The Quiet Picture

I needed to check on the calypso orchid today. This is just the right time for them judging by the past 3 years, but it turned out that 2010 is a week behind. The very first thing I discovered when I got to the location was that it was wet – very wet. The water was streaming down the path at one point, I’ve never seen it this bad even if some water on the path is not unusual as such. But the calypso orchid wouldn’t be growing here if they didn’t like water, so I counted 20 individuals. However, only one or two of them were already in full bloom, and even that is probably a generous nomination. Give them some warm weather and I’m sure that they will look glorious in a week’s time, and there’s probably more of them, too. Considering how small some of the individuals were, there’s a good reason to believe that some hadn’t even popped above the ground yet.

I’ve heard that this location contains an unusually high number of white individuals. Every year there’s been quite a few of them, but I think that this year is exceptional for the colour variation. I didn’t keep exact numbers but it seemed like about half of the individuals I found were white.

The picture is playing a prank in my head, it looks like a big mouth with the tongue hanging out. I’m having a hard time seeing it as a rare and beautiful orchid now! Check my other calypso orchid posts to see what it should look like.

We made one more effort to find the pale pasque flowers in bloom. We found more leaves, but no blooms and now we’re sure that there won’t be any flowers this year, either. We should’ve seen at least some indication of a stem or a bud or something, but there really wasn’t anything like that. Something bad has happened in this location… from hundreds of individuals 15 years ago to just a handful now.

But one rarity that is a thriving is the bird’s eye primrose. The season is a bit early for them, there were some already in bloom but most of the plants only had tiny buds.

Later in the afternoon the rain came in but didn’t stay for long so I grabbed the camera and searched for some water drops in the forest. I’m sure there were many more but the ones that I was interested in were attached to the wood sorrel… complete with OOF grasses that follow the shape of the flowers. I think I’m done with the wood sorrel this year, gotta find something else tomorrow!

Anyone who has seen any of my close-up photos knows that I like smooth backgrounds. While it makes for very simple and accessible pictures that truly highlight the subject itself, it’s not always the desirable effect. Sometimes it’s nice to show the flower in its environment, so occasionally make some efforts to achieve this. And invariably, I fail.

When you start including the environment in the picture, it gets very complex. Finding the compromise of showing a little but not too much as to distract has proven to be a monumentally difficult task for me. Take the wood sorrel I tried to shoot last night. They were growing among grasses so I wanted to leave some of the grass in the picture, a bit fuzzy but still recognisable. But the grasses were all over the place… so I took a frame, reviewed it on the LCD, decided that one blade of grass was going distractingly in the wrong direction and removed it. Take a new frame, decide that one straw is showing too strongly. Remove. Click. Remove. Click. Remove. In the end I had the wood sorrel and a smooth background where you could just see a hint of a grass blade. And this is how it always goes for me. I start with good intentions but end up with the same type of picture I always take, simple and accessible.

The picture you see here is somewhere in the middle of the process. I’ve already removed quite a lot of the grass and I’ve also stepped up to f3.5 (started with f5.6 for more DOF) but you still see some pattern in the grass. I don’t like those light reflections on the right, so of course I removed the grasses for the next frame. And then removed more… and more…

I’ve been working extensively on this lily of the valley pic so I thought I’d post it. Nothing has been removed or added in the content (no cropping either), but I’ve used gradients, exposure adjustments, curves and all of that all over again with the adjustment brush, while trying to be careful not to over-do it. All I wanted was to bring everything to balance and enhance the buds and the droplet. There’s really just one colour in the picture, in different hues, adding to the simplicity. But effective, I hope.

It was raining today. I waited patiently for the raining to stop so I could train my camera on the lily of the valley buds and wood sorrel, but of course it doesn’t always help that the raining stops. It was still overcast and the wood sorrel didn’t like it at all and stayed closed. But there are other things to find in the forest – I came across this huge black slug. Everything is relative… slugs are supposed to be slow but when you’re working with a shallow depth of field, they move really fast!

Yesterday I mentioned the lesser butterfly orchids, today I had a look at a place where I know there’s always heath spotted orchids. Sure enough, found plenty of leaves, I didn’t even try to count them because they grow in a kind of a cluster so the leaves were all entangled. It provides some nice opportunities when they’re in bloom because you can fill the frame with the flowers. That would be in about one month…

I was very much expecting to see a lot of new flowers today. But you don’t always get what you expect, so I had to settle with the wood anemone alone. Last weekend when I checked my favourite wood anemone spot, the plants were very small with just very tiny buds. But the warm weather has worked miracles on them and not only did I find them in full bloom, I had a sneaky suspicion that they might actually be a little bit past the peak. Either way, they’ve grown with leaps and bounds in only a week. So that got me thinking about the pale pasque flowers. Maybe they’re growing faster than expected, also? So I drove to the location and headed directly to the plant I had discovered earlier. No flower. Nothing. Zip. Nada. Just the same leaves, exactly like I had found them. I had a look around and found one more set of leaves, so that’s now a total two pale pasque flowers in this location. Either the past 15 years have been really hard on the flowers here (there were hundreds of plants back then), or the season is still very early for them. I hope for the latter!

Back at home, I had a look at what’s happening around the house. I found that the lily of the valley leaves are growing tall with a few buds also. But the best moment of the whole day came when I checked the spot where I found lesser butterfly orchids. I hoped to find some small leaves, and I did – and I also found some buds! They are of course very small at the moment, only about 5cm tall, but I was just so happy to see them. I counted 21 individuals in total, but it’s possible that there will be more because it’s not so easy to find all the small leaves and maybe some of them haven’t even started growing yet. Earlier today I was feeling a little bit jealous when I was thinking about all the flowers that are already in bloom in Ljusdal, we’re probably a week behind. I’m not jealous anymore, I’ll happily give away that week for all the orchids we (will) have here!

Claes Grundsten is one of the best photographers in Sweden. He is a specialist in mountain photography and has authored or co-authored many books related to mountains and hiking. And since mountains are close to my heart also, Claes Grundsten is naturally one of my favourite Swedish photographers.

Having read many of his books and admired the imagery, I was excited to see that he has also published a book about flowers and mountains, “Blommor och berg”. It’s a coffee table book with nothing but pictures, no text at all apart from the intro. The idea of the book is to show the contrast in the mountains – small alpine flowers vs big mountains, colourful flowers vs black’n'white mountains. The book is divided in two, the first half is dedicated to the flowers and the second half contains the mountains.

You’d think that this book would be perfect for me, considering that I love mountains and flowers and alpine flowers above all. But it is true that you can’t judge the book by its cover – quite literally, in this case. Because it turned out that the cover picture was by far the best picture in the whole book.

It’s incredibly dangerous to say that “I can do better than that” because I’m just a rank amateur and Claes Grundsten is an established and respected professional. I’m used to thinking “I wish I could be as good” when I read his books. But page after page the feeling got stronger, these pictures were not holding up to the standard I expected and I couldn’t decide if it was because I was missing the point or if the pictures were quite simply not very good. By the time I had finished the flower section however, I was convinced that something was wrong.

Of course I can’t show any of the pictures here for copyright reasons, but I can try to explain. Take the black vanilla orchid for example. It’s a tough subject actually, very difficult to compose when it’s really just a ball on a stick. His solution is to use a backlit flower (which is nice in itself) and blue sky in the background. Also nice. But then… he has included the whole stem which means that the flower itself is very small in the frame and there’s an awful lot of empty background which is made worse by the crop which leaves the flower almost touching the frame on top! The same crop/composition problem is evident in many other pictures, as well. Like the common valerian; not just for the crop, but the flower is positioned on the left side of the frame and it’s leaning out! That’s such a big no-no that I can’t even imagine why it was done like that.

Maybe the problem is the shape of the book, it’s almost square which is not suitable for vertical pictures at all. Instead of using 2:3 ratio, his solution has been to crop them to 4:5, a useless format for tall flowers.

And when there’s finally a picture where the crop/format is ok, then the flower isn’t in focus. I mean I love using shallow DOF but the key to make successful shallow DOF pictures is to put the sharpness in just the right part. In the purple saxifrage picture, it’s in all the wrong places and there’s absolutely nothing for the eye to rest on. Had I taken this picture, it would’ve been axed in the first review round in Lightroom.

These are such beginner’s mistakes that I’m in total disbelief.

And then I got to the black’n'white mountain section. Back in the days before colour film was invented, everybody shot black and white for every subject. There was no other option, so it was the standard. When the colour films were introduced and got better, colour photography became the standard and black and white nature photography got marginalised. But you can still find subjects in nature that actually look better in b’n'w than colour, for example if you have a lot of texture in the picture, so I’m not anti-b’n'w as such.

I know that this is a matter of taste, but I claim that not every photograph is suitable for a b’n'w conversion. A landscape picture that looks great in colour does not necessarily look great in black and white, I don’t care what it looked like in the old days when b’n'w was the norm. We’re talking about today, we’re talking about a book that is only a few years old, created in the era of digital photography, the era of digital colour photography. You just can’t take any odd landscape picture and convert it to black and white and publish it in a book under the premise of “contrast”. It doesn’t work, sorry but it really doesn’t.

I’m sorry for this trashing, but the disappointment was huge because my expectations were sky high, thanks to the previous work I’ve seen from Claes Grundsten. It only leaves me with a question, why Mr. Grundsten? Please tell me it was because of a cash flow problem, because anything else is either cheating or a serious error in judgement. If you intended “Blommor och berg” as an artistic statement, then it’s a gross misrepresentation of your skills. I still think you’re one of the best photographers in Sweden, because even the best photographers are allowed to make mistakes. However, the right place for those mistakes is the recycle bin, not a book!

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But I must say that something good came out of it, too. The format of the book is simple so it’s easy to put together a book like this in any self-publishing software. All you need is the pictures, and when it come to flowers, I know I have those pictures. At first I had considered of buying this book (thankfully I didn’t but borrowed it from the library) because I wanted a coffee table book for the coffee table in my cabin (-to-be).  Now I realise that I can create the book myself. It won’t sell any copies because I don’t have a name, but I don’t want to spend the money on someone who’s abusing their’s!

It’s been raining a lot since the night before Thursday. The ground is completely saturated and when the sun came out at around noon, the air was very humid which added to the warm sunshine – t-shirt warm! Without a shadow of a doubt, the warmest day of the year so far. But it’s just a blip in the weather, the raining will resume tomorrow and the temperatures will go down, but I didn’t really need that kind of encouragement to enjoy the good weather while it lasted. I took a break from the flowers (which was easy because there aren’t that many around) and just walked around to see what’s happening in nature. And I wouldn’t go a whole day totally camera-less in these conditions, so I went to the Hembygdsgården in the evening to catch some building details in the warm light.

My favourite lily of the valley location is right next to Hembygdsgården so I had a look at them, the leaf buds are about 10cm tall already. And then I found a flower – a tiny common dog violet. Sweet!

Imagine a sparse pine forest. Imagine the forest floor as it typically is in these forests – covered with lichens and mosses and heather and blueberry/cowberry/crowberry brush and juniper bushes. Now imagine the leaves of a pale pasque flower. And imagine that there is just one pale pasque flower individual in all of this forest.

What would you imagine are the odds at finding this one indvidual?

Not very high I would say, but I found it!

I only know of two locations with the pale pasque flower, the favourite being Gröntjärn. Since I moved to Loos however, Gröntjärn is very far away so I was wondering if it grows anywhere closer to Loos. I spoke with my flower guide and sure enough, there is a location north from Rullbo. He was there in the mid-90′s and found hundreds of plants, out of which about 250 produced blooms.

Problem is that 15 years is a long time in nature. Trees grow and forests are cut down, so finding the exact same spot you visited many many years ago is not all that easy. Last week we tried but found nothing. We concluded that it’s too early anyway so now we tried again. It turned out that one week is also too long to remember the exact same spot… because we drove past the place we searched last week! But this time my guide had found the old notes he had written down back then, and he said that the flowers were growing among juniper bushes. The place we searched last week had no juniper at all, so now that we were trying to remember where we had parked last week we were also looking into the forest to see any areas with juniper. And we found it, so searching for the pale pasque flower became a bit easier because now we were confident that we were in the right place. But it’s still a lot of area to cover. Until suddenly, there they were… pale pasque flower leaves!

I figured that searching for plants is a combination of skill and luck. You need luck to happen to walk past just the right spot, and skill to understand what you see. I’m starting to think that maybe I’ve learned something during all these excursions I’ve made with my flower guide. Learning to photograph is learning to see. And learning to find flowers is also about developing a vision that is tuned in to the plants. Very often it comes down to looking at the green pattern in front of you and seeing the deviation in that pattern.

I mentioned that back when my guide had last visited the place, there were hundreds of individuals. And now we only found one (normally when you find one, it’s much easier to find more because you know exactly what you’re looking for). But my guide had noted down one more interesting detail – the time. He had been there close to midsummer, and still found some inviduals in bloom. This is very late, compared to Gröntjärn where I’ve always seen them during the first half of May. But it’s also a different climate. There are places around Loos which almost remind of a alpine environment, so it’s hardly surprising that we have some plants here you normally see in the mountains. With this in mind, we concluded that it’s just way too early for them at the moment, so we will come back in two weeks in hopes of finding more individuals. Because this is a the right place, we are 100% sure about that. We just need to find it again…

This is a fairly typical situation for us when we’re searching for flowers. My guide has a memory (sometimes good, sometimes vague – it can be decades since he’s last visited some of these places) of the location and then we just walk up and down the area until we find what we’re looking for. Most of the time when we don’t find it, it’s because the timing is off so we come back a week or two later and there it is. So far we’ve actually found everything we’ve looked for which is a pretty good record!

Just when you thought you’d seen the last hepatica picture! Well I thought I’d taken my last hepatica picture (for the year) until I saw a bunch of them, radiating their colour from under the branches of a spruce. The flowers were big and the colour was very strong, not a pale flower in the bunch unlike the hepatica behind my garage which all seem to be small and pale (some of to the point of being white). But what really attracted me about these hepatica was the way they were growing between the brances of the spruce. A great opportunity to show some environment of the flower, it’s not what I normally do because it’s very difficult to create a simple composition when you include some background in it. And me, I like simple compositions! What helped me with these pictures was the patchy light so I could let some parts of the picture be generously underexposed to reduce the distractions.

Another thing I was able to do that hasn’t really worked for me before was to include the leaf in the composition. Granted, I had to do a lot of coaxing to get this flower positioned the way it is because the flowers are normally much taller than the leaves, but I got the idea for it when I saw another flower resting on the leaf so I just needed to set up a more photogenic pair. No flowers were harmed in the process!