The Quiet Picture

It’s been a cold weekend and I skipped my planned excursion yesterday, so I was really hoping I could go out today. By noon the temperature was up to -18°C so I dressed warmly and set out. And it wasn’t actually as bad as I expected, breathing was my biggest concern and that was no problem at all and as long as you keep moving at a good pace, you generate enough body heat to keep the extremities warm as well. It’s only when you stop to take pictures that you can feel the heat dissipate quickly… just as well that I didn’t have many photo ops then. Only two in fact, one in the way out and another in the same place on the way home – the light had changed so it was worth shooting twice, LOL.

But yes, I was a little bit surprised that I didn’t have to use the camera more often than that. The sceneries are wonderful to look at, but it just doesn’t quite work in the viewfinder. A little bit too much wind in conjunction with the snowfall earlier in the week so it’s not all photogenic. But it was a nice hike in any case, I was positively surprised to see that the cold temperature wasn’t a problem so if we get another of these cold weekends, I shouldn’t allow myself to be stuck inside four walls.

The weather forecast kept saying that last night would be completely overcast. The full moon and stars in the sky disagreed though and after all the snowfall earlier this week, the conditions were just perfect to try some night photography.

As I was peering up through the tree crowns I noticed that the sky wasn’t quite as clear as it had seemed at first – there was some very light cloud that dimmed the stars a little bit. It wasn’t necessarily a bad thing, I like the effect of the clouds especially when they are blurred by the long shutter speed.

I wish we could have more nights like this. That feeling when you’re in a quiet snowcovered forest and the moon is shining bright enough so you don’t need a flashlight to see where you’re going… awesome!

I was really looking forward to enjoying the winter landscape today as well. Yesterday they were still saying that it would be around -15°C today but it was -22°C in the morning and now the forecast is around -20 degrees the whole day. Not sure if I enjoy the winter landscape quite that much… I hope the temperatures will rise a little bit in the afternoon because it kills me to miss the scenery as it is at the moment!

Keep It Simple, Stupid! The winter is full of opportunities to simplify your images. In a very basic form, all it takes is a few lines. Or a lot of lines, like the frozen web on the left. It wasn’t just frost, but proper ice crystals that made the threads look like a band of pearls.

The slight dusting of snow we got earlier in the week together with the frost provided me with some nice subjects and I could stop kicking myself about the missed opportunities yesterday. I even found something that was very much like the “Arches” picture that failed miserably as taken with the mobile phone. But already as I was taking pictures of this small bush (or a small birch), I realised that it will be very difficult to bring out the lines when there’s almost no natural contrast at all. So it took a surprising amount of effort to process a simple picture in Lightroom, the trick is to deliberately underexpose a little and then boost the contrast and curves and finally I even used the adjustment brush on the branches to lift them from the background and finished off with a vignette. And it still doesn’t work.

But then I found an easier way to photograph the same subject. The flipside. On the opposite side of the bush (yes, it’s the same bush), the branches were visible so the lines were clearly defined. Processing was easy – deliberate over-exposure for a high-keyish effect with a boost in blacks and clarity and then I just had to clone a small distraction in a corner. And add a slight vignette of course, I’ve taken the habit of routinely add vignettes to almost all my pictures.

Keep it simple. On a wonderful winter’s day as it was today, it was easy. In the immortal words of Frank Drebin in Naked Gun: I love it!

We’ve had a little bit of new snow, but it’s not really the big transformation I’m waiting for so I’m feeling unusually uninspired and left the camera at home today. Except, I’m not really ever totally camera-less – I keep the mobile phone with me and it has a camera. It’s one of those semi-smart phones and the camera is just one of the things it doesn’t do very well. But as they say, your best camera is the one you have with you, so instead of walking away while trying to kick myself for missing an opportunity, I decided to make the most of what I got.

I won’t even go into a discussion of comparing a phone camera to an SLR. Can they be compared at all, anyway? Apples and oranges… anyway, with all the shortcomings in mind, I reckon the results aren’t always terribly bad. Not terribly good either, granted, but for those occasions when you’re not carrying and SLR with you, then the phone camera is indeed the best camera you have with you. One thing that surprised me though is how it seems like it does a good job with some pictures while other ones fail. For example, I think the sharpness in the “Glove” and “Loos” pictures is quite acceptable. I was sure that the “Arches” picture below would be sharp as well, and part of it is, but then part of it is somehow muddy. Not out of focus, just… not sharp. Kinda like part of the picture is compressed harder than the rest of it.

I was also surprised about white balance. It actually does a good job at auto WB! But it doesn’t help much when there’s so much noise. The noise is very obvious in the first picture – even if you can’t see the grain in this small version, you can see the colour distortions. Just like the sharpness in “Arches”, the colour noise varies in strength across the picture. Seems to be worse on the right side. In order to get over this handicap, I tried a black&white conversion. The “Loos” picture worked pretty well as colour, but the b&w treatment suits it better. “Arches” look awful with the colour noise, so the b&w conversion definitely rescued it. Except for the problem with the sharpness, obviously.

I’ve had the mobile phone for … two years now? And this is the first time I’ve seriously tried to take any pictures with it. With these results, I think I will stick to my SLR though (surprise!). I just have to get more disciplined about carrying it with me even when I’m not feeling inspired, because you never know what you find. For example those snow arches, I am kicking myself for a missed opportunity. The camera I had with me was not the best one…

Not sure if I’ve mentioned that I have pictures at a stock agency. I’ve mentioned it on the front page of my homepage but here in the blog I’ve kept quiet about it… mostly because there’s nothing to say. I average about one sale per year, it’s a numbers game and I only have a few hundred pictures at the agency. I’d need a few thousand to get any income out of it! The funny thing about the stock pictures is that they accept pictures that I wouldn’t have thought were up to scratch, while they reject pictures which are my favourites. So what makes a good stock picture? I still don’t know, so I send them a wild assortment and let them figure out what works and what doesn’t.

So these few pictures that have been sold through the agency, I never find out how they have been used. The information I get is only which picture it was, who bought it, and for what purpose. For example, the latest picture sold through the agency was bought by Nordstedts and it was used for an advertisement. It could be published anywhere, I would never find out. It’s a winter landscape picture from the mountains, lonely ski tracks heading towards the tundra. Nothing special in my eyes so I had completely forgotten that I had ever taken such a picture.

Yesterday at the library I noticed that they had a freebie magazine out for grabs. “Fjällsäker” (Safety in the mountains) is an annual publication intended for tourists to educate them on how to dress warmly, watch out for the changes in the weather, avoid avalanche prone areas etc. Since I read everything about the mountains I can get my hands on, of course I grabbed a copy of this. Page 17 is dedicated for maps, and in the lower right corner there’s an ad for Fjällkartan (mountain map). Click here for the PDF, and go to page 17. I thought the picture looked very familiar. Hmm.. a winter landscape from the mountains with ski tracks… it’s an ad from Norstedts… could it… yes it is! That’s my picture!!

Talk about a coincidence! I have most of the mountain maps on my shelf (two copies of some of them), so having one of my pictures used for advertising Fjällkartan makes me very proud!

And what’s more of a coincidence is that this happens hot on the heels of the book. At the rate of which I normally have my work published, I’ve already exceeded my annual average and it’s only January. I don’t need a crystal ball to predict that I can now look forward to 11 very lean months… So don’t worry, the gloating will stop here!

It’s been quiet about my cabin project but now it’s coming along again. The permits got delayed, then the cabin frame got delayed, then the big freeze set in and they couldn’t do the groundwork. No big issue for me, I’m not in a hurry.

But now the groundwork is almost done. I went there on Saturday to take a look (because some things I don’t believe until I see them!) and was delighted and scared at the same time. Delighted to see that instead of creating a small parking place close the road, they had created a driveway all the way to the cabin (which probably was out of necessity to be able to access the cabin site by big machinery in the first place). Scared because the cabin suddenly became very much a reality. Not sure if that makes sense… but this whole project is so much bigger than I ever imagined. It is costing me more money than I ever imagined. To be honest, it’s sometimes frightening the living daylights out of me. Had I known what this would be like… never in a million years would I have gotten myself into it.

But, the process is irreversible now. For good or for evil, that cabin is going to be there and I have to pay for it.

And then I did that little snowshoe walk in the winter mountain scenery. And I loved it. I love the mountains. I don’t think I’ve ever felt such a sense of belonging somewhere since I moved from Finland. I belong to the mountains.

And then the cabin didn’t feel like such a burden anymore. Cost it what it may, but it will be my homebase in a place where I want to be more than anywhere else in the world.

Does that make any sense?

I did a quick trip to the mountains yesterday, had to check the cabin site because they’re almost finished with the groundwork now (more about that in another post). Since I didn’t have much choice in the date, I was lucky to have somewhat reasonable weather so I could do some photography while I was there.

And the photography started before I even got to the mountains. Road 84 follows the Ljusnan river and there’s a few spots along the way which are quite photogenic in the right conditions, and nothing beats the lay-by just before Hede. I’ve driven past a few times without stopping although the scene was looking incredibly good, so now I’ve made it a habit to slow down before the lay-by in case it’s a worthy opportunity… and this time it was. The river is normally open during the winter, so there’s plenty of potential especially in cold weather.

When I was finished at the cabin site, I still had a few hours of daylight at my disposal so I put on the snowshoes and followed a snow mobile trail. It hasn’t been snowing lately in the mountains either, so the snow was old and had crystallised in the cold weather. By crystallising I mean that the top layer of the snow had frozen and these crystal structures were sticking up… the phenomenon itself is not unfamiliar to me, it happens every winter, but what stunned me was the sheer size of these crystals. They were formed like birch leaves and were easily the size of them, so I started calling them ice leaves. The wind was picking up and the “leaves” were falling at every gust of the wind, you could hear the faint tinkle when they hit the ground. Amazing thing!

One of my favourite mountains is Ånnfjället, it has a very characteristic profile that looks good from any angle. It’s also visible from much of the road between Mittådalen and Funäsdalen, so it was the obvious choice to concentrate on during my short trip. The setting sun was fading behind the clouds, but there was just enough light to provide some contrast for the clouds of snow that the wind was whipping up on the mountain. I was hoping for the sun to come out for a glorious sunset, but that didn’t happen so I gave up and drove to Funäsdalen to get a good cup of coffee and drive home.

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It has taken me half a day to process the HDRs (all of them from that lay-by in Hede). I didn’t use a tripod (lazy, lazy and more lazy) so I relied on quick shutter speeds and IS to keep the picture reasonably steady for processing. But it turned out that none of my four different HDR programs were able to align the pictures correctly (even if they were off by only a few pixels) so I had to manually align everything and then run them through the different programs to see which one gave me the best result, because I wasn’t happy with anything I was getting out of them. In the end I settled with LR/Enfuse or otherwise I would still be processing them. The worst part is that I needed to process every series of shots to be able to determine which ones were worth keeping, and when I finally had the results I threw away half of the work I put into them. Oh well, what are Sundays for anyway?

Last spring I was asked if I could take some pictures for a local book project. I was a bit hesitant because the motif wasn’t my normal stuff and experience has taught me that I don’t do well “on commission” – I’m only at ease when my inspiration to photograph comes from inside me. But, I’m also not very good at saying no so there I was at the Fågelsjö Gammelgård, shooting interiors and trying not to break any of the fragile old handicraft pieces from the 19th century while setting them up for close-ups.

The book is based on the diary entries of a local farmer. He lived on the estate that is now the Fågelsjö Gammelgård old farm museum, so his life is preserved not only in the words he wrote but also in the buildings, interior decorations and assorted household items. He was a skilful craftsman and it’s fascinating to see all the things he had manufactured himself, it seems like he was even a bit of an inventor because some of the artefacts were very creative.

The book was supposed to come out already last summer, I was asked well ahead in time but then the time ran out and suddenly they were in a hurry and I had to jump in with a short notice. And then as it happens so often, life intervened and the project got delayed anyway, but now the book is finally out and it looks great! Much better than I expected, and I mean the book as a whole. But the strange thing is… all of my pictures in the book look better than I expected as well. I’ve often heard photographers say that pictures look better in print than on screen, and I think that this book proves it. For all the hesitation at first, I’m really happy I did the job because now I have my work published in a book I can be proud of!

The book is called Min hand är icke begåfvad att föra en skikliger penna – Fågelsjöbonden Jonas Olssons dagbok 1851-1892 and it’s edited by Eva Heggestad (ISBN 978-91-633-6003-9, published by Fågelsjö Hembygdsförening). It will be available in the Ljusdal bookstore and I’m sure that it will be prominently displayed at the Fågelsjö Gammelgård museum in the summer.

Musings on photo editing, part 2

Part 1

My question is, is a photograph a representation of reality, or is it the photographer’s interpretation of what they think reality should be?

When the picture is edited to no longer reflect the reality, I’m not sure if I want to call them photographs anymore… seems like they’ve gone beyond a photograph, in the traditional sense of the word (read: analogue). The dictionary definition of the word “photograph” is pretty all-encompassing though, because the word means “drawing with light”. Photography is a form of art, so a photo must be a work of art, and a heavily edited photo is… not a photo? But a work of art in any case. And such, neither wrong or right. And whatever I personally feel about photo manipulation, I am not going to condemn anyone else for doing it. To each their own! My only problem is when somebody presents a photo to me as a reflection of reality, when in fact the photo is edited to longer represent reality.

The beauty, as always, is in the eye of the beholder. If you’re ready to accept a heavily manipulated picture as a photograph, then that’s what is – even if it ends up on Photoshop Disasters. But as all the pictures on the PS Disasters blog witness, a photograph does tell a big fat lie sometimes. The laws of physics are bent and the human anatomy likewise.

Maybe the issue is really about linguistics. Could we have a word for a non-edited image (where no physical elements are changed) and another word for a “photoshopped” image? Both are photographs at the moment, whether you call it an image or a picture it’s all just semantics. But I’m talking about the difference in content!

So this brings me back to the new tools in CS5, which is actually what gave me the spark for these musings in the first place. While the content-aware fill tool is very cool indeed, you can hardly call the result a representation of reality. The ease and extent of removing elements in the photo is almost scary. Don’t like the factory in the background? No probs, remove it. That’s looking at the world through a pink filter: everything you find wrong with it will be fixed.

My challenge lies in finding that rose-tinted reality in the world around me so I can portray it with my camera. The challenge is not about changing the reality to fit my ideal of it.

Same difference I guess.

Musings on photo editing, part 1

Remember when they used to say that a photo never lies?

Well, they may have been a bit too blue-eyed even in the old days of analogue. There was a lot more going in the darkroom than simple film development. But by and large, a photo didn’t lie. Those darkroom wizards aside, the majority of photographers (pros and home snappers alike) settled with reality as it was, warts and all.

Then came computers. Then came digital cameras. And now, Adobe is prepping Photoshop CS5 with some really cool new tools that takes manipulation to whole new heights and it’s not like the photo editing tools have been bad so far either.

Regular readers of this blog (yes, I mean both of you) know that I have a very conservative stance on a photo manipulation. I just simply prefer to make my images in the camera, that’s all – it’s a personal challenge, but it’s not an absolute and I’m prepared to venture out if the occasion calls. Dust spec removal, levels adjustment, saturation etc have always been part of my toolbox and I don’t consider those any more manipulation than choosing the composion, aperture and shutter speed in the camera. Manipulation to me is when you start adding or removing things in the picture – physical things like buildings, radio masts, trees etc.

It seems like I’m getting a bit more relaxed about my attitude towards editing (manipulating) my pictures, so I guess it’s just a matter of giving it time. I try to keep Lightroom as my one-stop shop for photo processing and the clone/heal heal tool has its restrictions. In any case, I’m gradually doing more retouching in my pictures, beyond Lightroom. Nothing drastic, but removing occasional stray branches or grass blades is not the moral dilemma it used to be. White lies… bending the truth a little bit?

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An un-edited version of the above picture is here. And yes, it’s a zoo animal, another thing that requires disclosure. Just take a look at what happened with the winner of the Wildlife Photographer of the Year. A stunning picture whether it’s a tame wolf or not, but if it is tame… then I would sure like to know it. The end result doesn’t count if you’re not honest about it!