The Quiet Picture

Last week I was hoping that I was done with the crocus pictures, but I just had to post this one. It’s not very polite to shove a lens up to anyone’s reproductive system but the crocus didn’t mind and I promise that no flowers were harmed in the process! In order to get this picture, I had to use an extension tube with the macro lens and this is actually the first time I’ve ever used the combo. The Sigma 150mm lens does 1:1 magnification but it wasn’t enough to completely fill the frame with the crocus so the extension tube came out of the retirement where it’s been since I got the long macro. I’ve been thinking about my flower strategy for the summer and one idea I’ve toyed with is doing more genuine macro photography. The definition of what “macro photography” really is can be a bit fuzzy, but I think that most of my flower pictures are close-ups rather than macro – true macro starts with life-size magnification. But regardless of the amount of the magnification, the appeal of the technique for me is to completely fill the frame with the subject!

Since we now have more and more green things sprouting from the earth, I made an inventory tour of my favourite spring flower places. I was mostly interested in the daphne and wood anemone and found out that I probably won’t be shooting the daphne on 1 May like I did last year. And the wood anemone… I got a real shock in my favourite wood anemone spot. It was covered by 40 cm of snow! The place gets direct sunlight only in the morning but the nights have been cold so the morning light doesn’t do much. It hasn’t been raining either and the days haven’t been particularly warm, so this snow is not going anywhere. Will be very interesting to see when the wood anemone will bloom here and in what numbers. In a much sunnier place I saw the wood anemone already sprouting leaves.

My camera needs flowers, and so do I!

Today wasn’t quite as nice as yesterday, but it doesn’t stop the spring from coming along. I found hepatica buds behind the garage, and they weren’t there yesterday because I looked and didn’t see any. The crocuses are also increasing every day and I can even see a snowdrop on the way, only leaves mind you no bud. I’ve only had snowdrop flowers the first year after I planted them, since then it’s only been leaves. So if they start blooming next week, hopefully this is the last of the crocus pictures this year, but at least it’s a yellow one. Out of the 23 crocus flowers I have at the moment, all but three of them are purple and the first two yellow ones were unphotogenic so I was happy to see this third yellow open already today. A small thing, but big enough for the macro lens!

Then I went for a walk down to the lake. The water level is really low as it always is in the spring, probably around 1m lower than normal. In the autumn I needed wellingtons to approach this old boat from the shore, but today I was able to walk around it without any risk of wet feet. But I did have to watch out for the numerous willow grouse droppings (if you look carefully, there’s a pile to the right of the boat). I think it’s willow grouse anyway, I’m not a bird dropping expert… if not willow grouse, then black grouse. But if it’s black grouse, then I would be very surprised because this doesn’t seem like a black grouse kinda place.

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These are the first pictures I’ve processed on the new laptop. The screen takes some time getting used to, it’s very bright so everything that looks ok on my big monitor looks too bright on the laptop. But a lot of the problem has to do with the viewing angle… need to remember to always use the same viewing angle when I process the pictures!

I’ve got myself a new toy in the form of a 14″ Sony Vaio laptop. I must say that I’m quite happy with it, not least because I got it for discounted price that I’m sure was Sony’s mistake! When I was looking for a laptop, I was having a real hard time finding something that was perfect for my needs. Then I found this Vaio in one webshop, it was only some pre-release information with a price but it wasn’t available for order yet. So I went directly to Sony’s store, bookmarked the page and waited for the laptop become available. One day it did… but the price was a whole lot lower than the price I had seen in the first store. I didn’t waste any time but ordered the Vaio, and the following day when I checked the Sony store again, they had corrected the price so it matched the higher price I had seen at first. But in my order, it was still that “discounted” price, this is the first time I’ve been a beneficiary of a pricing mistake! Not complaining.

The laptop comes equipped with a 64-bit Windows 7 Home Premium. I had been quite keen on seeing this new OS, having been one of the many (millions) who hate Vista. And so far it’s been a positive experience, even if it had some features enabled that were driving me crazy, but when I finally figured out how to disable the nuisance I’m much happier already. I still have one nag but I hope that I can fix that one, too. Google will help.

So apart from not being able to keep my fingers off the new toy, I spent some more time with my crocuses; there’s not much else growing yet anyway. There’s quite a bit of snow left in the forest, while the snowmobile trails are getting too soft to walk on so my walks are restricted to the roads at the moment. But things happen quickly at this time of the year, so I’m sure that things will look up soon!

Every day there’s more crocuses coming up under my kitchen window. Today I had five of them in bloom, but I can see three new buds already. It’s too bad that my crocus patch is shaded in the evening so the only chance I have of seeing them open is during the weekend, so I was happy about the sunny morning today because it gave me the opportunity that I was waiting for!

I checked out the hepatica again to see if any of the buds I saw yesterday would be open already, and a couple of them were. So the hepatica are now officially in bloom, which is roughly the same time as last year.

I came to realise that it’s worth taking the same pictures of the same flowers year after year, after all. I decided a couple of years ago that I wouldn’t do it but the budding botanist (pun intended) in me appreciates the documentary value of the pictures. It works if you write down when this or that flower was in bloom, but it’s much better to have a picture of it in the catalogue!

Finally, finally, finally! Time for my best friend, the macro lens. My crocuses are not in full bloom yet, but I know that the coltsfoot will have dotted the roadside yellow in that warm spot that is always the first one to melt in Loos. I was hoping to see other signs of spring, anything at all that I could feed to the macro lens, but it is a bit early still. The snow has melted in many south facing spots now but the only place where I saw anything new growing was this coltsfoot patch. But there was a surprise waiting for me – I found hepatica buds! I’ve always known that there’s hepatica here, but normally I only see them later on when they’re in full bloom because they grow on the other side of the ditch and this was the first time I jumped over because I wanted to shoot the coltsfoot.

Oh boy! It was only when I was looking at the yellow filling up the viewfinder that I realised how much I’ve missed the macro lens. And flowers!

The more I use Lightroom the more I like it. I’m not an expert user but I’m learning, and it seems like my vision is changing in sync with my processing skills. What I thought was perfectly processed a year ago needs re-processing now.

When I was working on Monday’s zoo pictures, LR really proved its worth. I’m totally in love with this tiger at the moment, maybe I’ll grow tired of the picture soon but right now I’m just patting myself at the back for a job well done. I don’t often get to feel like this about my pictures, if I get one such every year I’m happy.

I think what attracts me about the picture is the intensity. At first it’s of course the intense look, but then as I started processing the image to get rid of the grey film that the fence created, I also started to intensify the colours and the tiger’s stripes. Everything has to “pop” – the look in the eye, the colours, and the pattern. All the while trying to minimise the effect of the fence, which is still visible in the background, at least if you know to look for it.

When I was finished with the processing and looked at the before/after comparison, I was impressed that it could all be done in Lightroom with what really amounts to basic adjustments (just quite a few of them). I didn’t even use the clone/heal tool! And like I said, I’m not an advanced user, I haven’t explored the full potential of LR and I don’t know any fancy processing tricks. But I’m learning and maybe a year from now I will come back to this picture and find that it needs to be re-processed because my vision has been re(de)fined along with my LR skills!

I added some new pictures to the minnak.net galleries. For anyone who’s visited the site before, the new pictures are collected in the New! gallery, logically enough… Some of the pictures actually date back to last year, but there’s also three very new ones (one more deer, tiger and polar bear).

I know I’ve talked about about zoos before and I think I might have even said that I will never visit one again, but I now solemnly swear that I will never promise I will never visit another zoo. The issue of captive animals, for and against, it’s been discussed already and now I just want to write about these animals at Orsa Björnpark. Specifically, polar bears and tigers which were the animals I was really keen on seeing in the first place.

But I’ll just say a few words about the zoo first. It’s a bit like Järvzoo, with all the domestic predators (brown bear, wolf, lynx, wolverine) but they also have some “foreign” animals – kamchatka brown bears, polar bears and siberian tigers. They will add leopards in the summer, but even so, the number of species in this zoo is low. The enclosures on the other hand are very big, which is nice for the animals but not so nice for the photographers. The chain link fences don’t help either; they’re good for keeping the animals in and people out, but a photographer needs to use all the tricks in the book to eliminate the distractions.

My secret weapon was the 300mm f4 lens. Shooting wide open of course, so no margin for error. The weather was on our side because it was overcast, otherwise the chain link fence would’ve been impossible to fade out. It turned out that 300mm was a tad too much at times and I had to make most of my compositions in vertical format, otherwise I didn’t stand a chance to frame in an animal without cutting off any important body parts. The tigers were so close that I ever struggled to get a whole head in the frame! But other than the photographic dilemma, it was pretty amazing to be so close to the magnificent animals. And just when I thought that they were looking really cuddly, one of them yawned right in front of me and revealed a sharp line of pearly whites, complete with 4-inch fangs. So that chain link fence was kinda nice, after all…

The polar bears were in a playful mood. They have an open pool of water that still has some ice cover left, and these two bears decided to reduce the ice cover and started hopping on it until a big raft of ice broke off, making a nice new plaything for them. It was non-stop action with the polar bears so it was hard to keep the pace, especially when I had to nail the composition because the bears were close enough to leave me with a tight framing. Normally I like tight frames, but I would’ve been happy with less of a challenge to nail it in camera… however, it was very nice to see the polar bears, this is only the second time I’ve ever seen them.

I think it counts as a good visit. Out of those two species I wanted to see and photograph, I saw and photographed both. I even got some pictures I’m really happy with, I would’ve settled with one good picture of each but I got much more than that!

We’ve got plenty of the roe deer around here but they’re really shy, so I can just forget about approaching them in full sight, they’ll be long gone before I get to photographing distance. I’ve only really had one reasonably good opportunity to photograph them, that was over two years ago. Since then I’ve of course seen roe deer a-plenty, but never right for the camera. That is, until today. I was watching tv when I saw a roe deer buck approach my bird feeding site. I’ve seen a lot of deer tracks around it so I know they like to stop by and eat the seeds, so I quickly grabbed the camera and mounted the 300mm lens and then carefully opened the window. And oh joy, the buck didn’t mind! It knew I was there because it reacted to the sound of the shutter, but it obviously didn’t mind it and kept eating.

And then… another buck came by! I could not believe my luck. It was so close that a head shot was all I could do, EXIF says that the subject distance is 7.65 m. And it was all possible because I was shooting from my living room and the animals were approaching me, not the other way around.

The bucks soon got female company but this is of course not the mating season for roe deer, so nothing much happened. In fact, they just settled down to sleep but unfortunately a bit further out so that photography got complicated. I can still see them though, just by reaching out a little bit from my chair as I type this.

I’m just so happy that the roe deer finally gave me this opportunity, I’ve waited for five years!

Easter is a classic time for a skiing (or snowshoeing) trip in the mountains. The sunny fifth season days really are the best up in the mountains so I have a tradition to do a trip every year, normally I pick any sunny Saturday in March or very early April but with Easter giving us extra days off, it’s perfect.

There’s plenty of daylight at this time of the year so I was in no hurry to get to Messlingen. Just as well because the road from Hede to Messlingen was in a bad shape, no mud pits as yet where the car would get stuck (give it a week or two and those mud pits will be there), but so wet that my car quickly changed colour from green to mud. So glad I just washed it…

The trip plan I had for the day was to take the trail that passes behind my cabin and follow it up to the alpine tundra. I hiked up there last year but the weather was horrible, it was a downright snowstorm so not a chance to see any scenery. This is now going to be my “home away from home” so I was curious to see what it really looked like!

When I got up to the forest line, I found a perfect place for a break. Or rather, everybody and their dog had found the place before me so I just followed the tracks, but luckily when I got there the crowds had already left. It’s a small valley-like depression that provides protection from the wind and because it faces south, it’s just perfect. In Swedish they’re called “snögrop”, snow pits. It means that you tramp the snow to form a seating place where you can enjoy your coffee in the warm sunshine with beautiful scenery around you, awesome! Except of course I wanted to maximise the scenery part of this deal so I made my snögrop higher up on the slope, which means that I didn’t get full protection from the wind which means that it wasn’t quite as pleasant to sit there as it would’ve been otherwise but nevermind… it was awesome!

Before I was completely freezing from sitting down in the wind, I got back up on the trail. The alpine tundra was just as magnificent as I had imaged it with wide open spaces with snow and mountains as far as the eye could reach. And then when I followed the trail up to the Öster-Stoljan peak, it only got better. How about a 360 degree mountain panorama? It could be done here. I didn’t feel like trying a hand-held 360 panorama though so I settled for a couple of smaller views. The one below is looking towards west.

There’s just one problem with admiring this landscape. It was cold. Really, really cold. I was appropriately dressed for the weather, but when you get up on these peaks the wind is relentless. And this wasn’t even a bad wind!

Öster-Stoljan seems to be a very popular place. Understandable, because it’s one of the closest peaks from Messlingen and very easy to reach. At one point I was seeing so many snow mobiles up there that I thought they had a convention. Judging by all the tracks, I was the only one who got there by foot… Good for me.

When I got back to the car, it was already 6pm so the light was nice. My plan was to take the road to Funäsdalen (no way was I going to take the muddy road back to Hede!) because there would be quite a few opportunities for catching the evening light. And just when I found my opportunity, the light faded. Some thin clouds in the west, just enough to obscure the sun so that the glorious warm sunshine was transformed to blah during the time it took me to walk from the car to my subject, because it figures that there’s no way to park right next to it.

But no complaining. This tradition of mine, it will most definitely continue!