The Quiet Picture

Seems like a repeat from last Saturday. Weatherwise. Except it was a lot more windy – just as well the flower season is over because it was borderline too windy even for landscape photography. I tried some long exposures to blur the grasses but I had to delete half the frames because they were shaken. Using a tripod.

Later in the evening when I was wondering if I should go out to catch the light that was emerging, it suddenly started raining and I happily stayed indoors. Until I saw the sunlight again, which can only mean one thing – rainbow! When it happens you don’t have a lot of time, so I could forget all about taking myself somewhere interesting and instead had to make the best of the trees I have down the street. As fine as the rainbows are, these trees are starting to get old… I’ve lost the count of how many rainbow pictures I have taken down the street here, but I guess the number will keep growing anyway. Just can’t resist a good rainbow!

I’ve updated and slightly re-organised the photo galleries at minnak.net. As always, the new pictures are in the “New” gallery and I’ve also tried to re-process some old pictures but it seems like I still have a lot of work to do with them. I’ve recently learned a new way of processing pictures in Lightroom, so the old pictures now look unnecessarily pale… I’ll get to them one day.

Edit 2009-08-30: I updated the Orchids gallery with some new pics and new post-processing.

There’s one thing I keep saying to myself, but not always living it – which is that if you see a photographic opportunity, you’d better make the most of it because that opportunity won’t come back, ever again. There are so many variables in nature that the same place will never look exactly the same, sometimes the changes are barely noticeable but they are there nonetheless. Thus it was that when I was standing the shore of the Fågelsjö lake on what was a sunny and calm morning, it wasn’t quite as sunny and it wasn’t quite as calm as it was last Saturday when I had visited the place for the first time. So I quickly left and went for my plan B, which was to check out a new place a few km north from Fågelsjö.

I found a shallow lake with rocks in all sizes lining up the shores. The lake is dammed and I don’t know what it had looked like before the dams, and to be honest I don’t really care either because it only comes down to one thing – photogenic or not? And this place is indeed photogenic, many times over! Morning is just the perfect time to be there, but when a place is this good, it’s normally good in any light. So I was walking around, seeing opportunities everywhere and I discovered that it really is possible to have too much of a good thing. After a while I was so overwhelmed that I just simply gave up, knowing that I’ve only scratched the surface.

I sat down for a cup of coffee and as I was eating my cookie, I noticed an opportunity I couldn’t resist. The funny thing is that I didn’t even bother to stand up – I just traded the coffee cup for the camera and took the picture sitting down on the spot. Sometimes it’s that easy.

I needed to make some preparations for my cabin in Messlingen and that was just the perfect excuse to take out a day to do some photography in the mountains as well. I checked three different weather forecasts and they all said different things, it could be anything from rain to sunshine and in between but changing weather can also bring with it some wonderful light so it wasn’t all bad.

The first photo op came up at the Väster-Storbäcken brook near Mittådalen. I always make sure to check it out when I drive past but it’s been years since I’ve stopped to photograph it. I was wondering if I could do anything I hadn’t already done here, but it was easy in the end – on with the ND64 and polariser and I was able to get down to 20 secs to get that silky smooth water. Add a small stitched panorama and I was happy!

I had a plan for the day but a lot depended on the weather of course. We had barely started when the rain came, but it was only a local shower and we could see in the west that the sky was getting brighter. Which was just as well, because I had planned to drive west anyway to Mittåkläppen and Djupdalsvallen (any excuse for a waffle). When we got there, the promise of rain was still in the air so we had our waffles and waited for it to clear. After a while it did look better, so we set out on foot and as if by magic, the sun started to break out when we got to the ridge! It was absolutely fabulous with the afternoon sunshine and dramatic sky, which got us into a photography frenzy because the light could disappear at any moment so we’d better make full use of it. I can’t claim that I spent a lot of time contemplating over my compositions but this was such a gorgeous place that it didn’t really matter, it was looking good in almost any direction. The intensive clicking of shutters stopped abrubtly though when we heard something that sounded very much like thunder, accompanied by a big dark cloud. The top of an open ridge is not a place where you want to be when the lightnings start striking, so we packed up quickly and made our way back into the relative safety of the forest and hoped to reach the car before the raining started. It turned out though that it wasn’t as bad as it had looked at first, so a few drops of rain is all we got and a few pictures along the way as well, because we couldn’t resist stopping when we came across an opportunity, darks clouds or not!

There’s a nice little tarn next to the Mittåkläppen road with great views towards Skarsfjället. In the right light and calm weather it would be a great place, but this time we only really got one out of  two – it was calm, but the sun didn’t want to show itself again. Very dramatic skies though, a worthy subject in itself.

Since it looked like the cloud cover was lighter in the east, we decided to drive back to the Ånnfjället view instead of waiting and hoping for the light to happen at Mittåkläppen. Chasing the light this way is a bit risky – you can’t really ever be sure that the light is still there when you are but this was a calculated risk on my part. The weather fronts often get stuck in the mountains between the Norwegian and Swedish border, so further in the east your chances improve for good weather. Well, that’s my theory anyway and stick to it, because the light was indeed still there when we got to our spot! Frantically I unpacked the camera and set up the tripod, all the while hoping that the light would last a few more seconds so I could get at least one frame. The light did last, a whopping 20 minutes that gave me the best pictures of the day!

This is the first time I’ve visited the mountains in August. I was surprised to see the signs of autumn everywhere, this is quite clearly a time of transformation when the summer ends and the autumn begins. With the weather as it was today, it all made for a few memorable minutes of magic light that proved beyond any doubt that changing weather is a photographer’s best friend!

Once again, I found myself at Svartån. But this time it was morning and I had a chance to shoot the creek upstream. Streaming water is always better when viewing it upstreams, except at the moment of course there’s not a lot of water left in the creek. I’ll take the beautiful morning sun and red cliffs instead!

From Svartån, I drove the freshly paved road from Rullbo to Fågelsjö. It was a real joy, they’ve been working on this for the past two years and there were times when I avoided the road because it was so hard on the car to drive. But no such problems now, getting to Fågelsjö has never been this fast!

There’s a couple of places I’ve been looking on the map for a while now, and today was a perfect opportunity to check them in real life. The first one was even better than I expected – I’ll be definitely coming back here, there are lots of photo opportunities but my timing wasn’t the best possible. But I got some keepers anyway, which is all the better because the second spot turned out to be inaccessible – the road was closed.

The biggest disappointment of the day was that I didn’t bring a thermos and some cakes with me. I can’t imagine a better place to enjoy a cup of coffee than those warm rocks on the shores of the Fågelsjö lake… next time I’ll have more than just the camera in the bag!

This should come as a less of a shock after my G10 acquisition last year but I’m now a proud owner of a consumer grade superzoom lens, the Tamron 28-300mm f3.5-6.3 XR Di VC (I promise that’s the last time I type the full name of the lens). Now why would I want such a lens after using L grade Canon glass for so long? For many reasons, actually.

• I need another zoom lens because I’m tired of swapping the 24-105mm between the 40D and EOS 3.
• The “other zoom” should go long – 105mm is usually enough on my crop factor 40D, but I’ve found it short on many occasions on full frame.
• Image stabilisation – or Vibration Compensation as Tamron calls it – enables me to travel light (=no tripod). There’s a non-VC version of this lens and it’s much cheaper, but I figured I’ll be happier with VC.
• There aren’t that many superzooms that are suited for full frame. Canon has one in the L-series no less, but the price is in the luxury range as well. There are some 28-200mm zooms but the problem with all these superzooms is that they get soft towards the long end. I’d rather have a 28-300mm zoom that goes soft at 200mm than a 28-200mm zoom that goes soft at 150mm.
• This lens is better suited for macro work than the 24-105mm.
• The lens is small and light and is suitable for most photographic opportunities, thus ideal as a hiking companion.

So that’s the background for getting the lens. The downside is of course that a superzoom is a compromise at best, but I knew that already so my only expectation about the lens was that it would perform as I expected a consumer grade superzoom should perform. In other words, as long as my lens was not a bad copy, it would be fine for my purposes.

But I still hear you say, why would I want to have a soft superzoom with pedestrian autofocus, chromatic aberration and variable aperture (with a whopping 6.3 at the long end)? I mean, the pictures just won’t be any good, not when they’re held up against the Canon L glass or Sigma 150mm f2.8?

What if I told you that it doesn’t matter? Because it almost doesn’t, honestly. Of course I like to have sharp pictures. But I also like taking pictures. Just the whole process of it… the reason why I got the film camera earlier this year. It is the road that really matters. Image sharpness is not a critical issue for my purposes, I promise! So using a superzoom with the film camera will be just fine. And if needed, using a superzoom with the digital camera will be just fine as well.

With that in mind, I won’t bother to be testing this lens; lens charts and brick walls have never been part of my subject matter anyway. I just simply took the lens and photographed subjects that I normally photograph, and then checked that the results matched my expectations and they did. It’s not a bad copy, which is good. The G10 is softer for sure, so maybe it was a good thing that I had my eyes “conditioned” to see less than pin-sharp pictures and the Tamron sharpness, or softness, was acceptable. The only thing I haven’t been able to see is the corner sharpness, only the slides will show it later when I get them back, but I’m sure it won’t be worse than expected either.

So what else can I say about this lens, except that it is what it is and is actually rather good at that? It even exceeded my expectations in one aspect, chromatic aberration. The Canon 17-85mm lens I used to have had much more CA than this Tamron 28-300 superzoom, and the CA tools in Lightroom removed most of it so it’s not an issue at all.

In fact, I’m rather pleased with myself that I got this little superzoom lens. It will find a permanent home on the EOS 3 and maybe make occasional visits on the 40D, but regardless which camera it’s sitting on it will still be fun to play with!

A couple of photographer friends came for a visit, I had promised to show them my new favourite location at Svartån. I think I may have raised the exceptions a little bit but judging by the number of pictures being taken, nobody was disappointed in any case! Since it hasn’t been raining in the last week, the water level had receded again so it was now possible to jump around on the cliffs and rocks to find new angles that I couldn’t access in my last two visits. The weather co-operated with us, initially it was sunshine but then it turned overcast (we even got rained on – I think I counted at least four drops, lol) so it was possible to use long shutter speeds to blur out the water.

The sun came out when we had reached the top of the rapids, so we drove to another location to see if we could get any sunset opportunities. The first place offered a few sunlit frames, but there was a bank of clouds in the horizon and the sun soon disappeared behind it. We checked out another small tarn anyway which in some other light should be nice, but late evening in overcast weather is not it so we wrapped up the day. A bit of an anticlimax maybe, but I don’t think anyone was particularly disappointed!

Yesterday was full moon. Moonrise was just before sunset and there was a chance of clear skies – of course I had to try my luck with this first moon opportunity since last winter! The moon was rising in the east-south-east and after studying the map, I decided that my best chances were in Rullbo. My backup plan was simple; shoot from the bridge that crosses over Voxnan in Rullbo where the river widens into a lake and there are no big hills in the horizon. But I had two other sites which I hoped would work out, and I had reserved enough time to be able to check them both before moonrise. I was a little bit disappointed to find out that I couldn’t even get to my 1st choice location as the road was blocked by pile of sand and it would have been possible to drive around if I had had a 4WD so that dipping two wheels in the ditch wouldn’t have been an issue. Exactly what the pile of sand was doing there, I couldn’t quite figure out… but I turned back and drove to my 2nd choice location. That one turned out to be otherwise nice, but there wasn’t enough of open sky in the horizon so I wouldn’t have seen the moon until it was high up in the sky.

Which left me with the bridge in Rullbo, and it wasn’t actually half bad, there was this small island with some pines that I could use as a foreground. The only thing missing was the sunset light because the clouds were blocking it, but the important thing is that I had enough clear skies for the moonrise. Watching the moon appear behind the horizon is always an impressive sight!

We’re finally there – we can take the photographer out of the equation. If the pictures are bad, you can genuinely blame the camera!

I haven’t ridden the motorbike since my accident. At first of course I had to recover from it, then the weather took a turn to the worse (I’m a nice weather biker) and then I had holidays… and before you know, the summer is winding down and the bike is standing abandoned in the garage. And to be honest, I haven’t really been itching to ride either. Where there’s a will, there’s a way, so had I really wanted to ride the motorbike I would’ve found the time for it for sure.

Today my motorbike buddy asked me if we could go on a ride. I didn’t want to be a quitter so I mustered up some sisu and got on the bike again! We did a short trip, half of it on tarmac and half on gravel road, and I must say that the tarmac feels good. Speed is not an issue (certainly not when the Tricker only has a top speed of 110 kph), but gravel is. So when we were on the gravel road, I took it much more carefully than I used to, even on this road that I am familiar with.

But the important thing is that I didn’t give up on the bike. I still have a scar on my chin to remind me that things can go bad, but right now it feels like I just need to get some practice to build up the confidence to take on the dirt roads and it will be all good again!