but there wasn’t quite as much movement in the reeds as I had expected. The biggest problem with this whole concept is of course that the wind doesn’t pick up speed in these small corners quite the same way it would do in more open spaces. For example if I wanted to smooth out some serious wave action - which I’ve wanted to do for years now - we just don’t get that here. Small lakes.

When I was driving back I noticed that the sky was opening up in the west, just perfect for sunset. It turned out to be just as fine as I had hoped for and I took a whole lot of pictures, although having said that, I was also bracketing with HDR in mind. So many pictures in fact that I had no chance of processing them last night, thus a belayed post. Photomatix had a lot of trouble with these images though, it helped with the sky but the reflection in the water was a nightmare. Completely oversaturated and way too bright in relation to the sky (the reflection is always darker than the thing that is being reflected). So I took the Photomatix HDR creation to Photoshop and added a reflection from one of the original images, then erased with low opacity to reveal just a little bit of the saturated colour in the HDR beneath.

I had hoped to get some more long exposure wind pictures today, but not sure how it will work out now that it’s sunny. The pol and ND filters won’t kill enough light, one second is probably an optimistic target. I’m thinking about getting another ND8 filter for these occasions… I wish there was an ND12 or ND16 though, because I don’t like the idea of stacking three filters. Vignetting is not an issue because I’m using a crop factor camera, but that’s a lot of extra glass in front of the lens. I guess I just have to make sure it’s quality glass, so the Hoya Pro-1 ND8 will probably be in the shopping cart shortly!

The road I take to work runs in east-west direction, so now in the autumn (and again in the spring) I get the morning sun in the face when I drive to work, and setting sun when I drive home. It can create some dangerous moments when the sun completely blinds you so you can’t see where you’re driving, but it can also provide some very beautiful moments like this morning mist which was coloured orange by the rising sun. I stopped the car and started to look for some more photogenic spots than the road and luckily there’s marshland on both sides of the road at this place. So there I was, running around the half frozen bog with my feet getting increasingly wet while I was desperately trying to get the same light on the fog as what I saw on the road.

I couldn’t find any more orange mist, but I did catch the play of light. Good thing I had left home earlier than usual, I had a hunch that the morning would turn out photogenic. And you won’t find me skipping around bogs at 7am during weekends anyway!

(These images are actually from yesterday morning. I had an image processing backlog (for some strange reason) and didn’t get around to these until now.)

Since I had such a productive week last week, I dedicated a whole gallery to the pictures I took during my holiday in the mountains. Some of the them are already familiar from the blog, but most of them are new. It’s not possible to comment directly in the gallery, but this blog post is open for commenting…!

For years I’ve been looking at the Rogen Nature Reserve on my map. The region is filled with lakes in all kinds of exciting shapes and sizes and I’ve been wondering what they would look like in real life. Today was the day I was finally going to go there and see it for myself.

But a lot of things were happening before Rogen. Say for example, how about a sunrise with clear skies and clouds of mist clinging to the mountain? Yes, that ticks all the boxes so I hurried up to the nearest peak (which is just a few minutes easy hike away from the Skarvruet hostel I was staying at) and marvelled at the landscape. At first I thought that I was missing the mist, then it came back, and then went away again, and the next moment I was engulfed by it. What an amazing thing. And all the while this mysterious - or mischievous - mist was playing with the landscape, I was playing with the camera.

When I finally had had enough eye candy, I drove to the Rogen Nature Reserve. The hike to the actual lake of Rogen is 10 km and I didn’t want to squeeze a return trip in one day, but I had seen on the map that I could get to see some of the lake formations much closer, an easy 3 km hike and then back. It turned out that Rogen had more eye candy to spare - I was absolutely charmed by the place. The area is fairly flat and the few mountains that stick out are quite low, but you do get to see some higher mountains in the distance. And if any proof was needed, then this was a generous reminder that you do not need mountains for spectacular landscapes anyway. The first part of the trail (about 1.5 km) takes you through a mountain type forest with birches and pines. Then you get to the first big lake and soon after that, an exciting ridge with lakes on both sides, kind of like a miniature version of the Punkaharju ridge in Finland (most Finns should be able to relate to that). So as you follow this ridge, photo opportunities are all around. I had plenty of them, and with a little less wind I would’ve had even more. But with the stiff wind, it wasn’t really ideal for lake photography although I’m not complaining.

If you ever have a few hours to sparer when passing Tännäs, visit Rogen. You won’t regret it. In the unlikely case that you do regret it, send me hate mail. I want to know what kind of a person would not like nature at its best.

Since the day had been as good as it had, I didn’t want it to end yet. I decided to take the road south from Tännäs and then drive through to Lofsdalen to Linsell. This route is many times more scenic than 84 and I was happy to discover that they had finally fixed the road so it wasn’t nearly as bumpy as it had been. Regardless, you want to drive slowly so you don’t miss any of the scenery!

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Can a holiday be any better than this had been? My senses were filled with impressions and I even had to switch off the CD player in the car because I had been listening to silence so long that the music felt like an intrusion. So I sat in the car, with my thoughts on the experiences and adventures from the past week and a big smile on my face. Life is good.

I woke up early to catch the morning light, only it turned out that I might as well have slept in. Once again there was enough clouds in the sky to make photography just one long exercise in patience and I really broke my record while I waited for light to fall on both my foreground and background. And when it finally did, some high cloud had started to build up so the sky behind the whole thing was milky white. An hour thus wasted, I relocated myself to another mountain and found a great spot. Except, just as I had set up my tripod and camera, the light disappeared again. I waited half an hour and never got more than partial sunlight on my subject, so it was just as well that my photographer friends arrived and released me from the misery.

There are still a lot places in the Funäsdalen mountains that I haven’t discovered, but I’m getting more familiar with the area after every visit. It’s nice to be able to share that knowledge with other photogs, although it would’ve been a whole lot nicer if we had had the light with us today. Nothing wrong with the places we visited (I hope), but when the light fails like it did today, you’re left stretching your photographic skills to make anything out of it. I don’t mind overcast weather with proper clouds, and sunlight works fine, but this high cloud that blocks the blue sky and half the sunlight… for me it’s just about the worst possible.

In the evening we went to the sunset location I had found on Thursday. We were hoping against hope that the clouds would part enough to give us some colour, but for a long time it looked like my only keeper from that outing was a photo of a juniper root. Then when we were almost back at the car, we found that the wind had completely died and we had a mirror calm lake in front of us. Light was starting to fade, but we suddenly had wonderful opportunities to play with reflections, form and shape on the calm water. And then at last - colour! The last rays of the sun managed to colour the clouds red, but it was more like an ironic reminder of what could’ve been than any real sunset. We had to laugh while quickly scrambling for a last ditch attempt at catching the light. I think I prefer the juniper root…