The Quiet Picture

It looked like I would be in luck – clear skies in the afternoon. Then at sunset, clouds in the west. Argh! No problems to see the moon and Venus, but with the clouds in the horizon, the orange gradient was conspicuous in its absence. When’s my next chance? Hmm… 4 weeks from now, actually. Except Venus will be gone. A quick check in the Sky Calendar reveals that Venus will be a tought subject next winter – it follows the sun too close, and it’s not nearly as bright as it has been this winter. Oh well, can’t win ‘em all. I guess I’ve said that before…

Yesterday was half overcast, but when I came home the sky was starting to clear and Venus and the crescent moon were shining brightly in south-west. Photographing the crescent is one of my ambitions, so I set out although it was a little bit too late – there was very little light left in the horizon. Just half an hour earlier would’ve made a world of difference! The cool thing about the crescent is that it looks more like a full moon here. The 6-sec exposure picked up the shaded part, you can even make out all the moon features in the full-res image. If I’m really lucky, I’ll have another chance today, even if the moon and Venus won’t be this nicely aligned today.

Today I was notified that someone had stolen my pictures, this is the first time I’ve known of it to happen. The person who emailed me had several of her pictures displayed on this same site, but she asked if I could help in stopping the thief permanently. The site is full of images ripped from all over the place, the copyright information is clearly visible in most of them! I was told that even the horoscopes that this person is posting on the blog are ripped from another site. Apparently, no original thoughts in his head… Anyway, I found that my image was hotlinked directly from my site, so the fastest way to stop this unauthorised use was to use .htaccess.

This is what it looked like before:

And this is with hotlinking blocked:

If you’re a photographer, maybe you want to check the site yourself…  at the moment of posting this, my image (or the warning) is on linked page but it’s a blog so the page number may change in time.

Although I’m taking measures to stop this, it doesn’t mean that I’m really terribly worried. I don’t make money with photography so somebody using my pictures without permission is not ripping me off financially – it’s just ripping off, period. It’s the principle of it that bugs me, if someone asked me if they could use my images non-commercially, I’d most likely permit them to do it. But using without permission, I’m offended.

I read an article today where they speculated that filesharing is so common these days that people don’t understand anymore what intellectual property really is. So even though they hear everywhere in the media that downloading music and movies and software is illegal, their moral compass is so skewed by the ubiquity of filesharing that they don’t consider they’re doing anything wrong. But you know what? Just because everybody is doing it, it doesn’t make it right. Now I’ve experienced first hand what it feels like to be at the losing end of copyright infringement, and I can’t say I enjoyed it much. Revenge however, that was sweet…

I’m putting Loos on the blog map!

The scenery hasn’t really improved much from last weekend. It’s been snowing a little bit, but the wind picked up today so I didn’t nurse any false hopes for being productive today. Sure enough, I was nearly at the end of my snowshoe hike when the first real opportunity came up. With the wind picking up the snow from the roof of this old storage building, I wanted to see if I could capture it at the right moment. I waited for about 15 minutes, shot a couple of dozen frames and then gave up, but it was good enough to inspire me to go to the homestead museum with snow and old buildings a-plenty. Alas, no photogenic whirling snow, but my eye caught this detail instead. Or did it catch me?

Internetworld har gjort en webbhotelltest, och det visade sig att mitt webbhotell Cliche fick sämsta betyg. Jag har kanske haft tur då för jag har inte upplevt några som helst problem. Hur många år har jag haft minnak.net nu… fyra? Under den tiden har jag behövt kontakta supporten två gånger och fick snabb svar både gånger, först när jag behövde MySQL aktivering får att installera WordPress och sen när jag reggade en ny domän och ville peka om den. Fast ompekningen gick inte som jag ville, men det var mitt fel – det stod ju i klartext hur de kan peka om, och det jag ville göra var bestämt nånting annat. Så nu äger jag en domän som gör ingenting… tror inte jag förnyar den… Hursomhelst alltså, trots dåligt betyg från Internetworld så skulle jag ändå kunna rekommendera cliche.se. Kanske hjälper det att jag jobbar med IT så det här att man inte får något hjälp med att installera WordPress osv gör mig inget, och kontrollpanel har jag faktiskt inte saknat heller – jag tänkte inte ens på saken tills jag läste om det i testet. Uptime tycker jag får godkänt också.

Jaja, kanhända att har jag alldeles för låga krav då.

OBS! Jag har ingen annan knytning till cliche.se än att vara kund… tyckte bara att det var lite småroligt att se hur cliche misslyckades med nästan vartenda delmoment i testen. Your mileage may vary!

P.S. Titta jag lyckades med att skriva (nästan) hela inlägget på svenska, borde kanske prova på finska också nån gång får att se hur det känns!

I’ve mentioned a few times how I like planning (I probably never even do half of what I plan, so the secret is to plan a lot). I’m always a season or two ahead in my plans, so now I have a plan for the summer. The idea is to try to find something to concentrate my efforts on, and also have other goals so I don’t get a tunnel vision. For example, last summer I searched for the orchids (and succeeded above all expectations, I’m really happy!), year before that I looked for flowers in general and in 2006 I documented the village of Loos.

This is what I hope will happen in 2009:

Motorbike. Lots of it. I wanted to ride the bike a lot last summer, but I found out that weather-wise the comfort zone is really narrow so the weather spoiled the plans more often than not (too hot, too cold, too rainy, etc). And sometimes when the weather was suitable, I had other plans. But now I know that suitable weather must be used for motorbiking and nothing else.

Mountains. I want to explore the mountains, and naturally I also want to combine hiking with photography. I will spend my summer holidays in the mountains and hopefully also do some weekend trips (day hikes only, though).

Waterfalls. The theme for the summer is waterfalls. I’ve done a lot of research and found quite a few falls I want to check out, the good thing about these is that the season is very long so if I don’t catch all of them in the summer, I can continue in the autumn. Waterfalls and autumn colours play nice together anyway.

So these are my main goals, it doesn’t mean that I’ll abandon flower photography, it just means that I’ll make an extra effort for these new goals the same way I made an extra effort to find orchids last summer. As long as I can bother to lift my butt off the lazy chair, there’ll be plenty of time for flowers!

There is one bad thing about these plans though. I’ll be releasing a lot of CO₂, so I will buy myself a clear conscience in the form of emission rights. I don’t know if they make any actual difference, but I need the peace of mind of knowing that I at least tried to make up for my sins.

Anyone interested in mountain and/or waterfall trips in Dalarna and Härjedalen? I’ve got the maps…

There’s snow and then there’s snow. The snow we have at the moment is not good for hiking, it’s very dry and powdery so even the snowmobile trails are soft. You waste a lot of energy in sinking and sliding with every step instead of going forward. So there’s something to be said for above zero temperatures in the winter, it would be nice to get a solid foundation for the trails. March, at the latest.

Another thing I noticed about the snow is that it’s getting wrinkled. Can’t remember I’ve ever seen such a phenomenon before, but it looks like when the snow comes down cold and airy and then starts to settle down, it can get wrinkled. Not even the Eskimos have a word for wrinkled snow…

The landscape looks a bit scabby at the moment with these odd clumps of snow on the trees, so I’m not really inspired even if it was a gloriously sunny day. Just when I got out in the afternoon though, the clouds started to drift in and I ended up doing my hike in muddy light and was about to write off the day photographically speaking. But then, right at sunset, the sun came through a gap in the horizon and although it didn’t create any nice lightshow in the clouds, I did get to catch the last light on a snowcovered pine.

[This (very long) story starts on Saturday 7 February]

It’s full moon on Monday and the moonset/moonrise co-incides with sunrise/sunset. It can only mean one thing – I have a day off and I’m heading to the mountains. I’ve booked myself to the Messlingen hostel and it’s snowing, so it’s almost a repeat of my trip from last year. Although a year ago the skies cleared for the D-day, we’ll see if I can get lucky twice.

Saturday

On the way to Funäsdalen, there’s one photo-op just before Hede, I’ve driven past it too many times without stopping. Now I remedied that and took my pictures. When I started the car, I found out that the right rear wheel had locked. I got it running again after reversing a little, then forward and reverse a bit more. After a fuel stop in Funäsdalen it almost did it again, this time only with the warning lights though and the same trick fixed it again.

It was still only noon, so plenty of time for a hike. I had initially planned to do scouting, but the snowfall made it impossible, there’s just simply no views to look at in any direction. But I wasn’t discouraged, I can work with mountains and I can work with snowfall so I was bound to find something. And indeed I did, lovely mountain birches at the treeline, and then just when I was wondering if I would dare to hike to the peak of the Ramundberget mountain despite the weather, I saw an avalanche warning sign so I prompty turned back.

When I got back to the car at Walles, I got a nasty surprise – both wheels were stuck and there was no amount of coaxing I could do to get the wheels spinning. Crap. Then I had a real stroke of luck and a guy in an SUV came by, I explained the problem to him and he towed me to the road, where we hoped that the wheels would be jolted to action. Alas, no, but there was a fully equipped garage just a few metres away so the good samaritan pulled my car to it so we could give the wheels some TLC with a heat gun and a sledgehammer. I was ever so happy to get the car working again… but as I was driving down, the anti-spin and ABS lights came back on. I got down ok though, and then once again I had to do some reversing and forwarding to get it all working again.

At that point I just wanted to get to Messlingen. There would’ve been some daylight left, but I wasn’t feeling like stopping anywhere in case the wheels would strike again. The hostel turned out to be very cozy indeed and I was the only guest so I had the place to myself, a pleasant surprise after all those nasties I had today.

Sunday

The snowfall continued, so there was still no point to try to do any scouting. I took the snowmobile trail from Messlingen towards Storsjö, because it was the shortest way to get above the treeline. Once I had hiked all the way up there, a snowmobiler stopped and asked if I needed a lift. Very kind of him, but a bit too late…

After lunch, I wanted to drive down to Funäsdalen and check out a few places. Except, both wheels were well and firmly frozen again. I was disgusted. And I promise you, I did not have handbrake on overnight if that’s what you’re thinking! I got a hammer from the reception but it wasn’t enough to release the wheels (note to self: buy a sledgehammer). After some thinking, I decided that my best option was to call road rescue and have the car towed to a warm garage in Funäsdalen, it will have to thaw out completely because otherwise the problem will just repeat itself like it has done. When I spoke with the people at the reception, and then with the car rescue guy, I found out that I’m not alone with this problem. Apparently a certain type of brake is more prone to these problems so when there is so much snow getting into the wheels, melting and freezing, you just get problems.

I hate my car. Ok fine, I don’t really hate my car. But I sure don’t like it either.

Monday

First thing after breakfast, I called a taxi to take me to Funäsdalen to get my car. The rear wheels were bare now – I can actually see inside, wow! But when I pulled out, the infernal beeping started again warning me about something (no warning lights were on), I guess the car didn’t appreciate all the beating it received yesterday. With every beep, I was missing that sledgehammer more and more… but as I persisted on driving along, the beeping finally stopped. I got to the hardware store and bought myself an axe (in lieu of a sledgehammer).

I seemed to be on a string of bad luck, because the snowing continued. Momentarily in the morning it had seemed like it would clear, but nix. And not only falling snow, but there was also a heavy wind whipping the trees, blowing a whole lot of snow in the air. Sometimes I can be a real optimist though, so I took the snowcat from Bruksvallarna to Kariknallen. When we got on top, I wondered if this was just another one of my stupid decisions – the wind was horrible, impossible to face it because the snow was just like small needles. Thankfully for the most of the way down the wind was on my back, so it wasn’t that bad. Lousy for pictures though, you can imagine the visibility under these conditions.

But let’s be positive for a moment. I don’t have any regrets for missing all the scouting, because the moonrise wasn’t anything to photograph anyway. Too many clouds, even if the sky was finally starting to clear.

By the evening, the sky really was clear apart from a few clouds in the horizon all around. Photographing the night sky with mountains inthe foreground had been one of my goals, but I didn’t feel like driving to a location now. Firstly, the wind was still stiff and if I felt it here among the trees, then it would be really bad in the open places where I’d need to go. I drove through snow drifts today and it wasn’t fun. Secondly, I have to re-build my trust relationship with my car. The prospect of getting stuck in the middle of the night in the middle of nowhere was not appealing!

However, after I saw Orion and Sirius from my room window, I just had to do something so I set out on foot. Finding suitable spots was hard though and I had second thoughts about driving somewhere better, but in the end I just didn’t dare. I’ve had enough mishaps for this trip already.

Tuesday

Officially, I’m at work today. But since it hasn’t been exactly relaxing when half my mind has been occupied with whether or not the car will move, I figured that this was my last chance to get anything out of my mini-vacation (I did get an ok from my boss!). But when it rains, it pours – they called from work last night. Nothing I could do, I’m really sorry, but in the morning I was probably more stressed than I would’ve been without this holiday.

The good news? The car was fine. All four wheels spinning, I think it’s a great feature in a car. And it was also clear skies, so I had a chance to see the moonset. I watched it go down, and then waited for the sun to come up, and I was freezing for all the standing still… but I finally felt at peace again. Might be hell to pay at work tomorrow, but today was heaven.