The Quiet Picture

So it’s the last day of the year, time to wrap up photography for 2009. The scenery is still nice and wintery, but when you look through the viewfinder it’s not so pretty anymore. Windblown debris and pockmarks from fallen snow, not ideal for landscapes. But I had to try anyway, so I opted for high key pictures. I thought I was doing ok with them until I started processing them, high key is apparently not quite as easy as I thought! The last time I tried, I was much happier with the results, maybe it was beginner’s luck. So bit of a bummer with the day’s results, but it’s a nice to try anyway. And once I got my brain in the right gear (it’s all about shapes!), I now have quite a few ideas so maybe I’ll try tomorrow again. Not much else to do anyway, the landscape isn’t going to magically improve overnight (which it would do if we got a lot of new snow and no wind, but that ain’t happening).

I have a “Photo Of The Month” collection in Lightroom. Every month I pick a favourite picture from that month’s crop, so each POTM is not necessarily among the best pictures of the year because not all months are created equal. Some months I have more – and better – keepers than others, but selecting pictures like this is a nice way of looking back at my years of photography.

Some of the pictures I’ve already posted in the blog, but here’s a recap of the whole year and the reason why these are my photos of the month:

January
January 2009 was a good month, but my favourite has to be one of the sunrise pictures where the cold mist was coloured orange by the rising sun. I arrived at my location just before the sunrise but the thing is that I got there in order to catch the moonset and was disappointed at first when I saw a bank of clouds in that direction. But then when I looked towards the sunrise and saw the mist, I was awestruck. An unexpected but magical moment!

* * *

February
It seems to be a tradition for me to take a mini-holiday in the mountains to catch the full moon. On this particular trip I had major issues with my car and not so much luck with the moon either, but all of it just makes the trip that much more memorable. And it’s true that bad weather can be the photographer’s best friend – I love the simplicity the snowfall creates when it blocks everything except the closest objects.

* * *

March
March 2009 was a surprisingly quiet month for me, I would normally expect the spring winter to provide more opportunities. Or maybe I just didn’t make use of them. My favourite of the month is thus a snapshot I took when I was bored while waiting for a squirrel to appear on a feeding site I had set up. Snowfall during the night had covered the forest and I got an intimate landscape picture with my 300mm lens.

* * *

April
April is always a slow month for me, only November is worse. While the rising temperatures are nice, the landscape is anything but and it’s too early for flowers, too. But in the mountains there’s a good chance of catching good light and beautiful sceneries, so I drove to Lofsdalen for a snowshoe exercise in the Easter. The pictures were disappointing, but the day wasn’t!

* * *

May
Things really start looking up in May and by that I mean that the macro lens is back in active duty, having stayed on the shelf all winter. The choice of flowers is not very big though so year after year, I try to come up with a new idea to play with. This year it was high key – white flowers on white background. Not something I normally do, but the results were rewarding.

* * *

June
The flower season is in full swing and the biggest problem is to decide which flowers to concentrate on – there’s too little time to get them all. The lady’s slippers are hard to ignore though so I keep coming back to them but this year I came back with something new – budding slippers, or “baby slippers” as I also called them. This particular picture is probably my favourite of the whole year!

* * *

July
July is normally the busiest month of the year. There’s flowers and landscape a-plenty, and a summer holiday in the mountains is a big deal for creativity. So rather surprisingly, the photo of the month for July 2009 is a white waterlily picture I took close to home. White waterlily is a favourite flower of mine and I never get tired of them!

* * *

August
Despite visiting the mountains many times a year, I’ve never been there in August, until now. Autumn is already in the air and the landscape starts to turn colour and then if you’re really lucky, you get a break in the clouds at sunset and all that scouting and chasing the light finally pays off. A few minutes of pure magic.

* * *

September
During the summer of 2009, I found a lot of new places around home. Some of them were great, others were a bit disappointing, but then there’s this one place which became an instant favourite. The little brook is running over red cliffs, surrounded by rocks and pine forest, and it’s easy to reach. If there’s something else I should ask for a place, then I can’t think of it at the moment. It’s not grand landscape by any measure, but it is as beautiful as it gets in my eyes!

* * *

October
Having mentioned this new favourite of mine in September, it was definitely worth visiting in October as well. It was a sunny morning but the night had been cold, as witnessed by the frost. When I saw the log, I just had to shoot it. Maybe it didn’t turn out quite as well as I had hoped for, but the moment was very special, just like the whole day.

* * *

November
My photography is dead in the water. November is just a long wait for the snow, but this year I was saved from the boredom by the little birds that visited my new bird feeding site. The birds get to eat their fill and I get to photograph them, I think it’s a good deal for all! This particular day was foggy and it obscured the trees in the background, leaving me just the bird and the branch. Black and white seemed to be the right way to process this, which is a rare thing for me.

* * *

December
The winter took off for real. A snow front had left the landscape completely covered and my biggest problem was to be out in time before the rising temperatures would start stripping the trees bare. I drove to one of the new locations I had found in the summer, and was deliriously happy to be walking around in the winter forest, even if I did sink in some small water holes on occasion…

It seemed like there might actually be a sunrise today. I mean the kind of sunrise that you can see – with colour and all, you know. So I made my way to a new spot I had found, the viewpoint is a bit too low to actually see the sun come over the horizon but if there’s any colour in the sky, it should be good. And I guess it is, but there really wasn’t much colour to go around today. A little bit of a pink glow in the fast moving clouds so I put on a filter to get a 6 sec exposure and then in LR just generously under-expose and saturate to bring out the colour. And it’s still not much. But the 6 sec exposure turned out to be a good idea, because the blurry clouds work much better than the short shutter version with sharp clouds.

When the wind quieted down yesterday afternoon, the snowing took on. So we now have a new layer of fluffy snow, it’s past knee deep as I found when I took a short cut through the forest… but despite that, it’s fairly easy to walk through because it really is airy and light. And then I came across some strange holes in the snow, figured it must’ve been a bird because there were no tracks leading to or from the holes. Until I found a hole which hadn’t caved in yet and saw grouse droppings at the bottom – it’s as good a snow cave as I’ve ever seen (=the first snow cave I’ve ever seen)! With the snow as fluffy as it is, it must’ve been easy for the grouse to create the cave and then break it open in the morning to fly off. You can just make out the wing depressions in the snow.

Just goes to show. Even if there are no great pictures to be had, there’s always a chance to see and learn something new!

It’s snowing, but the wind is wreaking havoc on the scenery so the beautiful snow cover we’ve had is gone. I mean, the beauty of it – the snow itself hasn’t gone anywhere. It’s just been blown all over the place. So when I went for a walk, I left the tripod home and only took the camera in case of some snapshot opportunities.

I must say that the backpack felt light without the tripod strapped to it. It got me thinking, for the hundredth time, if I should invest in an el-cheapo ultra-light tripod. Once upon a time I had a flimsy plastic tripod because my sturdy Manfrotto tripod was too big and heavy to carry anywhere. I sold both and got the small but steady Gitzo G1228 instead and I must say that I haven’t regretted it for a second. But even when it’s paired with the very light (and very excellent) Acratech Ultimate Ballhead, it’s still 2 kg. And 2 kg when hiking up and down mountains and through deep snow is a lot after a few kilometres, when I’m the one doing the carrying anyway. So that el-cheapo flimsy plastic tripod is often looking very good on the way home from those trips… The tripod wouldn’t have to extend to very tall and it doesn’t need to have a macro option and it doesn’t have to be very compact, it just needs to be a set of three legs that don’t weight much but can support the 40D with the 24-105mm lens (less than 2 kg).

With that in mind, I surfed to BH because they have just about every piece of photographic gear currently manufactured listed on their site so if I can’t find it here, it probably doesn’t exist. At first I looked at tripod legs because I already have a very small and light ballhead (even smaller and lighter than the Acratech) but it seems like all the legs are more serious than an integrated legs/head combo, meaning that they’re heavier and more expensive. So I looked at the integrated solutions then and found a Konus 3-Pod-3, never heard of this make but at 15 bucks the price can’t be beaten! But this Sunpak tripod is more attractive, the load capacity is borderline too little but with careful use it could be ok. I’m just wondering if there’s a way to get rid of that ballhead and replace it with the small one I already have, because it’s extremely good for its size.

One option I’ve often thought about is a monopod trekking pole like this Sunpak Versipod. But I can just imagine what will happen with a lightest puff of wind… and those small legs can’t be adjusted individually so it requires level ground to set up, and I’m rarely that lucky.

Which means that I’m better off working out with the Gitzo and failing that, rely on the IS on the 24-105mm lens. It worked today anyway; I was down to 1/20 sec and no problems with it!

You haven’t seen this before and you won’t see it again anytime soon (ever, I hope)… a picture of me, in my blog! I wanted to try the spooky effect with long shutter speeds where you move in the frame and only leave this ghostly semi-transparent impression. Not very easy to find the right combination of shutter speed, movement and stillness, it definitely belongs to the category “things I’d never try with film”! The composition wasn’t easy either because I needed to avoid having any trees behind me or the head would disappear in the dark branches. After a few trial and error, I got it.

It’s obviously not a very good picture but the fun was in doing. I’m not sure about the blueness, the colour is true because I was out after sunset but I’m nearly obsessed about having my snow white. Maybe I should try this at noon with a dark ND filter instead… or maybe not, it’s a nice way to kill some time on a lazy afternoon but the model is very un-co-operative!

Four days off! Thank you very much. The landscape is certainly perfect for the season and the temperature likewise, so I went for a walk and explored a forest road I’ve never taken before. The road is a dead end so I haven’t bothered to go there before, but according to the map there’s a trail from the end of the road to the skiing tracks so I figured I could walk a full circle instead of there and back again. Of course, such small roads are not ploughed so I had to wade in the snow, but it’s hardly knee deep yet so no worries. Until it started going uphill. And then when it levelled, the road ended and the old trail took on through the forest and I was sinking deeper. Holy cow! I tell you, the last km home was slow going. I tried to will my feet to move faster but it was no use, I walked at a snail’s pace. I reckon this qualifies as a work-out so I’ve earned those chocolates I have waiting for me!

But it was all worth it, and I don’t mean just for the chocolates. The road gets close to the Kvarnån brook for a moment and quite unexpectedly, I found some trail markings that continued to follow the brook. I haven’t seen this trail on any map, which is a bit odd because I have some old maps which show trails that are almost completely overgrown now. Will have to inspect the trail closer in the summer, maybe there are some photogenic spots further downstream…

I had big plans for today. I was going to hike downstream Svartån from the Svartåvallen road; every time I drive over the bridge there I think that it looks good but the terrain on both sides of the creek looks a bit tough so I’ve never tackled it. I’ve absolutely no idea why I thought it would be any easier with snow up to my knees…

Strike one.

I quickly came up with a plan B and made a U-turn to take the road following the Voxnan river instead. I was intent on shooting some water and the waterfall at Högforsen should provide. When I was standing on the cliffs at Högforsen, I got a déjà vu. When you have no idea if you’re stepping on solid rock or solid ice or water running under snow and thin ice, it’s not possible to get close enough to get a view of the falls. Same place, same dilemma, last winter.

Strike two.

So I figured that there must be something at Svartån again where it runs into Voxnan. Sort of, as it turned out. Very difficult to get next to the water (or ice) for any decent views. Partly because of the trees and bushes growing at the water’s edge, and partly because you don’t know where it’s safe to set your foot. I followed Voxnan a litte bit and gave up, and then followed Svartån upstream and gave up. Svartån is almost impossible, it’s completely lined up with trees leaning over the water (ice) so you hardly get any views of the creek, let alone good views.

Strike three.

I made a U-turn and drove home; sitting indoors in the front of the TV sounded like a good idea at that point. A lot of effort and little to show for it, but you know what? It wasn’t that bad anyway. The temperature was just perfect and it was snowing all the time and that’s really all that I ask for. Pictures are bonus!

It wasn’t quite as cold as yesterday and towards the afternoon the temperatures had risen enough to make it quite comfortable, actually. But in the morning it was a different story though, and I only managed about half an hour photographing the birds before my fingers were frozen. I was dressed in double and triple layers but it’s hard to keep the extremities warm when you’re just sitting down. You still need to operate the camera so there’s only so many layers of mittens you can wear… Anyway, the light was really nice at times but it was fleeting and I didn’t catch any birds when it was at its best. And in the afternoon when I had a short walk in the snow, it was already overcast and I hope it will snow a little bit during the night because the wind has caused some damage to the snow cover, especially on the trees. I’m hoping to do some landscape photography for a change!

I took the car to work for a change. Not perhaps the smartest choice of day to do it, because it’s exceptionally cold at the moment. But no worries about the car though, and it did give me a great opportunity to see how the temperature fluctuates depending on altitude and relative air humidity. On the way home, at around Färila it was -25ºC. When I was driving up Gilleberget (the first big hill west from Näsberg), for a moment I saw a balmy -18ºC in the display but then it got colder again until I reached the highest point on the road and it was back to -18ºC. But as I was approaching the lakes (Dåasen and Loossjön), the temperature dipped all the way down to -29ºC. After Loossjön it’s almost all uphill home to me and when I parked the car, it was “only” -23ºC.

So that’s something for me to keep in mind when I go on a photo excursion. If the weather is cold at home, I’d better be prepared that it’s at least 5 degrees colder in whatever destination I have chosen around Los.

But then on the other hand, while it’s not quite as cold up here as it is in the “lowlands”, our average temperature around the year is cooler. Which means that we get snow earlier and it stays better and there’s more of it during the winter – me likes! Living on top of a hill at 420 meters above sea level, it’s all good…

Sunlight! What an amazing thing, clear skies in the morning, when has that happened? My bird restaurant is ideally located for the morning light (the reverse applies in the afternoon) so out I go, hoping that I could make use of the beautiful warm light. Since this is forest, the light moves around a lot and then some clouds came in to temporarily shade the sun so my window of opportunity was quite short. But just long enough… I took a series of shots of this great tit and when I looked at them on the camera LCD, I was just desperately hoping that at least one of them would be as sharp on the computer as they looked in the small display. As it happened, they were. I’m happy! I got a bunch of other pictures which weren’t half bad (although nothing that had this wonderful light) but I deleted ruthlessly, I even got rid of pictures that would’ve been keepers on any other day. Everything is relative.

Nothing is ever perfect, though, so could I please have this same picture but with a blue tit in it?