The Quiet Picture

Since there’s been some talk about me being a photo purist who doesn’t like manipulate pictures, I thought I should confess to some photo fixing every once in a while. The real issue I’ve been preaching about is disclosure – manipulate all you want, but I think it’s only fair that the manipulation is disclosed. Except, if you’ve done the manipulation before you took the picture, so I’m letting some double standards show through. And let’s not forget one very important thing – sometimes in nature photography it really is better to do the manipulating on the computer than in the wild because you should never try to bend nature to your will… well, except gardening out some grass straws. I mean, we mow lawns, right? Oh well, anyway, I’ll try to get to the point now.

When I took this picture of the bear cub, I knew that it was going to be a close call to fit it in the frame. The 40D viewfinder doesn’t have 100% coverage so I hoped that although the paw was clipped in the viewfinder it would be whole in the actual picture and indeed it was – except that the claws just touched the bottom edge. This is no good, but I didn’t want to throw the image away because I didn’t have any good bear cub images in my catalogue and this one was otherwise the best frame I got in the session. Then I noticed that I had another image where there’s more rock visible at the bottom, so I just simply took a slice of the rock and added it to problem image and then with some careful cloning and erasing made it fit seamlessly. Then I cropped the image to 5:7, added vignetting, adjusted curves, selectively saturated and de-saturated and used a gradient…

So what you see is not what I got, but thanks to Photoshop I got a keeper of a bear cub anyway!

With that said, I do strive to create the image in the camera. But if I fail, I can cheat!

I like to read* magazines. I especially like to read about photography, nature and outdoors activities and I like it best when all three are combined. When I moved to Sweden, I started reading the Swedish Foto magazine. It didn’t take me long to get fed up – I thought that the quality of pictures was horrible and the other content in the mag didn’t exactly inspire me either. So I started subscribing to Camera Natura which definitely had the quality I wanted, but it also had longwinded interviews that wore me out after a while.

Every time I had a chance, I would buy English photography mags like Practical Photography and Photography Monthly (they are not available in Ljusdal) and I was happy with those, although it seemed to gnaw me that a lot of pages were wasted on gear reviews that were irrelevant to me, I mean I’m not loyal to Canon just for the sake of being loyal, it’s just that I’ve invested a lot of money in the system so I only have a passing interest at best for other manufacturers’ products. Then I found out about EOS Magazine and thought that it would be just the ticket – a photography magazine dedicated to Canon! But I really don’t need articles that explain what the different letters and symbols mean in the mode dial (yes they really do write about that) so I dropped EOS Magazine and subscribed to Photography Monthly instead. I’ve been relatively happy with PM but it is a British mag with content that reflects the country, so I’m starting to get a bit frustrated with all those wonderful locations they write about – I’d loved it 9 years ago, but now I live in Sweden so the Top 100 Greatest Landscape Locations in Britain are pretty much lost on me. And it’s not just that, but as a strict nature photographer it doesn’t work for me to have the mag filled with specials on sports and portrait photography and everything in between.

While my search for a good photography magazine has been going on, I’ve also tried other mags. I subscribed to Outside but got tired with those translated articles about locations and activities that had no relevance to me, so I swapped it for Utemagasinet. The location reports are close to home, but I have a limited interest in different outdoor activities so mostly I just skip those canoeing and ice skating specials and wait for the hiking and cross-country skiing articles, and there’s not enough of them to keep me subscribing to the mag.

So now I’m running out magazines, but thank goodness for blogs! Blogs seem to offer me the content I want, although I’m still old-fashioned enough to prefer printed material. So if some of the blog content could be transferred on paper, then the ideal magazine would be something of a cross between Photography Monthly and Utemagasinet. It’s all about nature and the location – I’m interested in the stories behind the pictures, kinda the way I write my own blog. My writing is mostly a lot about nothing so it won’t hold up to any closer scrutiny, but this country is full of capable photographer/writers who could easily fill out a mag after mag with wonderful stories. I don’t need longwinded interviews of the photographer to find out who they are – I’d rather find out who the photographer is through the pictures they take and stories they write themselves. Just like the blogs where you can read a photographer tell a story about their latest photo trip with the pictures they took, and some technical information related to get an insight on how it was created. For example, a photographer goes for a week long hike, how do they solve the issue of dragging photo gear with them, and how do they tackle the weather conditions? Or it could be a photographer in search of a rare flower or animal, do they find what they’re looking for and did they get the picture? This ideal mag should also contain equipment reviews, but not test chart pictures and pixel peeping because the Internet is already full of those. What really matters is how the equipment performs on the field; how do different photographers experience the gear? And then you could top up this mag with some tips for technique and help columns where experienced photographers can give advice to newbies, and provide constructive critique to readers’ photos (like most photo mags do already).

See what I meant about writing a lot about nothing? I just managed to use 800 words for what really amounts to “I haven’t found any magazine that I like but I do enjoy reading blogs”.

Don’t even get me started on photography forums…

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* Since I like to read, this podcasting craze hasn’t caught on me yet. I rarely watch anything at YouTube. I also skip the videos that many sites now post instead of written articles. You’ve got to read and write, people, or in 10 years we’ll just be a big bunch of illiterates!

Since I had a lot of bird activity at the feeder again, I decided to zoom with my feet and set up shop just over 3 metres from the feeder. This meant that I was out in the open and the great tits seemed to mind it, but the smaller birds and nuthatches kept happily feeding and I kept happily snapping. I missed a few ops when the darn shutter wouldn’t fire, but overall, I’m thrilled with the results. Of course I still needed to crop the images to fix the composition, but now I was getting over 8MP files instead of half the size as I did earlier. Now why didn’t I think of this years ago?

The most exciting visitor today was the crested tit though – and this time I got a picture! It didn’t come to the bird feeder but stayed where I had left food for the squirrels, it’s a more protected location that the bird feeder so I think the crested tits prefer the cover. Or then they’re just shy like the great tits.

But the prize for the most exciting picture goes to the willow tit taking off! I still can’t believe I actually got it… of course, I was only trying to take a picture of a bird sitting pretty on the branch, but these things happen in a fraction of a second so by the time I pressed the shutter, it had spread its wings. So it’s definitely a lucky shot, but on the other hand, I doubt even the pros nail these without some element of luck involved. It’s too quick to react when it happens, so you have to anticipate the action and leave the rest to the motordrive. Or like in my case, just simply fire the shutter at the wrong time!

The idea I mentioned yesterday was about the crescent moon. I knew it was going to be very low in the horizon so I had to pick my place very carefully – had to make sure that my location had a higher altitude that the landscape in front of me. At first I thought that I was going to miss the whole opportunity because of clouds, but luckily there was an opening in the south so the moon was visible. The result wasn’t the kind of crescent moon picture I dream about, that would require the moon higher in the sky and a nice colour gradient like those afterglow pictures from yesterday. Full moon is much easier than a crescent… but I’ll keep trying. Oh and in case you’re wondering where the crescent is in this picture, it’s low in the sky in the middle of the empty space on the left. It’s not easy to see it, not even for me and I know where it is, LOL!

I had made a lot of plans today but as it often happens, I didn’t do everything I had planned. Despite this it turned out to be a very productive day, I got squirrels and birds and landscapes and close-ups, all in glorious sunshine and then sunset and dusk. I even did some scouting for an idea I have, we’ll see if I can make anything out of it tomorrow.

So the squirrels are back, this is good news because so far I had only seen a glimpse of one so I was getting worried that they don’t like the new setup. I didn’t get any keepers from the new perch though but the winter is long so I’m bound to have a photo op some time in the next few months.

The crested tit also paid a short visit, unfortunately I didn’t have a camera at hand right then and by the time I was ready, the bird was gone. I hope it will stick around this year.

Since it’s been clear skies all day, the sunset wasn’t going to be anything special but it’s always worth trying for the starburst effect when the sun is disappearing below the horizon. But the colour gradient you get after the sun has set is even better – the colours really pop out when you underexpose a little bit, all you need is a good silhouette and then compose around it.

Winter is on schedule – got the first snow on the 29th. It will of course melt away soon but here’s hoping for more snow later.

It was a very wet beginning for the month and we got 68mm rain in the first 5 days. The last 5 days it was cold.

Temperature (High): 9°C
Temperature (Low): -3°C
Temperature (Average): 3°C

Total of sunny days: 3

Snow cover (High): 1 cm
Snow cover (Low): 0 cm
Snow cover (Avg): 0 cm
New snow: 1 cm
Days with snowfall: 2

Rain: 88 mm
Days with rain: 17

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I was looking at the Wildlife Photographer of the Year winner images and noticed something interesting – three of the winning bird images are taken in Finland (by foreign photographers). That got me thinking, we have largely the same kind of wildlife and same kind of sceneries here in Sweden, but Finland has succeeded much better in marketing itself as the last true wilderness in Europe and has gained quite a reputation among professional photographers. I think it’s just about the #1 brown bear location, for example.

It’s a real pity that Swedish entrepreneurs have not understood that wolves and bears can be a real asset to the country, and not something you should get rid of as soon as possible.