The Quiet Picture

It’s so typical, the weekend when I would be free to go anywhere without worrying about work calling, I don’t have anywhere to go. I was hoping for some sunshine last evening but it never happened, so the day pretty much wasted away. It was an equally dull today, except for a little bit of sunshine which I actually didn’t need at all because I was out hunting mushrooms. It has rained a bit this week, so the mushrooms are popping up everywhere. The only problem was finding some photogenic individuals because nobody likes to look at rotten and maggot eaten ‘shrooms.

I haven’t done any mushroom shooting in recent years, not sure why. Perhaps for the same reason that I never pick mushrooms – I just can’t identify them. If I ate anything I’d pick, I’d probably kill myself or at least knock out some internal organs. Anyway, I hate having unidentified things in my catalogue. I want to know every flower I shoot, every mountain, every lake, everything. I guess I’m a bit obsessive about names… so I’m very curious right now about two orchids I found in the forest. I know they’re orchids for sure, even when they withered. I just don’t know which ones when I can’t see the blooms. The first one had leaves like a common spotted orchid (it’s very rare around here, instead we have plenty of their close relative heath spotted orchid) and the second one could be a frog orchid (also very rare here), but I’m just not sure. And now I have to wait in suspense until next summer to find out!

The universal truth among photographers is that the best light occurs during sunrise and sunset. And then there’s the equally true “it depends”, but instead of explaining at length on what it depends on, I will just say that light is also a perception. Simply put, it is what we perceive it to be at any given situation.

Today I had a Moment which changed my perception.

I left after breakfast because the forecast said that it will be a sunny morning and rainy afternoon. As I was driving my location, I was cursing at the high cloud – that nightmarish thin cloud cover which doesn’t entirely block the sun but it makes everything look very dull. Is it just me or has there been many such days this summer? But I didn’t have a plan B so I drove ahead anyway, if all else fails at least I could do some scouting because I had never been to this location where I was going now.

By the time I got there, the sun was completely blocked. I practised with long exposures and let the wind blur the grasses and smooth the water and after a while, I was rewarded by the faintest of sunshine and a sliver of blue sky in the horizon. It was only temporary but it gave me hope, so I settled down to have a cup of coffee.

And that’s when I had the Moment.

It was about sitting on a soft pillow of moss and lichen. It was the gentle wind and warm sun on my face. It was the backlit trees on the opposite shore and it was the family of swans and how the light was playing on the feathers whey they extended their wings. It was a Moment of absolute peace.

By the time the sun was out and the sky was blue, it was already a late morning. The universal truth among photographers tells me that the light is not good. But for me it was perfect – the Moment had changed my perception of it. The Moment was more important than the pictures and it liberated me to see beyond the light.

Maybe for anyone else these pictures are just snapshots during harsh light. But for me, they are the experience, the Moment, when I no longer had to search for inspiration like I have been doing all summer because the inspiration had come to me.

The light had never been more right than it was right then.

Strange feeling. While I had this great urgency to take some pictures, at the same time I was almost unmotivated to do it. In fact, unmotivated to do pretty much anything. But I haven’t lost all of my will power yet, so at first I went for a long walk while it still was overcast, and then in the afternoon when the sun started coming out, I drove to a nice little tarn that I haven’t photographed yet. Or maybe it’s not so nice – it’s called Elaktjärnen, “mean tarn”. I tried to figure out why it would deserve such a name, and the closest I could come was that it was surrounded by a lot of dead trees but I assume they’re dead because of beaver activity; there was a beaver hut on the shore (probably abandoned a long time ago already).

I had company, a lonely whooper swan that occasionally whooped at me while I was walking around the tarn. The dramatic light and clouds faded into blandness while I was still trying to figure out how capture the place so it was just as well that I got a text message from work, I needed to look at a server that was misbehaving. It’s always a bit surreal when it happens… I’m in the middle of nowhere, and the phone beeps. Reality calls.

I waited to see if the sun would come out again in the evening but it didn’t. Until the sunset – it turned out to be a nice one, and for the second time in a row I was looking at the beautiful light through a window instead of the camera viewfinder. That was like the second nice sunset this summer and I’ve missed both! And I can only blame myself for it.

Last day with the 5D MkII that I was supposed to use for wideangle photography. Ironic then that most of the time I was zooming the 24-105mm lens at full tilt and of course found it short, so if I would ever get a full frame camera I would probably need to invest in a 70-200mm lens while I’m at it. And a new computer – my workstation had considerable trouble dealing with the 5D files which are twice the size of the 40D raws!

It was a sunny day but I’m definitely having trouble of making use of the evening light. I’ve never been quite as into sunset light as I know that I should be as a photographer, but shooting at sunset is not nearly as easy as setting up your tripod and waiting for the light to happen. You have to choose your subjects with great care, scout ahead and then double check in the evening. It’s the shadows – the thing you thought would be nicely lit is suddenly shaded in the evening. And shadow is something we have plenty of around here. In small scale, it’s the forest. In large scale, it’s the hills. What it means that you don’t ever really get to see the actual sunset, the time when the sun “officially” sets. It will be gone behind the nearest hill long before it has actually set. There are no grand views here and even if you do find a good viewpoint, there is so much logging that the landscape is guaranteed to be ruined in every direction.

Or then I just haven’t learned how to handle the evening light. I’m fairly sure that it’s exactly the same problem with sunrise light – it’s just that I rarely bother to wake up early enough to check it!

When I lived in Ljusdal, I used make long trips by car in search of nice places to photograph. When I moved to Loos, the car got some rest and I found many good spots within walking distance. And a lot of more great locations are just a few kilometres further so there’s not a lot of driving required anyway.

But today I felt like doing a road trip again. I had found one interesting location when studying the map and I decided to make a big de-tour getting there. Loos is in the north-eastern corner of Finnmark, and there’s a lot of interesting nature in Finnmark. History as well, but I’m more interested in the landscape, even if I’m a Finn and get an occasional kick out of seeing the Swedish spellings of the old Finnish names! My company on this trip was a Canon 5D MkII that I got to borrow for the weekend. To be honest, I wasn’t quite as keen on the camera as I was on using a wideangle but since there was no wideangle lens I could get my hands on (that would be a wideangle on the 40D), the full-frame camera did fine with the 24-105mm lens of mine.

I really should have stopped at every interesting place, but for whatever reason, I drove past most of them. This small tarn was the first spot I saw so it was a good beginning, but then after a while… how many nice tarns can you shoot during one trip? After I had set up the tripod for the picture and started attaching the camera, I found out to my horror that I had forgotten to switch the camera plate from the film camera to the 5D. I had no way of securing the camera on the tripod! After thinking about it for a moment, I noticed that the rubberised zoom ring of the lens provides enough friction to make the camera stay on the quick release platform by itself, so with the remote release in one hand the camera strap in the other (so I could catch the camera if it slips off!) I was able to use long shutter speeds without compromising image quality. By long shutter speeds I mean ISO 50 and polarising filter – it’s not handholdable even in sunlight. This makeshift support system worked fine for horizontal pictures, but it was a whole lot trickier to balance it for vertical. Adjusting the camera position for the composition was a real pain in the butt in horizontal, and it was near impossible in vertical!

The goal of this trip was Amsen, a large-ish (in local scale) lake north-west from Fågelsjö. I saw on the satellite picture that there’s a really long curving beach at one end of the lake, and sandy beaches are rare enough around here that it would get my attention. I had a suspicion that it would be difficult to get that long beach in a picture so that you can actually see what it is, and indeed it turned out to be even worse. You can see the beach in the horizon, but obviously it’s impossible to appreciate it from this earth-worm perspective. And I didn’t find many other opportunities either, the place is ruined by logging which reaches all the way to the shore so just trying to avoid the ugly wasteland reduced the composition options to minimum. Having said that, it was interesting to see the place. Never seen anything like it in this corner of the world and I might go back there one day, to explore it better than I did now.

And the 5D MkII then? Interesting. It has ISO 50 which I love. Honestly, if the next version in the x0D series has ISO 50, I’d seriously consider switching. That is more important to me than any other feature, closely followed by weather-proofing. But working with a full-framer gave me a problem I never have with the 40D – vignetting with filters. I was still seeing black corners at 28mm and what kills me is that the vignetting was evident in one picture but not the next, when they’re both taken at 28mm with the same filter, with only a slight difference in composition. I can only speculate that I rotated the filter in between the frames and the glass element is a little bit loose so that it would hang down a little bit in some position. I only saw the vignetting in the upper corners which would support this theory, even if it sounds a bit strange. In any case, it’s not the camera’s fault. The camera is fine, but it’s not good enough for me to upgrade. For one thing, I can’t afford it. For the second, my 40D still works and that is good enough for me!

One photographer I have the deepest respect for is Guy Tal. He creates stunning landscape pictures but he is also a very insightful writer, just check out his blog. He recently wrote about photography competitions and I can only echo his thoughts. I’ve been very suspicious about any competitions for the very reason that he mentions, that in the end the success or failure of your pictures depends on the eye of the judge(s). A competition does not measure how good your pictures are – it measures the opinion of the person who is reviewing your picture.

Now it might sound a little bit like sour grapes when I say it, but it’s not. Yes I’ve participated in some competitions in the past, but only some random small ones (I’m realistic enough to know that I’m not good enough for any of the big ones!). And no I haven’t had any success, and sometimes I’ve been downright discouraged when I’ve seen the winning pictures. Technically inferior to mine, but what difference does it make when the judge is technically not a photographer? And anyway, since when has technique mattered? The photograph has to say something to the viewer, and my photographs don’t talk much. I like them quiet. The way I see it, I don’t need a prize to validate my photography. All I need is the satisfaction I get from my own work, created on my own terms. If someone else likes it, great! But as for competitions, I’m done with them. Zero ambitions.

A bit like writing this blog. I do it because I like to write, not because I entertain any illusion that I’m good at it. Why do you think I keep rambling on about nothing? It’s just the joy of seeing the noise on the keyboard turn into words on the screen. An excuse to publish some of those pictures I have lying around on the hard drive!

After a couple of trips to the mountains with a lot of hiking, I was happy to take it easy this weekend. It was un-inspiring weather anyway, with a slight chance of evening sun and calm waters last night so I took the bike and pedalled down to the lake. There’s a nice little tarn next to the shooting range, they even set up a new picnic table this summer so it’s a great place to enjoy a cup of coffee in the peace and quiet – provided nobody’s there shooting, of course. But they never do that on a Saturday evening, so I got the place all for myself.

I walked up and down the shore with camera in hand, ready for any ray of light through the extensive cloud coverage. I found a nice spot and to my amazement, the sun did come out a little bit! No spectacular light by any means, but better than nothing and it actually fits the mood of the day.

I wasn’t all lazy all weekend though. I found a spot with lots of wild raspberries, it’s very close to home but for some reason nobody else seems to have discovered it because the raspberry bushes were unpicked, although the berries are ripe and sweet. This is in a place where the forest was cut a few years ago so the raspberries haven’t been there for long, I won’t tell anyone they’re there but I suspect that sooner or later they will find the spot. Loads and loads of wild raspberries…. easy pickings, quite literally!

There is a really nice waterfall close to the road between Hede and Funäsdalen. As usual, it’s not signed from the road so you need to do your research beforehand to find out it’s there. The creek is called Rändån and the waterfall is Rändåfallet.

When you come from the direction of Hede, you will pass thru a small village called Långå. About 8 km from the T-junction in Långå (a road branches off to the right but you continue straight on the 84), the road crosses over two creeks. In between the bridges, there’s a yellow sign for “Långå 7″ for a gravel road. Look right and you’ll see a parking lot and a large information board – that’s where you park the car! And now you just hike the very easy trail 1 km through a pine forest to get to the foot of the falls. The trail is level and dry (unless it’s been raining a lot) so you don’t even need any hiking boots to manage it. But then if you want to follow the falls up (which you will definitely want to do!), you have to work a bit harder to get up the steep hill. But it’s still easy.

The first part of the falls is wide but it falls in many smaller falls instead of one big. It takes some searching but you’ll find some nice angles to shoot those smaller falls close to the right bank where the trail is. When you get past this part of the falls, the creek levels off a little bit so now there’s a series of smaller falls. About 300 m further upstream, there’s another big waterfall and that’s as far as you need to go.

As usual with waterfalls, their photo worthiness depends a lot on the volume of water running down. My personal preference is low volume because it reveals more textures and forms, so the best time to visit is late summer and autumn. However, I think that Rändån is regulated upstream from the falls so the volume of water might not always be relative to the season. You’ll get an idea of the situation already from the main road where the bridge crosses over the creek so if it looks like there’s too much or too little water, you might want to save the visit for another day.

Rändåfallet is perhaps not the most photogenic waterfall and it certainly takes some work to find the best angles. It’s a very nice place though so if you’re at all interested in waterfalls, it’s well worth the visit and you should never leave the camera in the car!

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(Edit 2010-09-18)

I paid another visit to the falls and this time walked all the way up to the top falls that I missed the last time around (even if I wrote that they’re there). It just confirms my opinion of this place, the top falls were just as nice (or even nicer) than the lower falls. The top falls are kind of in two parts, the picture shows the upper part. When you get to this viewpoint, the trail goes up very steeply but it’s not worth the climb, there’s nothing to see so only do it if you want the exercise.

There was also very little water in the creek at this time, some of the falls pictured above no longer existed. Any less water and there wouldn’t be any falls to shoot at all!

I’m back at home now, had a relaxing day at work – meaning, I didn’t have to use my feet much. Coffee machine and back! I did two small hikes yesterday which puts my four day total to exactly 50 km of hiking, and I could easily go for another hike now. The only thing that is making me tired is the mosquito that kept me awake the other night, I tried to kill it but every time I switched on the light, the bug would sit still and I couldn’t find it. A male mosquito obviously because it didn’t bite me, but the noise it makes just keeps the stress hormones going and thus no sleep. But enough about the mosquitoes!

The first small hike I did yesterday was to the Svalåkläppen fell off Bruksvallarna. A very easy peak to reach from Rockvallen and then you get to eat a waffle at the Kariknallen cabin, even if their waffles are not as good as those server at Djupdalsvallen. But then again, the waffles at Djupdalsvallen are the best, period! Maybe I’ll get there in September before they close for the season…

As I was driving home and the clouds were still not clearing much, I suddenly had an idea that I should visit the Rändåfallet waterfall in Långå. I’ve been there only once before and it was years and years ago when I was shooting film. The falls are very easy to reach and they are quite nice so it was about time I paid another visit. Since there isn’t any abundance of information about the falls on the Internet, I will write another blog entry about them later – for now, just a picture that shows a small detail of the falls.

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I’ve reprocessed some of the pictures I’ve posted here in the past days. If you’re a regular reader, clear your browser cache and re-visit Thursday‘s (first picture updated) and Friday‘s posts (all pictures updated). I’ve re-done the stitched panorama in Friday’s post, I used an adjustment brush to “fade” the tree that was cut off in the frame. It’s still cut off, obviously, but I hope it’s not as distracting as it was before.

I also realised something about the Tvärån falls from Thursday. I was already speculating when I was there that I took a wrong turn and didn’t end up quite where I was supposed to end up. The thing was that as I was following the trail up the creek, there was a brook that came from the side. I was almost sure that I should’ve crossed the side brook, but there was no way I could’ve gotten across without getting my feet wet. It was too wide to jump over and too deep to wade over (without taking off my boots). And the trail that continued over on the other side was much weaker than the trail that turned to follow the side brook, thus I decided to follow the better trail. Had I had the instructions with me (forgot them in the car with the map), I would’ve taken off my boots and waded across the water, because that was the right trail to take! So now I’ve missed what presumably is the best waterfall in Tvärån, very annoying to have done all that hiking and miss the target. Which means that I will have to get back there one day, long and boring hike or not!