The Quiet Picture

As I was waiting for the jays or squirrels to appear, I noticed that the forest was looking rather photogenic. So I concentrated on the background then, because nothing was happening in the foreground. That white strip at the bottom is the pile of snow in the jay image last week.

The sun has now come out and snow is falling again, except this time it’s the snow falling from the trees as the sun is quite warm already. Such a strange thing… blue sky. Can’t remember the last time I saw it.

The snowing just won’t stop. All day today… it just kept falling. Last year I was photographing crocus buds on the 6th of April, I reckon I won’t be doing that this year.

The temperature was at zero, it really limits my excursion options. The problem is that the snow sticks to the snowshoes so you end up walking with a 2-kg lump of snow under each foot, which tends to dampen your enthusiasm for long snowshoe walks. So I opted to take the road instead and walked to the Kvarnsjön lake which usually never fails me. The creek was open with pillows of fresh snow on the rocks so I got my photo ops, the biggest problem was to keep the falling wet snow off the camera and the lens. At least I had had the foresight of mounting the ND and pol filters already at home.

And now, I’m fresh out of ideas for tomorrow.

After the trashing I gave to the Lowepro Flipside 300, you’d think I’d never touch a Flipside again. As it turns out, here I am with the 300′s new big brother, Flipside 400 AW (which was released after the Flipside series was introduced, so it wasn’t available the first time around).

The thing is that I’m just having trouble with finding a gear bag that is suitable for me. Every photographer on the move knows that the bag is an essential piece of the kit, so it’s important that you’re comfortable with it or you’ll risk wasting your energy in fighting with the bag instead of concentrating on taking pictures.

I seem to be going thru bags one a year, initially happy but gradually annoyed. After the FS 300 debacle I got myself a new day sack which feels incredibly good on my back, accommodates all the photo gear and has a great option for carrying the tripod. For a bag which is not intended to carry photo gear, that’s pretty good. But then those annoyances. There’s no space for  a water bottle or a thermos, unless I store it together with the camera. No, I don’t think so. Likewise, if I want to pack a lunch sandwich, it is guaranteed to get squashed. And then the gear compartment, although I cut away a strap and a mesh pocket, the camera often seems to get stuck on the way in or out of the bag, tempting me to rip it out with force which one day may have fatal consequences.

So, enter the Lowepro Flipside 400 AW. Having read the specs for just about every photo backpack on the market today, the only one that fit the bill was the Flipside. The closest alternative to it was the Lowepro Nature Trekker AW but it was too big and too heavy. Many other otherwise suitable backpacks dropped out of contention because they had the tripod holder at the bottom and I categorically refuse to carry the tripod at the bottom of a bag.

I had second thoughts, and third thoughts, but based on the experience of the 300 and reading the specs and what other people were saying about the 400, I had a pretty good idea of what to expect. And to my delight, I more or less got what I expected. I wasn’t positively surprised (unless not being negatively surprised counts) but I wasn’t disappointed either. The bag is light and well padded and is moderately weather-proof even without the supplied raincover.

Compared to the 300, this is what the 400 fixes:

• Padded waist belt.
• Sternum strap is movable! (I didn’t notice at first that it can be moved, so I started to wonder if the Flipside 300 had a similar movable solution. Because I sure hated the position where it was.)
• No hard edges which would press against my back.
• Roomy enough to carry the gear I need, although once again I can’t figure out for the life of me how Lowepro can fit in all the gear they give in the description (but I was already prepared for this, so no surprises there)
• The side pocket is big enough for a water bottle.

And what doesn’t work quite as well as I’d like:

• Tripod holder. Fair enough, Lowepro specifies that it is suitable for a compact tripod or a monopod, and I thought that my small Gitzo is a compact tripod. It isn’t. This would be a serious deal-breaker, but then I found that I can use the side pocket as a tripod holder – put two tripod legs in the pocket and use a strap to tie the tripod to the bag’s carrying handle. The tripod sits steady like this, the only question is how long the pocket holds because it’s obviously not designed for this use. It seems pretty strong anyway.
• The rain cover is packed at the bottom of the bag, making it bulky and the bag won’t stand up on its own because of this. Not such a big deal though.
• The front compartment could open up a bit more. Now it’s tight spaces.
• Speaking of tight, many other pockets are on the small side. There are three tiny pockets on the main compartment lid intended for memory cards, but certainly not for a CF card in a holder. Maybe a CF without a holder, but I will not put an unprotected card in the bag.
• The main compartment is a little bit hard to get at because the shoulder straps tend to be in the way. Once you get the lid open, you need one hand to keep it open because the zippers don’t go far enough to allow the lid to “hinge” at the bottom. But I reckon Lowepro intended it this way – it reduces nasty accidents in case you forget to zip up the lid before picking up the bag! And now that I was out in snowfall, I found out that it also keeps the weather out of the bag. So it’s just a matter of learning to push the shoulder straps out of the way.
• Despite the generously padded waist belt and movable sternum strap, I still haven’t found a combination which would make the bag as comfortable on my back like my hiker’s backpack. It works fine for short trips, but on a longer hike, I’m worried that my shoulders will suffer. And if my shoulders start aching, then my head starts aching.

Despite these nags, I would still say that the Flipside 400 AW is the best camera backpack I’ve seen so far. There is room for improvement, but in the most important areas – carry capacity and carry comfort – it is quite acceptable. Certainly good enough for me to keep using this bag, time will tell if these small nags turn into major irritations though.

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Based on my experience so far, it seems like my ultimate backpack still doesn’t exist. Tradional backpacks made for hiking have superior harness systems while not ideal for photo gear. And photo backpacks, while keeping the gear safe, are not comfortable on my back. I think the problem is that photo bag makers like Lowepro use the photography aspect as the starting point, so the ergonomics needed for hiking are sacrificed, even when they claim otherwise. If only Lowepro (or any photo bag maker) could get together with an outdoors gear manufacturer (e.g. Haglöfs)… The outdoors company could provide the frame of a hiking sack and Lowepro fix the gear storage. It would make an expensive pack, but at this point I’d be willing to pay!

I’ve gone over to the dark side. I drove a snowmobile yesterday.

Anyway, it was a whole lot easier than I thought. I guess the motorbike practice helped, so as soon as I got used to the way the snowmobile behaved, I had no problems at all. By the time we took a narrow trail zigzagging through a pine forest I was having a really good time. The long open stretches across lakes and marshland were not so interesting and I was starting to wonder if that was all there was to it, but in end I was a bit disappointed to turn back home. Talk about guilty pleasures… But last week I bought a year’s supply of emission rights anyway, so I hope it’s not all bad.

Photographically yesterday was another downer, but maybe I’ll get something done today. It’s snowing at the moment, I’m waiting for the new snow to cover some of the debris so I might find something photogenic enough. This jay is so far the only picture I’ve managed to create, and even this one is heavily cropped.

Käännöskirjallisuutta lukiessa mikään ei ärsytä niin paljon kuin käännöksen paistaminen läpi. Huono käännös harmittaa jo maallikkoakin, mutta itse kääntäämistää opiskelleet ja/tai tehneet huomaavat jo pienetkin virheet. Kaunokirjallisuudessa vaatimukset kasvavat entisestään, kun kyse ei ole vain tekstin merkityksen kääntämisestä vaan pitää myös huomioida kirjailijan tyyli. Itse havaitsin jo varhaisessa vaiheessa että sovellun paljon paremmin asiatekstien kääntämiseen kuin kaunokirjallisuuteen, joten en voi muuta kuin ihailla kääntäjiä jotka osaavat luovia kieltä niin hienosti että käännöstä lukee yhtä mielellään kuin alkuperäistä.

Ongelma on vain että taitavia kääntäjiä ei arvosteta tarpeeksi. Ihan kuin minkä tahansa tekstin kääntäminen on vain ylimääräinen kulu joka pitää saada mahdollisemman halvalla, ilman mitään käsitystä mitä kielen kääntäminen itse asiassa on. Turhaa ne kääntäjät viisi vuotta siellä yliopistossa opiskelee? Onhan niitä tosin luonnonlahjakkuuksiakin jotka osaavat ilman virallista koulutusta, mutta pointti on se että kääntäjien kuuluu saada oikeudenmukainen korvaus työstään, ihan sama mikä siinä on koulutus alla.

Siinämielessä on hieman ikävää lukea että kääntäjien työtä on arvostetaan aina vain vähemmin. Luulin että se oli jo silloin opiskeluaikanani 90-luvulla melkein pohjamudissa.

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Siinä se tuli sitten se ensimmäinen suomeksi kirjoitettu blogi-viesti! Ja taisi olla viimeinen… kyllä vääntyy vaikeasti nyt, vaikka tosin helpompaa oli kuin kuvittelin. 15 vuotta ulkomailla asumista tulee tänä vuonna täyteen, siitä on näemmä seurauksia.

Spring is definitely in the air. It was a sunny and warm weekend, the snow cover was reduced by a few centimetres and the roads are thawing in the sunny places, birds are singing and I’m totally un-inspired by it all. Honestly, great weather to be out but I’ve no idea where to point my camera. Caught a squirrel anyway.

You may (or may not) have noticed that the squirrels have been absent from the blog this winter. The reason is very simple – I haven’t seen any squirrels since early January. The seeds and nuts can go untouched for days so they’re not around here even when I’m not. And when the food did disappear, it looked like it was the roe deer that had helped themselves to a snack but now there’s so much snow that the deer are avoiding the de-tour to the squirrel perch.

So now I’m pinning my hopes on the mating season, maybe it will bring some new activity to my corner of the woods – I saw two squirrels today anyway!

And speaking of absentees, I haven’t seen any birds either. I thought my new feeding setup was a success in the autumn, but then when the snowing started in December the birds disappeared and I haven’t seen them since. I hope they’re ok though and just feeding elsewhere.

I was only supposed to write three posts about film, but that was before I actually got the camera. It feels like I’m more excited about my 2nd hand film camera than I was with my brand new 40D!  So I picked it up last night and the first impression when I was unpacking it was “wow it’s huge”. When I compared it to the 40D, it’s only marginally bigger but somehow it still seems larger than its dimensions indicate. Weird. The second reaction after unpacking the camera was “wow no display”. Just a tiny window to see the film roll, LOL.

Then after I had attached a lens and turned on the camera and pressed the shutter – oh wow. The Sound. When the 40D came out, a lot of people were complaining about the shutter sound. It was different than on the 20D, yes, but I got over it in about a day. But the EOS 3 is like beautiful music… I need to get it as an MP3. I’m telling ya, you want to take pictures with this camera just so you can hear the shutter!

What the Duck 648

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The lens I mounted on the camera was the Sigma 15mm fish-eye. I’ll add a fourth “wow” here – for the first time, I saw how wide 15mm really is. I could get the whole room in the frame… it’s a brand new photographic experience for me. I think I should try to learn to use wideangles this summer!

Great news from Olympus – now we can just hope that the other camera manufacturers are equally smart! 12 MP really is enough, what we need is to get more out of those pixels than more of them. Less noise and more dynamic range and I’ll be shopping for a new camera again!

Maybe so far I’ve made it sound like going back to film is all good, so I’ll talk about the caveats now. There are some things where digital beats film (and I don’t mean cost and instant feedback etc that I’ve already talked about), and some of these I will miss.

The possibility of changing ISO on the fly is one of the benefits of digital. I will be using Velvia 50 and 100, so whatever I do I have to do it with a slow speed film. I’ll be mostly using the film camera for landscape this summer, so it’s not a critical issue, but should I want to take the occasional macro I’ll run into trouble for sure, because most of my flower work seems to be done in low light. So if I want to do macro with film, I’ll have to find some subjects in brightly lit places. Or shoot petrified flowers.

I was a big fan of Velvia back when. Then around the time I switched to digital, Fuji changed the emulsions and even stopped manufacturing Velvia 50 for a while, but it seems to be back now. The strange thing is that I saw a chart about the grain size and according to Fuji, the ISO 100 emulsions have finer grain than the old 50! I’m gonna have to see it myself, so I will start with a couple of rolls of both.

Another digital benefit I will miss is white balance adjustment. Velvia is daylight balanced so it’ll work fine in sunlight, but when the clouds start coming in, my pictures will get the blues. The solution is obviously to use colour correction filters, but I have to confess that I was never really good with them. I owned an 81B which I never used and now I don’t even have that one. The biggest concession I made to colour correction was to get the Moose polariser which combines an 81A with the pol, so it will work with waterfall photography (which I prefer to do in overcast weather).

With that in mind, I am not completely liberated from post processing when I get the film scans back – one way or another I’ll have to fix the colours because I will not waste any more money on filters.

And the third benefit of digital that I will miss is graduated ND filters. Yes I know there are no grads in digital cameras, but I mean the ease of creating HDRs from multiple exposures. I can do that with film as well, but it quickly becomes a cost issue. Graduated filters is another thing I’ve always overlooked, so there are some type of pictures I never took with film because the latitude wasn’t there. But now I think I will try bracketing in moderation, if the subject is worth it. Or maybe, just maybe, I’ll get an ND grad anyway – I could use it as a “slow-down tool” with digital as well.

And then finally – there is the issue of waiting. And waiting. And waiting, for the slides to come back from the lab!

Late winter is probably not an ideal time to get new gear, Velvia is wasted on snow and April in particular has never been a productive month for me. But the camera won’t suffer if it has to sit on my shelf for a few weeks and the Velvia rolls won’t grow old in the freezer. When the greens start sprouting up, I’ll be ready!