The Quiet Picture

For my weekend excursions, I pretty much only have two directions to choose from. I can go north-west to the Kvarnsjön lake, or south-west to the Älgsjön lake (my favourite). There used to be a third option to the east down to the Loossjön lake, but I think there was a dispute with the land owner or something and the trail was closed off a couple of years ago. Now the only way to get to Loossjön is a big and boring detour so I don’t bother with it. I’ve got a few options to vary these two trail options but by and large, it’s the same week after week. Despite that, I never come home with the same pictures I took the week before. Ok yeah it’s a lot of snow and a lot of trees, but it’s not the same snow and it’s not the same trees. And sometimes it’s sunny, sometimes cloudy, and sometimes snowing. There are so many ways for the landscape to transform that a scene that I didn’t earn a second look before is now a stand-out. And then there are some scenes that I look at every time because I can see the potential but the conditions just never are quite right for a picture, so maybe, maybe, next week…

Today’s target was Kvarnsjön. The trail there was the same old same old but at the lake, I found something new. I’ve often mentioned the creek that flows out from the lake (in the east, reached from the road), but at the west end of the lake where the trail leads there’s another creek and I decided to follow it upstream. It’s been cold enough for the creek to ice over apart from a few fast flowing sections, but I was still amazed by what I was seeing. There’s so much potential that I’ll be visiting again, maybe in March when the temperatures allow the creek to stay open, and then some new snow to decorate the trees… it will look nothing short of gorgeous!

Last year I planned to get a MacBook Pro this year to replace my desktop machine. However, the old desktop is still working fine and there’s sufficient hardware to cater to my current computing needs, so I couldn’t really justify the MacBook Pro yet. The only problem I had was the harddisk, it was slow and noisy and starting to get a bit full as well. So instead of a 23K Mac I got a sub-1K HD and after carefully backing up all my files, replaced the disk.

The new disk was recognised instantly so off I went installing Windows, no problems whatsoever, in with the drivers and now I hit a snag. It started complaining about some missing files… insert disc? No idea what it meant, so in with SP3, reboot and try again. Same error. Hmm. Check disk manager – WTF?! Windows was set up on … partition J? I mean, what happened with C?! Reboot and check again… sure enough, J. Hmm.

Then I had a great idea, create another partition and install Windows on that one. Said and done. Now I had Windows on partition I. Except the really funny thing was while I was logged in Windows #2, I could see my original Windows installation on C! What is going on?? Ok check Google, there must be a way to swap the letters for the system drive. Indeed there is, so I did as instructed and… Windows #1 won’t start. Hmm. Maybe I did it wrong, so I tried it on the second Windows and… Windows #2 won’t start. Hmm.

But now I realised that my internal multi-card reader was probably messing up with the drive letters, so I disconnected everything and launched Windows setup again. Deleted the existing partitions, did a rain dance and crossed my fingers and… voilá, I had Windows on drive C. Perfect. The drivers all installed without errors as well, although I did check the drive letters rather nervously after every reboot!

The new disk is superfast and superquiet with a 750 GB capacity, so disk space will certainly not be an issue for the next 5 years or so (it will outlive the rest of the computer by far). I still have one of the old 120 GB drives as a backup and it’s interesting to compare these two disks, they are like night and day. When I copied my files from the backup to the new disk, I could hear the old disk crunching away while the new one was barely audible at all. Lovely!

Now that my desktop computer has a new lease of life, I can save up for a MacBook Pro 17″ with extra RAM, maybe next year then…

Yesterday was a windy day, so although we got a little bit of new snow the windblown debris was spoiling the landscape. Today however, it was snowing even more and the wind had quieted down enough so the landscape was looking a whole lot better. I did a snowshoe hike to the Älgsjön lake which is one of my favourite routes, there’s always something interesting along the way and then the marshland leading to the lake itself is sure to look nice. That is, unless the snowmobiles have left the trail and driven loops around the marsh, so I was a bit disappointed to hear that familiar roar of engine behind me, thinking that it’s one of these morons with no respect for the law or good manners. Or common sense, for that matter. Well, he did drive irresponsibly but at least he stayed on the trail, so I got my unspoiled marsh but no pictures because the wind had kept the trees free of snow in these open places.

Every time the trail crosses a lake, there’s a sign warning the snowmobilers about the risk of weak ice. I’ve been meaning to take a picture of one of these signs for ages now, but never gotten around to it until now. So there I was, trying to figure out the best way of including the trail and the signs in the frame, when I heard another snowmobile closing in. The timing couldn’t have been better – I didn’t even have to change my composition to get the approaching snowmobile in a perfect position. Sometimes it’s more luck than skill… I think I saw only four snowmobiles in total, so having one of them arrive right at that moment was a bit of fluke. Oh and I’m happy to say that he was one of the responsible drivers as well, not tearing up the engine or the trail!

The scenery looked frightfully bad after the warm temperatures earlier this week, so I didn’t even take the camera with me yesterday when I went for a walk. I did some scouting instead and hiked to the Kvarnsjön lake to look at the creek running from it and found a lot of open water and very nice ice decoration around. So today’s project was photographing all that, except it was snowing when I woke up. Needless to say that all that beautiful clear ice was now decidedly less so. Already when I was taking the pictures, I knew it was all bad and sure enough I trashed the bulk of them. Just an excercise in composition.

Oh don’t I wish I had relied on Kvarnsjön to produce like it always does, and taken the camera with me yesterday…

Full moon tomorrow but the weather might not co-operate, so I wanted to catch the moonset today as it coincides nicely with sunrise. Only problem was the solid bank of clouds in the north-west so I didn’t stand a chance. But since I was already out and about, I went for the sunrise instead and now I got seriously lucky – cold mist. By far the best sunrise I’ve photographed this winter and to think that I would’ve completely missed this orange mist had I not been out in search of the moon. You win some, you lose some.

When I got home, a surprise was waiting for me. I have seen very little of the squirrels so far, but now one of them had finally come for brunch. So I just swapped the zoom lens for 300mm and got some keepers even if the light wasn’t ideal. I hope I will soon see more birds as well… they are only making short visits so it’s no point even setting up the tripod.

In the afternoon I had high hopes of catching a nice sunset to go with the nice sunrise. Just a little bit of cloud that might provide additional colour, but the colour never really materialised. While I was waiting for something interesting to happen with the sunset, I glanced behind me and saw the moon rising (moonrise already at 13:30, but it takes a while to work its way high up in the sky). Now I was racing the time to find a good spot for the moon before the sky got too dark, and I got lucky – again. A row of spruces on the edge of a clearing so I could put the moon right above the treetops. The picture is a bit misleading, really – the moon was much much higher on the sky than it appears here, but who cares. I got my moon.

I had hoped for a moonset and sunset… but I got a sunrise and a moonrise instead. And you know what? There’s no way I could’ve done anything better even if my plans had played out perfectly!

* * *

The post title is a kind of a play on words, a private joke. You’ll need to watch Soapdish to get it…

Wasted day off… the sunrise disappeared behind clouds and the snow disappeared from the trees by the gusty winds. I couldn’t have been less inspired to do anything but I finally forced myself out to scout for a certain location. Having done that, I just hoped that the sunset would be interesting because the sky was partly clear. So I went out about an hour before sunset, only to find out that it had started snowing while the sun still shone through a gap in the clouds. It was surreal… I had hardly any time at all to find a spot, so I settled with any composition. At first the sun was still too bright and I tried bracketing for HDR but after a minute or so the sun had faded enough to get it all in one frame. Creating a HDR with these big snowflakes flying around the frames would probably have been impossible anyway (I didn’t even try, just ditched everything but this last frame which worked on its own). It wasn’t really even a sunset… it was just an orange globe quickly fading behind the clouds.

A completely forgettable day, but a few glorious minutes to remember.

Jim M. Goldstein has a blog project for sharing the best pictures of 2008. I haven’t done this “best of” thing in the previous years, but now that I’ve finally started grading pictures in Lightroom, it’s easy to create all sorts of collections so I put together a gallery of my 10 favourite pictures of 2008.

As for the very favourite, it’s difficult to pick one. The latest always seems to be the greatest. In retrospect, it changes… but I will go on a limb and say that the Cassiopeia image is my #1. Everything just came together perfectly for it – new concept (for me) of looking up through the tree crowns, the trees covered with snow in windstill conditions, almost full moon lighting them up, and learning the technique for exposing these pictures. Once you have a new idea or learn a technique you can only keep refining it, but using it for the first time with success is always special.

One thing that sticks out from 2008 is that it was the most productive year I’ve had so far, even though I’m much more critical about my pictures now than I was a few years ago. I think I’ve also managed to maintain a better standard than previously, which means that I’m still on a steep learning curve even if it’s not always as obvious as it was in the early years. But then again, being a photographer is a process of constant learning, otherwise it wouldn’t be any fun!

I’m trying to apply a new strategy to my weekends. Normally I always have a slow morning with an extended breakfast, then go out on an excursion and spend the rest of the day wasting time. It means that I’m always missing the best light (althought in the dead of winter, every light is good light) so I thought I should now try to be out at sunrise, spend the noon at home and then go out for the sunset. And in case you haven’t noticed, I’ve sort of succeeded – there’s been more sunrise and sunset images in this blog than usual. But now I have a problem with the weather, it’s just simply too good. With all these clear skies, every sunrise and sunset is identical and the only difference I can make is to find a new location. Honestly, can you even tell the difference between sunrise and sunset if I didn’t say so?

It has also been the coldest day of the winter so far. Even the tripod was frozen and I struggled to operate the leg locks. And every once in a while I had to stop to rub my face to get circulation going again, it was -17°C when I got home, but in some cold spots while I was out I’m sure it was below -20°C. So at long last, proper winter temperatures so I shouldn’t complain. It’s just that photography becomes a very complicated procedure and I quickly decided that there was nothing about the sunset worth staying around.

Another “new” thing I tried today is skiing. I haven’t written anything about skiing this winter, for the simple reason that I haven’t skiied much – just one short trip early in the season to discover that my blister problem hasn’t miraculously disappeared over the summer. But now I found a new blister-prevention method so I wanted to try it, unfortunately it didn’t work though. The heel was already hurting after 2 km. By the time I got home, I knew I had a blister there and the worst part was that it had developed under the tape. I wasn’t looking forward to removing the tape, but somehow I managed to do it without tearing out the loose skin in the process.

It’s official now, I’m done with skiing. It’s a real shame because I really like it, but not enough to endure the pain. The good news is that I have found an alternative (painless) method of taking me around the trails, I will write more about that in the future!

I finally got a decent picture of Orion. An almost half moon is lighting up the foreground, but it should be looking even better on Monday or Tuesday when the moon is getting fuller. If only we get clear skies, that is – it was supposed to be sunny today but the clouds didn’t go away until at sunset. Anyway, I need the extra light so I can reduce the ISO. I don’t know what the noise reduction kept doing because it sure didn’t remove the noise in these ISO 250 images. Sometimes I do wish I had a high-end full frame camera… Or dare I hope for a revolutionary new noise reduction technique (that actually works) in Canon 60D?

There was certainly no lack of snow in December and the two warm days and even some rain only managed to dent the snowcover but not lose it. All that snow has taken a toll on the trees though and when the temperatures crept above zero, the snow became too heavy for many trees. So now we have a lot of fallen trees, then there are some that are just simply cracked in half, and others have lost some branches. But it sure was pretty when it was at its best.

Observations missing for a week while I was on holidays.

Temperature (High): 1°C
Temperature (Low): -13°C
Temperature (Average): -6°C

Barometer (High): 1036 mbar
Barometer (Low): 975 mbar
Barometer (Avg): 1012 mbar

Total of sunny days: 5

Snow cover (High): 43 cm
Snow cover (Low): 23 cm
Snow cover (Avg): 35 cm
New snow: 60 cm
Days with snowfall: 13

Rain: 3 mm*
Days with rain: 1

* Not quite sure about the rain – I forgot to put my rain meter out. But 3mm should be in the ballpark anyway.

2007
January 2008
February 2008
March 2008
April 2008
May 2008
June 2008
July 2008
August 2008
September 2008
October 2008
November 2008