The Quiet Picture

I have uploaded a new flower gallery on minnak.net. I was going to update all the galleries and make some other changes to the website, but instead I wasted my time with a minor tweak to the gallery page.

The tweak concerned the rounded corners – the right side corners now move with the gallery frame. Originally I had used a 900px wide background gif, but that doesn’t scale so the right corners disappeared if the window was too small. I’m no coding genius so it took me quite a while, but in the end I figured out a way to get scalable corners which work in Firefox and in IE and hopefully in other browsers as well. They should work anyway, it’s all done with simple CSS. When I had finally figured it out, I found out that browsers interpret the code differently – the lower left corner which looked fine in Firefox, displayed 1 pixel too high in IE, which left me a weird line in the corner. I ended up positioning the corner gif at -1px and now IE shows it correctly, and if it’s 1 pixel too low in other browsers it’s not very easy to see anyway.

So, the whole scalable corner thing, you’d think it’s easy to do and I’m just making a big deal out of it. With my (lack of) coding skills though, it’s a whole evening spent with Google and trial and error and then finally a moment of triumph when it works!

I have started to haul over the image galleries on minnak.net from manual html coded pages to automatic flash galleries as kindly provided by Lightroom. Not sure if you’ve noticed, but I haven’t updated any content on minnak.net for quite some while, there’s two major reasons for it: firstly, I publish new images every week on this blog, and secondly, simple as the code is, it’s still a boring chore to manually edit the html to create the image pages in the old galleries.

So far I’ve changed the Finland and Fauna galleries. I’m not 100% happy about the gallery template, but that’s all I can do with the settings available. It’s not even possible to change the font, but I hope there are some additional tweaks in future releases. I would also prefer another kind of layout where the text can be placed separately from the thumbnails, as they are bundled in the current version. My coding skills end with simple html and css, so I won’t even attempt to hack the Simpleviewer template!

Nags aside, the gallery does fulfill the most important function which is to display the images with the least possible effort from me. All I have to do is add an image to a Lightroom collection, make sure the required IPTC information is filled in and then upload the whole thing to my site – Lightroom can even do that! This means more frequent updates to my website so visitors don’t have to wade through my blog entries to find some random pictures.

And last but not least, the pictures will now be presented against a black background, which works much better than white with most images!

This was the warmest day of the year so far, and I wanted to make the most of it. The first task for today was to shoot some flowers before the winded picked up.

After that, time to start my cycling season. The first impression when I picked up the bike was that it was light – no trouble lifting this one off the ground… My thigh muscles were not quite happy about pedalling up the hills, but I wasn’t entirely dead beat when I finished my trip so it’s good news.

Later in the afternoon I swapped the bicycle for a motored version and took out the Tricker for a longer ride. I wasn’t sure how comfortable it would be to ride for 30+ km at one stretch, but it turned out to be just fine – I had mostly worried that my hands would go numb, but there were no such problems. In fact, the biggest worry turned out to be my cornering (no surprises there, really). When came into a sharp curve, I was horrified to notice that I was heading awfully straight in relation the curve in the road. Problem was of course that I wasn’t leaning enough, but I had enough presence of mind to release the gas so I managed to stay on the tarmac, if with the smallest of margins. The funny thing about this curve is that I always seem to misjudge it – winter and summer, I find myself breaking in the middle of the bend when I’ve once again driven too fast into it. And it’s not like I don’t know that the curve is there! Anyway, this one almost-mishap aside, the ride went smoothly and it feels like I’m getting more and more confident on the bike after every trip. At one point I even caught myself thinking about something completely else than the bike and the road!

I was out looking for pale pasque flowers today, after a tip I received. The place was the SÃ¥nghussjön lake a few km south from Färila, I’ve never been there before but I’m glad I got there now. When I found the flowers though, it was all for naught – they were over.

The forest in this part of the lake is open pine forest, my favourite type of forest. These forests don’t have a lot of flowers to offer (lichens and mosses are plentiful though), but the few there are just stand out all the better (for example, I saw some tiny buds of green flowered wintergreens, and lesser butterfly orchid leaves, so I guess they will blooming in just a few weeks). The simplicity of an open pine forest appeals my eye, and it’s very easy to walk around thanks to the lack of vegetation. So I walked up and down the lake shore and then into the forest, hoping that I’d find some more of the pale pasque flowers, but I didn’t strike lucky. After a while though I didn’t care – it was a warm and sunny evening by a calm lake, with just the lonely call of a distant loon for company. And then when the wind picked up a little bit and I found my way to the beach, I could hear the waves gently rolling in the sand.

I didn’t find any photographs, but I did find something even better – peace for the soul.

The weather forecast can say otherwise, but for me this was a moment of summer.

Yup, that’s right. Someone has actually stolen an orchid – the rarest plant in Finland, at that.

Suomen harvinaisin kasvi varastettiin

The rare (and now stolen) orchid is a western marsh orchid (Dactylorhiza majalis). It is rare here in Sweden as well.

For the benefit of those who don’t understand Finnish, the article says that the theft was discovered by ornithologists visiting the home of this orchid, a remote island in Dragsfjärd. The site has a sign stating that this is the only flower of its kind in Finland and should not be disturbed. The theft has been reported to the police.

The thieves have thus erased this species from the vegetation map in Finland.

I’ve read about all sorts of things being stolen, but a rare orchid… I’m trying to wrap my brain around it. If you love orchids, then you should have respect for them. If you don’t love orchids, why steal one?

People are weird.

Equipment doesn’t make a photographer, but sometimes a change can serve as a source of inspiration. In the past when I’ve photographed the daphne, I’ve found it a bit of a challenge – whatever I do, it’s just flowers on a stick. Last year I skipped the daphne entirely, but this time I wanted to see if I can make something out of it with the 150mm macro. It is the 4th lens I’ve used on the daphne – if this didn’t work, then it’s time to give up on the flower!

I got lucky – I found this group of three blooms in the middle of the branch, so I could use the “stick” as a diagonal running through the frame. Every time you find a group of three of anything, composition is a breeze – three is the magic number! Add a diagonal and you really can’t go wrong.

* * *

I also got out for a spin with the Tricker. I took it all the way to the Voxnan river, trying to get used to the speed. I found my comfort level at 70 kph, but I’m sure I’ll be checking out the top speed (a not-so-whopping 110 kph) by the end of the summer. Then again, I didn’t get this bike for the speed. I got it for the forest roads, and the top speed becomes irrelevant!

As far as Aprils go, this was fairly typical. The month started with a period of snowfall, but the temperatures kept above freezing during the day so the snow didn’t stay around for long. From the month’s highest of 51.5 cm it only took 16 days to go to zero. There were still patches of snow around in shaded places at the end of the month, and the lakes are mostly covered with ice. Towards the end of the month we got a long sunny period and the spring flowers started to come up for real.

Some other signs of spring:

• 4th: first cranes in Korskrogen
• 6th: coltsfoot
• 19th: a queen wasp sighting
• 24th: the crane couple arrives to Norrbyn
• 24th: hepatica
• 25th: snow cover reaches 0 cm at my snow meter
• 27th: pied wagtail sighting, lupine leaves, siberian scillas
• 30th: wood anemone buds

* * *

Temperature (High): 15°C
Temperature (Low): -2°C
Temperature (Average): 5°C

Barometer (High): 1018 mbar
Barometer (Low): 992 mbar
Barometer (Avg): 1009 mbar

Total of sunny days: 7

Snow cover (High): 51.5 cm
Snow cover (Low): 0 cm
Snow cover (Avg): 28 cm
New snow: 23 cm
Days with snowfall: 9

Rain: 8 mm
Days with rain: 7

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2007
January 2008
February 2008
March 2008