The Quiet Picture

I’ve had another day to play with the Canon 100mm f2.8L IS macro, but the pictures are few and far apart – not sure why but I’m just not coming across any subjects I like. The picture of the very pale heath spotted orchid is getting close to the closest focusing distance of the lens, but it’s nothing that my 150mm macro couldn’t have done. The wood cranesbill though, it would’ve been tricky to pull off with the long macro. I was shooting straight down on it and there wasn’t a lot of light in the forest, so the shutter speed was 1/80 at f2.8 (ISO 100). In order to get the flowers the same size in the frame I would’ve had to stand up straight, go to a higher ISO to get a fast enough shutter speed so I could hope to get something sharp. I’m not sure if it would’ve been possible to set up the tripod in such a way that I could angle down the camera, while still being able to see through the viewfinder!

So that’s definitely one for the shorter IS lens, I think that this is the best wood cranesbill picture I have. Just because the flower grows everywhere doesn’t mean that I have lots of pictures of it!

But no, I’m still not even considering of trading the long macro for this shorter IS macro. Maybe it’s not possible to take exactly the same pictures with these lenses, but who needs that anyway? If it’s not possible to take some particular picture, then you just come up with another one and don’t dwell over the might-have-beens. You work with what you’ve got!

I was fortunate enough to get to borrow the new Canon 100mm f2.8 IS macro lens this weekend. I’ve always wanted a macro lens with IS and a few years ago I had the 100mm macro without IS, which I then traded for the 150mm macro. I’ve never regretted getting the longer focal length, but using a long and heavy macro lens requires good support, so the tripod or the beanbag has to go wherever the lens goes. Shooting with this setup is very rewarding, but there’s something to be said for spontaneity as well – enter image stabilisation.

So now I’ve been out with this lens, sans tripod, and I must say it really works. I won’t be reviewing the lens because there’s nothing to review, I mean it’s tack sharp (anything else would be shocking) and issues like vignetting or barrel distortion are never a problem with macro (I doubt this lens has either anyway). So the only thing that’s interesting for me is what I can do with 100mm and image stabilisation and that’s what I set out to find out.

Having had the 150mm lens for a few years now, I had my doubts about the depth of field of the 100mm lens. I like using diffused foregrounds when possible and I also like completely feature-less backgrounds. I struggled to get both when using the 100mm lens in the past, but now that I had it again, I started wondering if part of the problem back then was that I was just not very experienced as a macro photographer. Either I’m better at choosing my subjects now or I am handling the situation in a different way, but background control wasn’t nearly as difficult as I remember it was. But having the lens for such a short period, it’s not possible to test it in all situations and I reckon the background would come into play when shooting in tight spaces where the background is closer to the subject than in the above picture.

The IS of the lens is great. It’s the new generation IS which is so quiet that I had to check a couple of times that IS really was on because I’m used to the sounds of my 300mm and 24-105mm lenses. The picture of the moth was taken with a 1/40 shutter speed, it’s marginally soft but completely acceptable. It would’ve been impossible without a tripod using a non-IS 100mm or 150mm lens (impossible for me anyway, I know some people are better at hand holding the camera than I am). So if I want to take a similar picture with a non-IS lens, I would have to start setting up the tripod and hope that the moth is still there when I’m ready to take the shot. Shooting without a support setup is very liberating, the threshold of taking a picture is lower because sometimes I just simply think if a subject is worth setting up the tripod, instead of thinking if a picture is worth taking at all.

It’s been nice trying out this lens, but when I give it back I won’t miss it. It’s a great lens for the macro photographer on the move, but I’ve developed such a good relationship with my Sigma 150mm f2.8 macro that I can’t see myself ever parting with it. Yes I still definitely want a macro lens with IS, but I’m fairly sure that in the long run I would miss those additional 50mm if I traded the Sigma 150mm for the Canon 100mm IS. So now I’m just waiting for a long macro lens with stabilisation!

I drove to the lady’s slipper orchid place I visited last week. It’s a small location, basically just an island of trees that were left standing when the forest around was cut many years ago. It slopes a little and I always enter it from the “lower end” where most of the lesser butterfly orchids grow, and then walk up to the lady’s slippers.

The lesser butterfly orchids are taking their time in growing, they are still only buds but they should definitely start blooming next week. Then when I was walking up, I kept looking for the familiar yellow of the lady’s slippers. Problem was – no yellow. I was starting to have a really bad feeling about it, and my worst fears came true when I reached the orchids. The flowers had been cut, all of them! My heart just broke. And then I got angry. The stupidity of people! First of all, all wild orchids are protected in Sweden. Although we are fortunate in having a few locations with lady’s slippers in Loos, you can’t call it a common flower by any stretch of imagination. People who know where the lady’s slippers grow, know for sure that’s it’s an orchid. Whether they know that all orchids are protected is another matter, but if you have to drive a small forest road to reach a remote location which is an island of trees left standing after a clear-cut operation, you’ve gotta be a total moron not to figure out that this was done to protect something precious. And we can also assume that whoever picked the flowers, did it because they like them. Is that the right way of showing your appreciation? By killing them? By preventing them from spreading? By reducing their chances of survival in the future years?

I was really really upset. It sounds crazy to be so upset for some flowers, but I guess I just found out exactly how much I care about these flowers.

* * *

My mood didn’t improve until later when I was walking around in my local woods, checking the two spots of lesser butterfly orchids here. They haven’t opened either and I was ready to give up on this gloomy day, when something caught my eye – an early coralroot! This is the first early coralroot I’ve seen in my local forest, and it was growing in an open spot which gave me an opportunity to take a picture of it in its environment. Granted, not a good picture, but it gives an idea of the environment. And having done that, I changed my angle to get a diffused foreground and background which brings up the modest flower and leaves the rest to your imagination. Maybe this is a ketchup effect… until last Sunday I didn’t have any early coralroot pictures from Loos, and now I find them so close to home!

But still, those lady’s slippers. I just don’t understand how people think. Or do they think at all?

A while back I was being a bit sceptical about the new Photoshop CS5. Then I found out that there’s one feature that might actually be quite interesting for me, the improved HDR processing engine. HDR in CS4 was quite bad, actually, but this new version (HDR Pro) promised an option to remove ghosts that sometimes appear in your HDR pictures when something has moved between the frames, for example tree branches in the wind. I had one such HDR that I’ve been trying to fix on and off since last September, so of course I had to test if I could finally get it done in CS5.

In short – no.

If you look at the picture, the first sample shows the ghosting that appears when the image is processed normally (samples are not downsized or processed otherwise than the HDR, just cropped from originals). I then applied ghost removal and used the medium exposed frame as the base for it. And it actually does a pretty good job, but only with some of the branches. On the right side, things look fine. In the lower left corner, it’s a total disaster.

So I loaded the same HDR but using the under-exposed frame as the base for the ghost removal. Now it looks acceptable (let’s oversee the serious CA, it’s not the point of investigation here), but instead of the ghosting, there is now some weird pixelated splotches all over the place. Look at the tree trunk, there are some black dots that are not happening in the other samples. And on the right in the brances, some green dots.

I tried to adjust all of the processing settings to see if I could get these artefacts to disappear. But nix, it can’t be done.

This particular HDR could work with just two frames, but the ghost removal option is not available for a two frame merge. It probably wouldn’t help anyway because the un-needed overexposed frame is not used for the branches anyway.

Maybe this particular picture is just too much for HDR Pro. Let’s not forget that this is the first version of ghosting removal and first versions often just give you a taste of the tool. Just like the HDR tool in CS4 was crap and now it’s good, so there’s a reason to expect that ghosting removal will be improved in CS6!

But until then, I have to decide if I will keep this HDR or finally trash it after spending hours on trying to make it work. Currently my only option seems to be to combine the best bits from the two HDR versions with ghosting removal applied. After a while, I’ll probably decide that the picture wasn’t that good anyway!

Yesterday was a total washout, it was pouring rain all day but I did actually go out with the camera. The film camera, that is – I had some frames left in the roll of Velvia, and the new greens were looking very lovely in the rain as the colours are always saturated under those conditions. Velvia + naturally saturated greens, will be interesting to see how the slides look like!

Today however, the rain was long gone. I needed to see what was happening with the lady slippers, but this year I will give the #1 lady slipper location a pass because I don’t want to wear out the delicate ground around the flowers. The place will be visited by a lot of people anyway because it’s probably the most famous lady slipper location around here, but the sad truth is that a photographer who sets down in one spot will wear out the ground more than a few people just walking through. I doesn’t matter how successful I am in avoiding any damage to the flowers, but the ground always ends up worse off for the deal. So that said, I drove to a location that I haven’t photographed at all yet. This new location is a host for lesser butterfly orchids as well and maybe some heath spotted orchids will show up later, but I haven’t seen other orchids here (unlike the #1 location where you can find five species).

The lesser butterfly orchids will bloom later than the lady slippers, so all I found was a few buds in roughly the same stage of development as the ones I have close to home. And then these lady slippers… I found them a bit strange. There were three flowers in what looked almost like over bloom, but they were somehow looking the wrong shape and size, a bit wrinkled even. And then there were about 15-20 buds in different stages of development, and a bunch of leaves only 10 cm high. It’s easy to spot the flowers and avoid stepping on them, but those small leaves had me moving around very carefully indeed so I wouldn’t trample them. Except that something had already been there and trampled on some of the plants, I doubt very much a human would’ve done it (I’m probably the first human here this year anyway) but I couldn’t quite figure out what animal it had been either. I will go back there next week of course, there should be many more lady slippers in bloom by then.

Happy with my discoveries so far (despite the wrinkly and trampled plants), I wanted to see if the early marsh orchids ssp. cruenta would show any buds yet. This is the other one of the two orchids that grows around Loos that I haven’t actually photographed here so I want to get those pictures this summer. I know it’s the same species regardless of where it’s photographed, but still, gotta get ‘em. Imagine how happy I was when I found one individual that was already in bloom!

The road to this location is in a poor condition so I parked my car when it still was good and walked the rest. On the way, I found a treat – early coralroot. It was totally unexpected, the early coralroot is not a rare orchid as such but it is very scattered so there’s no specific location for them like there is for most other orchids. They were too small though, but I was making plans to come back when I came across another early coralroot, and this one was already in bloom. Those two orchids I mentioned that I haven’t photographed around Loos yet… you know what the second one was? Early coralroot! I never thought I could get them both on the same day, especially when I didn’t even expect them to be flowering yet.

I’m happy. My Loos orchid collection is thus complete, now I just need to improve on them!

I’m a member of the Ljusdal camera club (Ljusdals fotoklubb) and every year they make two excursions. For this spring excursion, it was my turn to be the guide. I decided to show them some of the nice places I found last year along the Voxnan river, so we started from Holmsjön and then made our way back and stopped at the Skalhålet ravine. I’ve only been there once and it was raining then, which made it difficult to move around on the lichen covered cliffs (very very slippery when wet). So I didn’t get any pictures that time, and I didn’t actually get many pictures this time either. But I got a picture, so at least I now have some documentation of the place. It’s just not very photogenic, but interesting enough to see. We don’t have a lot of ravines around here.

I had planned the excursion so that the last stop would be the Svansjöbäcken brook. Very simple reason – I figured that nobody will want to do the difficult hike down along the brook so everyone can leave when they want to, while I can stay as long as I want to! The weather was overcast and this was actually the first time I’ve been there in completely overcast weather. Otherwise it’s a difficult place during the day, because everything will be backlit. Normally you want to shoot running water looking upstream, and this means that you’ll have the sun on your face unless you get there early in the morning or late in the evening. The cliffs and forest surrounding the brook are also photogenic but somewhat difficult in sunny weather, so I could finally take some forest pictures today.

I think it was a good day out, I hope that the other club members enjoyed it! Although I must say they left a bit quickly from Svansjöbäcken… I think I should’ve warned them about the terrain, I didn’t think how difficult it will be for someone who is not used to it!

I think that summer just started for me. It’s green everywhere, the sunshine was warm today and I was attacked by swarms of mosquitoes in the forest. The day was so good that I’m not even complaining about the bites!

I drove back to the calypso orchids. There were in full bloom now, but I also found some buds. This time I counted 29 individuals and I also tried to keep track of the white vs coloured individuals and I guess it wasn’t quite fifty-fifty as I speculated last week. About one third of the flowers I found now were white. Sunny day as it was, I got a spotlight on one of the white ones while the background was shaded. Sometimes black backgrounds work and sometimes not, and in this case when the subject is white, it’s like an inverse silhouette!

Having done the macro, I tried a new thing – landscapes. Ok nothing new about it as such, but it certainly was the first time since the winter, apart from a few intimate landscapes here and there. I drove to one of the nice spots I found last year, this one north from Fågelsjö. It’s not an ideal location for the afternoon light because most of the photogenic scenery will be backlit, but the place is so good that there’s always something.

When I arrived, I was greeted by a family of canada goose. It’s also possible that they were urging on their young to swim faster to get away from me… anyhow, I soon found many more canada geese and I had my cup of coffee looking at the birds, they swam to a safe distance of about 50 metres and then they didn’t mind me anymore. Still too far for any meaningful photography, which didn’t matter because I didn’t have a long lens with me and even if I did, all the birds were backlit. So I could enjoy the coffee in peace and then concentrate on the landscapes, until a couple of the canada goose decide to swim right into my frame! They even quite generously stopped for a moment so I could get some pictures (granted, not much a bird picture but a fair environmental shot anyway) until they decided that I was really up to no good and they took off on wings.

Summer, no doubt about it!