The Quiet Picture

I decided to try a new approach to bird photography – I built a hide. It’s still very close to home, but just a little bit in the forest so the birds don’t have to come out in the open to feed. I set up a lot of food and a few perches (work in progress) and then a small tent with a camo net thrown over and I was thrilled to bits to find out that it works! I even had jays and magpies coming for a visit, normally they’re the shiest birds around. Only problem is that I’m so close that I can’t get these big birds in the frame without cutting off feet and tail feathers… while at the same time, I’m still too far to get a good full frame picture of the small birds. So I’m cropping, but I’m learning to live with it. I don’t want to move the tent any closer or the birds will start perching on the lens!

I know that we have a lot of birds around at the moment, but I didn’t see that many today. Maybe they were suspicious about my hide (and all the hassle I made when setting it up), so I hope that I will have more luck with the feathered friends in the coming weeks. Or the whole winter, for that matter – unless they disappear again like they did last year. Landscape photography is not really a vital option at the moment and I don’t have any landscape ideas anyway. Will need some snow before the landscape becomes interesting again!

Late in the season, I’m still exploring new places. We were following the same river that we visited last week, and it meant discovering more remnants of log driving activity in these waters. The rock walls that line up the riverbank in some places is an obvious sign of log driving, but then there are other things that are starting to disappear from sight, like the wooden channels from the late 19th century that are now overgrown, or the duckboards which are half rotten so you have to be careful where you step because the plank can break under your foot when you least expect it. A fresh dusting of snow on the old planks doesn’t help…

Photographically a tough day, but this late in the season it almost doesn’t matter what the weather is, it’s tough any which way. So the day was better used for scouting, and we did find some very promising places that are definitely worth a visit in the summer. Just need a bit more colour and water, and it’s keepers all the way!

Having complained about my inability to take action, it will come as a surprise that my cabin project has taken a major leap forward – I signed the contract today! I found a contractor who will build the cabin for me, all I need to do myself is to furnish it when they’re done. Well, that and pay up. A lot. The money is just insane… I had absolutely no idea it would cost this much. I was under the happy illusion that I could get the cabin for half the money I’m paying. Oh, those blissful days of ignorance. But you know what? I don’t mind! Get this – they will build the cabin this year. This year! If they get all the permits in time and there are no nasty surprises on the way (like solid rock when they start digging in the grounds), then I might just be able to give myself a mountain cabin as a Christmas present. The best ever!

Can you believe it?

I sure can’t, and I have the contract in black and white. I’m elated and worried at the same time. Elated that the project is going ahead, and scared that I will get a rickety rackety shack with the wind howling in the corners. Time to take a leap of faith and trust them to deliver me a cabin that will last the rest of my life. That’s how long I will be paying for it, in any case!

If you look at the world map, you won’t see any white space anymore – we (humans) have been everywhere. The time of the great explorers is now but an exciting story in a book. What is left is personal discovery – just because some other people have been there before, doesn’t mean that it’s not worth for me to see. Up here in my neck of the woods everything is in smaller scale of course, I gravely doubt we any had any explorers here at all. Only the early settlers who endured the harsh environment and made a living out of the forest.

So today I was, if not an explorer, then a re-explorer anyway. We found a place which didn’t look like it’s been visited by humans in many years. Plenty of traces of log driving activity, but when the trucks took over the log piles the people deserted these waterways. The only tracks we found belonged to moose and a bear.

It was a difficult day for photography, so all I have is a few pictures for memories. But a poor day for photography was a great day for discovery!

Photography is a great way to reset your thoughts.

When I set out for a walk, I had a lot of negative thoughts in my head. The problem is with my neighbour/landlord who is apparently not able to grasp the concept of “yours and mine”. Meaning that when I pay my rent, I pay for more than just my flat – I pay for the garage and I pay for the piece of lawn between my flat and the garage. Which means that while I’m not the owner of the space, I have the right to use it – except now it’s him using it. His trailer has been almost permanently parked behind my garage since the summer, and when I half jokingly asked him if he’d like to rent the space from me, he said that he didn’t have room for it on his side (true – he’s got too much junk for the little space he has) and he’d remove it. But not only did he not remove it, but yesterday when I drove my car in the garage (I’ve been keeping it outside) I found that he had mounted a shelf and stored some planks on it. In my garage!!!! Without as much as a word to ask if he could do it, can you believe it?

So anyway, I was saying that photography is good. I tried to force myself to think happy thoughts as I was walking, but I always kept coming back to the same thing. Then I finally reached my destination, a small brook that I found last week. What a relief it was to set up the tripod and start composing the pictures, because every last little brain cell of mine was concentrated on photography. Happy thoughts, happy thoughts – quite naturally!

And then I was done with the pictures and started walking back home, and I was mad again. I’m paying too much rent and considering that I’m getting even less for my money than I should, the rent is intolerable. It’s a bad timing to move now because I really should save my money for the cabin, but my option is be angry every day when I see the trailer. I see it when I go to work, I see it when I come home, I see it from my kitchen window, I see it from my living room window, I can see it just by turning my head as I’m typing this now. And the shelf in the garage, I can’t believe he had the nerve. I can feel my blood pressure rising.

Too bad I can’t photograph 24/7.

It seems like every time I find a great place, I keep returning to it for many weeks in a row until I’m satisfied I’ve explored it in detail. My current such place is Svansjöbäcken, so that’s where I found myself this morning. There was a bit more water thanks to the rain/snow earlier this week, but more water meant that I wasn’t able to hop from side to side to find the best angles. Maybe it would’ve otherwise been possible in some spots, but the water’s edge was icy and the only thing more slippery than a wet cliff is an icy cliff. But there were plenty enough opportunities on this side of the brook so I didn’t feel like the pictures would be better on the opposite side.

I can’t believe what a beautiful day it was… just blue skies, everywhere. It’s not all good in this place, actually, because the contrast becomes hard to work with and it’s not the kind of contrast that I wanted to conquer with HDR either – sunshine and waterfalls just don’t mix in my book. But it works for some small spots of running water so again, I had plenty of reasons to take pictures. Plenty enough that five hours just flew by! And I only covered a few hundred meters, there and back again to see what the changing light is doing to the scenery and a coffee break to try and take in all the beauty around me.

I think it was a lucky trip for me. I dropped my bubble level without noticing it, but I found it again when I followed the same route back. I could’ve dropped it in a crevice between the rocks, or the brook, or in the long grass… but instead it had fallen on a cushion of frozen grass and was just sitting pretty and waiting for me. And then when I was changing filters, I heard a sound that no photographer wants to hear – something crashing on the rocks. But it was only the filter holder, which rolled into the water and I was quick enough to fish it out before it floated down the waterfall.

Can’t argue with a day like this!

It was such a nice weather that I couldn’t resist going for a walk.

-1ºC, windy and – snowing. 5cm so far, still coming down.

For some reason I didn’t see anyone else out. Not even footprints in the snow.

I just remembered that last spring I posted my plan for the summer. So time to check the list and see how I did.

• Motorbike. Well, we all (the regular blog readers, anyway) know what happened with that. Crash boom bang. Add some bad weather and it’s a recipe for leaving the Tricker in the garage. On top of everything else, the motorbike turned out to be a bad photographer’s buddy. It’s just simply not practical to haul the gear on the bike and even if I did, I’d still have a problem with all the protective clothing because it’s not suited for photography, so I’d need a change of clothes as well. I proved myself that I’m not afraid of the motorbike after my accident so I’m not giving up because of it, and thus, the Tricker is now officially for sale!
• Mountains. Yes, been there, seen it, done that. Found a lot of nice new places but I guess the biggest mountain-related thing of the summer is that I bought a piece of land there. So there’ll be more mountains in the future, for sure.
• Waterfalls. Yes, found plenty of those, some of them were positive surprises and others were disappointments. I didn’t get a chance to do my “waterfall day” which would’ve taken me to four different waterfalls I hadn’t seen yet, but I did get to see one of those four and it fell way short from my expectations. So if I do the waterfall day next year, I’ll have a more manageable three falls left to see.

Although I implied that I wouldn’t put as much energy into searching orchids as I did last year, this turned out to be an orchid intensive summer anyway. I’m still basking in the glory of finding the alpine chamorchis, at long last!

A little bit surprisingly, I don’t have any plans for next summer. I don’t even have plans for the winter. Or next weekend, come to think of it. The long term plans depend very much on what I get done with the cabin – if I get it built next summer, then naturally all my spare time will be spent on that. Now that’s something to look forward to!

Now I can check off the second waterfall in Björnån, having seen the first one last week. I was really curious to get there because in the satellite picture and on some maps it seemed like there was a bridge over the river, although it was nowhere marked as such. And indeed, a bridge it was – but not the kind I’d want to walk over! The planks were rotten and many were missing, so I settled to photographing it instead.

They used to do log driving on this river and it was very evident here, for example in the picture you can see the stone wall that guides the logs down the waterfall. We also found some duckboards that were barely visible from under the lichens and mosses, and an half-fallen bench used by log drivers while on watch to monitor the logs and ready to jump to action in case a log jam was forming. These constructions date back to the early 20th century and probably haven’t been used in at least half a century when log driving ended at Björnån.

Oh and the waterfall itself, it wasn’t actually half as interesting as the one last week. But I didn’t mind, all this other stuff we found made me feel like a historian, or an archaeologist, even!

Since the raining/snowing that they had forecast for today hadn’t started yet, we drove to Svansjöbäcken and followed it down until it levelled off. Somewhere around half way down the brook changes nature, from the cliffs upstream to rocks downstream. In the rocky parts the water almost disappears, so it will only be interesting when there’s more water so it will fall over the rocks. It will also be interesting to see the cliffs when there’s more water, although not too much – the cliffs are only attractive as long as they are visible!

September 2009 was an unusually warm September. This may not be reflected in the observations though, because most of that exceptionally fine weather happened during my vacation in Finland. So 11 days of observations are missing from the middle of the month.

Temperature (High): 17°C
Temperature (Low): 1°C
Temperature (Average): 11°C

Barometer (High): 1012 mbar
Barometer (Low): 987 mbar
Barometer (Avg): 1002 mbar

Total of sunny days: 0

Rain: 65 mm

Days with rain: 10

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