The Quiet Picture

They say that you’re not a real biker until you’ve crashed. If that is so, then I must be a real biker now!

Me and motorbike buddy set out for a nice evening ride in the warm sunshine. We came to a small forest road that I haven’t driven before, it was partly soft sand so I tried to take it carefully. Just when I thought that it got better, the road curved left. I decelarated to the curve like I always do, but unfortunately the curve was sharper than I anticipated, it was downhill and it was soft sand again. I was not going too fast, but I didn’t have the skill and the guts to turn sharp enough so I only had time to think oh shit and the next thing I know is that I’m spitting sand and blood.

My motorbike buddy said that I somersaulted from the bike and landed on my head, face first. I can’t remember the flight through the air, but I do remember hitting my head. I wasn’t in any pain though, all my limbs were working fine, I don’t think I even have any bruises. It’s just my face that’s the problem. When I hit my head, it pushed down the helmet and the edge of the visor hit me in the chin just below the lower lip. But since I wasn’t otherwise hurting, I just washed out the worst of the blood and sand and my motorbike buddy rescued the Tricker from the ditch and apart from a dislocated fender it was just fine. We pushed the fender back in place and continued the trip!

At home I had a closer look at the cut in my chin. It was still oozing blood and puss and I found out why – it’s really deep. And it’s not just the cut on the outside, but the inside of the lip looks even worse with two long and deep cuts which are now turning blue. If I lived in Ljusdal, I’d go to the ER but now I just have to hope that I did a good enough job with the the disinfectant. I’m a bit worried that there’s still dirt in the deep cut though.

But regardless, thank you helmet. Even if the visor gave me a split lip, without the helmet I’d suffering from a split skull!

What can I say, how lucky am I to be writing this? How lucky am I that there were no rocks on the side of the road, just sand? How lucky am I that I crashed where I did, and not two metres further where there’s a small creek running under the road? How lucky am I that I wasn’t travelling any faster than I did?

Why am I always so lucky? Why does it feel like I have a guardian angel looking after me, because I’ve had enough close calls but never anything serious?

I suddenly realised that our first orchid, the calypso orchid, might already be in bloom. Two years ago I was photographing them at this time, last year they bloomed over a week later. What if they were early this year? So I drove to our secret calypso orchid location and … they looked great! I didn’t see any withered individuals, so my timing was perfect. In fact, I could go back there this weekend and they will still look fine, I ever found one bud. And happily, there were more of them now than last year, May was so warm and dry last year that the calypsos suffered from it. It was dry now also, but maybe the thick snowcover in the winter helped them.

In all of the calypso orchid pictures I’ve taken so far, those top petals have been flat or even curving down. So this time I tried to find individuals with the petals pointed up, but I only found a few such. Maybe it’s an indication that these fairy slippers haven’t actually even reached full bloom yet? To be honest, I don’t really know what regulates the flower’s behaviour. Makes it all the more interesting!

Today is the national park day so I headed to the Hamra NP. I was hoping to find out more about the park but very early on in the guided walk it transpired that it was going to take a lot longer than I had patience for. I took the first opportunity to get ahead of the group and did the rest of the walk guiding myself while cursing at the light which was never quite right. Too much, too little or too diffused. Then I came across a view which certainly had potential, but just as I was setting up the tripod the sun disappeared behind clouds. So I waited. And waited. And waited. After over half an hour of waiting I decided that the view wasn’t that good anyway and left. So I do have patience after all, about half an hour’s worth to be exact.

Back at home I was wondering what to do. I was still bummed out about the morning, but then I saw that it was completely overcast again so I thought of the cowslip I tried to photograph yesterday (without much success) and I needed overcast weather for it. So I packed the gear again and hiked to the cowslip and set up my tripod just as the sun came out. I just can’t catch a break today?! Looking at the sky, I realised that the clouds had quite simply evaporated and I could forget about my overcast conditions. I decided that the pictures just weren’t happening today so I headed to Hembygdsgården for a cup of coffee instead. Feeling better just for sitting in the sun, I figured that the day wasn’t so bad after all.

The lily of the valley grows in carpet style abundance at the Hembygdsgården, so I wanted to check them out while I was there. It turned out that they hadn’t started to bloom yet, but the beautiful blue of the common dog violets was shining at its best. I don’t have any particularly good violet pictures, I don’t know why I’ve always found them so difficult to photograph… so imagine my surprise when I saw this lonely flower just begging to be photographed. And the light was right, at last!

My spirits thus uplifted, I headed home. When I was walking past a small park area, I noticed something yellow sticking out from the grass. A closer look – yes indeed it’s a cowslip. And not just any cowslip, but one with an orange tinge. I hardly ever see those! This time it didn’t matter what kind of light I was given, both sunlight and shade worked fine.

On the way home I kept thinking how the day had turned from a complete waste of time to a perfect day out. And it wasn’t over yet – I remembered the grape hyacinths on my neighbour’s lawn so I got down to get them also. Shaded works better for them but I had one sunlight idea, except by now… a bank of clouds had drifted in again. I waited for a couple of minutes and then decided that grape hyacinths are not my thing anyway. It didn’t matter – the violet and cowslip pictures had made my day already!

The marsh marigold are starting to bloom, but my problem was much the same as I faced with the wood anemone – what I could I do with them that I haven’t already done? I didn’t want to take the same pictures all over again. Then I thought of the leaves, I noticed last week how pretty the leaves are and how they cradle the buds so I wanted to find a way to make the leaves an important part of the picture, and not just an incidental detail. It’s easier said than done, because by the time the flower is mature enough to be in full bloom, that cradle effect is long gone and insects will have taken their toll on the aesthetics. I finally settled with this flower which had just opened and by focusing as close as I could without clipping the petals I was able to fill the background with the leaves.

This marsh marigold place of mine, it will be provide me with plenty of new opportunities to explore the idea because there were buds everywhere. It’s good for other flowers as well, to start with there’s the daphne that by now is of course way over bloom, and I could see marsh and dwarf marsh violets coming up. I also saw leaves of heath spotted orchids already, and then more herb paris than I’ve ever seen in one place. The biggest problem is that by July, absolutely everything is growing so wild that you’re wading knee deep in a sea of green so good luck with finding a clean background… But I just think that it’s lovely have such a place so close to home, it really is only a few hundred meters down the road from me.

I wanted to get back to my semi-high key wood anemones from Sunday. I liked the composition in this one with the foreground flower asymmetrically mirrored in the oof flower on the right (if it’s possible to “asymmetrically mirror” anything?), plus the open white space above. In Lightroom, I muted the colour in the leaves by increasing brightness (I didn’t want to desaturate because it just adds grey and it didn’t work in my eye), and then used a brush to selectively increase and decrease clarity. Some cloning and healing was also involved in the process because there were some stray petals sticking into the frame which I thought distracted too much, and the whole thing was finished off with a white vignette. A whole lot more post-processing than I normally do, but I guess it’s the joy of the flower season that inspired me!

I must say that I’m happy with the result, with reservation for the degree of whiteness in the background, because strictly speaking, it’s not white – it’s light grey, with perhaps a dose of yellow in the form of oof flowers. However, if I were to make it white then the main flower would be totally lost, so keeping the grey helps to lift the topmost petals. It really comes down to presentation; this picture should never be shown against a white background, nor should be it mounted with a white frame, LOL! I hope that the Lightbox plugin works for you so the picture opens in the dark frame… the default white browser window rarely does any favours to any picture, for that matter.

I’ve got quite a few wood anemone pictures, some of them I’m even happy with. So at first I didn’t know what to do with the flowers because I didn’t want to repeat what I already had in the catalogue, but then I came up with the idea of trying high key. I have a portable light tent that I got last year, I thought it would be good at taming harsh light and wind. It turned out that it doesn’t really do anything to the wind, and it’s too awkward to carry around for any longer hikes so the light tent didn’t see much action last year. But now that I had this high key idea, I needed a white background and the light tent was suddenly looking a lot better. I don’t normally like white backgrounds and it definitely doesn’t work with most natural subjects, but I’m reasonably satisfied with the results. The flower almost disappears against the bg, so you need to work with the greens to help carry the composition. But the light tent does a good job at eliminating shadows so the picture isn’t too contrasty, which would spoil the whole thing. I think I need some time to digest the pictures to find out if I prefer less or more green (I’ve got plenty of versions), but I hope you get the idea from this one.

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One of the mandarin ducks is back at the pond. So I figured, they came across a mandarin girl and this duck lost, LOL!

All April I kept complaining how I don’t like spring (or April, anyway). Now that we’re in the 2nd half of May, things are definitely starting to look better. And by things, I mean everything green and all the other colours! Today’s catch was still mostly just buds, but I’ll happily photograph them as well. Give them another week, you bet I’ll be there with the camera again.

In the morning I checked out the duck pond and was disappointed to find it empty. An elderly couple having a picknic breakfast at the table (yes, there are tables by the pond, it’s not a wild place in any stretch of the word) but not even a feather of a mandarin duck. Dare I hope that they (the ducks, not the elderly couple) will be back? Photographers talk about “eye candy” and if the mandarins don’t qualify as such, then I don’t know what!

I was a little worried that photographing the mandarin ducks in the evening would be difficult, and I found out that it is in fact nearly impossible. The pond is man-made and square in shape and only two of the sides are accessible – both of them providing back-lit conditions in the evening. And it figures that the all the duck food seems to be in the furthest, shadiest, most inaccessible corner so the ducks headed straight there! There was a very brief moment where I got some side-lighting and that’s when I took this picture, but it turned out that it doesn’t help if the ducks are approachable when there’s nothing but cold water between you and your subject. So the picture is an approx. 50% crop of the original.

The odds are definitely stacked against evening photography at the duck pond. In the morning however, the opposite applies and this leaves me hoping that the ducks will still be there on Saturday. Because on weekday mornings, there’s this little thing called work which apparently is more important than hobby. Even when we have gorgeous mandarin ducks in Loos!

All the excitement about the mandarin ducks yesterday almost made me forget that I had a productive trip to the Hamra National Park as well. Hamra National Park is currently the smallest national park in Sweden, but it will multiply in size next year when the Svartåmyran bog and the Svartån creek valley will be added to the park. 2009 is also a special year for the park, as it is 100 years now when the park was introduced as one of the first national parks in Sweden. The celebrations will take place on the 24th of May, I’m actually half considering of joining in even if I normally want to avoid the crowds. I just want to take an opportunity to walk around the park with a guide, because one thing that is currently woefully inadequate in the park is information – not a single information board anywhere along the trail to explain anything that makes the park so special.

But you don’t need to know anything about the park to enjoy it. I love old growth forests, it’s just nature being left on its own and it’s absolutely fascinating to see the circle of life, from rotten old tree trunks to fresh new sprouts. Photographically however, old growth forests are a nightmare for me. Too much information! I just can’t control all the detail to make any sensible pictures out of the forest, so this time I didn’t even bring a wideangle with me. I figured I could use the macro to isolate detail from the forest, and it turned out to be the right choice of equipment because this trip was more productive than all the previous visits put together. Having said that, it was still a very frustrating experience. I was looking around, absolutely convinced that there are countless pictures here but they just weren’t coming to me. I wish I could one day go to a chaotic forest with a skilled wideangle photographer and look through their viewfinder. Or maybe I need to go there with the fish-eye and film camera, maybe the extreme angle will jolt my vision!

It’s still early in the season so the park wasn’t at its best yet. I think I spotted a few ops for a normal wide-angle as well, so a new visit will be in order in the summer. The Hamra National Park is not there for great landscapes or exciting animal life, but that shouldn’t discourage anyone from visiting – you can’t find many of these untamed forests anymore so I’m happy to have one just around the corner!

Those ducks I mentioned yesterday, yes they were still there. I had initially id’ed them as mandarin ducks, but it seemed like such an exotic alternative that I was sure I was mistaken. But there’s no mistaking now, we have freakin’ mandarin ducks in Loos! I don’t know how rare they are, but rare enough not be included in my “Nordens fåglar” bird guide. It sounds so outlandish that I thought maybe they are somebody’s pet ducks, but nobody I’ve asked knows anyone who would keep mandarin ducks so for whatever reason these two guys have decided to settle in our little pond.  Then I checked Wikipedia and found out that mandarin ducks are comfortable with the Swedish climate so some have escaped from the places where they were initially introduced and they’ve even nested in Jämtland. But these two don’t have any girlfriends hanging around, so I hope they will stick around a bit longer and I get a chance to photograph them in a bit better conditions than today, maybe even catch them in the water because the shoreline is less than photogenic. But as far as the ID goes, this will do.

By the way, the picture is uncropped. The birds don’t seem too bothered about people, but I definitely don’t want to scare them off so I settled when I got this close (with the 300mm lens). I wish the native Swedish birds were as approachable!