The Quiet Picture

Back to normal time. It’s not even 4pm and the light is already fading! We definitely need some snow now to brighten up the landscape.

I walked to Kvarnsjön to see if I could make anything out of the creek and the ice. The ice is actually rapidly disappearing, when I got there I had a look at a spot with photo potential and then later on my way back I could see that the ice had receded a little bit. But it still worked for the pictures I intended, the cloud cover was patchy which gave a nice reflection. Normally the wind would’ve broken the water surface but the ice was containing the waves so there was just a nice amount of ripples in the water to contrast the ice.

What a dark day. Too dark for bird photography (although I tried – ISO 1600, f4, shutter speed 1/50…  doesn’t quite work), but just right for waterfalls. I drove to Hylströmmen, sort of. The freeze period last followed by the thaw and rain in the past days had turned the road into a mud track. When I almost got stuck, I decided it was close enough and walked the last 2.5 km to the falls. I can risk breaking my skull on the slippery wet cliffs but I won’t risk my car sinking in a mud pit!

And the falls then… I’m glad I didn’t even try to drive the car all the way. It certainly wouldn’t have been worth it. Note to self: don’t bother with Hylströmmen again. Ever. I just can’t make it work, I’ve been here a few times already but the number of keepers is alarmingly low. I mean, it’s a nice enough place to visit for sure, but photographically speaking, how do you capture it? If I don’t know it by now, I never will. Need to find new waterfalls!

I decided to try to get some flight shots of the birds. I have occasionally gotten a lucky shot of a bird with wings spread, so I figured I should be able to get one deliberately. Put the camera to continuous shooting and fire off a series, something’s gotta work, right? Wrong. After 297 frames I didn’t a single picture where the bird would have the wings spread and the eye would be sharp. Not one. But I got plenty of pictures of empty perches and quite a few amputated birds with either head or the tail missing. And when I finally got the whole bird, I found that the shutter speed was too slow to contain sharpness in the eye. The action is so fast that there’s motion blur even at 1/800 sec. Crazy! I don’t mind the wings blurring, but the eye just has to be sharp or it’s the bin.

Usually the reason I missed the bird take off was that it wasn’t sitting there long enough to focus anyway (same problem I always have with the birds). And then when the bird finally sat there a bit longer, I would keep my finger on the shutter and by the time the bird took off, the buffer was full so the camera wouldn’t fire anymore! LOL!

The only bird pictures I got today were the same old stationary ones then. But even if I didn’t get the pictures I wanted, I had another close encounter that I will remember for a long time to come. I’m not wearing any camouflage now because the birds accept my presence anyway. Just to prove it, a blue tit sat on my lens and I was just amazed to look at it from such close distance. And then… it got even closer and sat on my shutter finger! My favourite bird on my shutter finger. Wow!

In the afternoon I walked to the lake to have a closer look at the ice. Clear ice is not something to be taken for granted, usually we get snow when it gets cold so the ice is covered from start. The ice cover along the shore varies but it seemed to be about 5cm at best, all solid steel ice. I was expecting to take some more landscape-ish pictures of the ice, but when I found the bubbles I just concentrated on them instead. No landscapes, just a lot of small ice-scapes!

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With so many failed photographs today, I decided to put some of them to good use instead of just trashing outright. So I created an album on Facebook, it’s kind of a tutorial of what not to do when photographing birds!

My timing with changing the winter tyres was perfect. I did that on Tuesday and on Wednesday morning we had snow! It’s been so cold since then that it’s still white on the ground. The conditions just couldn’t get much better and I had my head full of ideas, with the snow, and ice on the lakes, and the sunshine, and most of all – full moon.

One thing I like about this time of the year is that the brooks haven’t frozen yet, while there is snow and a lining of ice. I reckoned that Svansjöbäcken would be good for that so that’s where I drove. It turned out that there is much more snow west from Voxnan than we have in Loos and it was pretty close that I couldn’t have driven the Ormsjö road which is not ploughed in the winter. My next car must have a better ground clearance!

It was kind of amazing to walk to the brook. I found myself going knee deep in the snow, it’s not really all snow of course but it’s the soft mossy ground with blueberry bush that makes you feet sink even in the summer. The big problem is that the ground is also very treacherous, because these mosses cover small crevices between the rocks. Add snow, and dangerous only begins to describe it. I realised that the brook wasn’t nearly as photogenic as I had hoped, so it just wasn’t worth the risk. I needed to find something with less bone breaking potential!

It’s been so cold that even Voxnan has an ice cover where the water is not moving too fast. I got a few pictures from Holmsjön, but as a whole this day was turning out to be a lot less productive than I had hoped for. But at least I had managed to kill some time so it was time to drive to Svartåmyran where I had planned to shoot the full moon rise.

When the Hamra National Park was extended to include the Svartåmyran bog, they also started to build a park entrance here, with a short duckboard trail and a watch tower. The project is not finished, but I heard that the watch tower is finally open and this was what I was betting on – get an overview of the bog in the foreground, with full moon rising in the background. Great plan with one major problem. They built the tower among trees… high as it was, I still had some pines blocking a clean view. I managed to find one angle without foreground obstacles, but it wasn’t nice. I waited for the moon and snapped a few frames, but it was far from ideal. Luckily I had done some scouting while waiting, so I climbed down from the tower and tried a ground view instead, and that’s when everything finally came together. As the moon was moving in the sky, I kept looking for new compositions with the frozen bog and pines in the foreground. My feet were cold but I was happy – I got what I came for!

At long last, I finally thought I’d print out some pictures in poster size. It was fairly easy to select the pictures because I honestly don’t have very many pictures which I feel would look nice on a wall, I find the whole concept a little bit odd. So I went for the minimalistic flower closeups, plus a tiger (I just have to decide between this or the one presented here).

The real problem lies in the presentation. I don’t want to have a picture which completely fills the frame so I just tried to use some lines for an artsy effect. I remember a few years ago I saw a big print where the use of white space around the picture was taken to extremes, I kinda thought it was a bit funny that half the price of that print is just empty space, really… But joking aside, it was a very effective presentation. You don’t need a physical frame when you create a print like that, all you need is a backboard and a sheet of glass for protection (and hanging up).

I’m reasonably happy with the frame now, but I don’t know what to do with the text. I want to have the title of the picture and I also want to squeeze in my name somewhere in there. But I just feel that the main text and my name are conflicting… maybe it’s a font problem, I can’t find anything that would work together and I don’t think it’s a good idea to the same font for both, unless I find a nice font in small caps so I could include both the title and my name under the picture. I’m sure I used to have a suitable font but I never remember to back them up when I reinstall the computer! I have one week to sort this out before the print offer goes out, so I guess I’ll have to do some font hunting again.

When you drive to Lillhärdal from Loos, you have to go north to Sveg first. I’ve often looked at the map and wondered if it would be possible to choose a more straight route, but that straight route means taking some awfully small roads. The proof is in the pudding… We tested it yesterday. After every crossroads the road got smaller until finally we were driving on a dirt road that would’ve been great fun in a 4×4. But as it was, I had to do scouting on foot to see if it was at all possible to proceed by car and with some skilled driving (not me) we got past the worst part. This route saves almost 20 km, but costs twice the time and I won’t be driving these roads again until I have a 4×4!

On the way back we chose a southern route which doesn’t save any mileage but the roads were better. We got to see a lot of new scenery and there was this one lake in particular which made an impression on me. A lot of small islands and an interesting shoreline with a lot of exciting features, it will be a photographer’s paradise on a calm summer evening! Actually, I think almost any ice-free season is fine, as long as it’s calm.

Another interesting thing yesterday was all the small tarns covered with ice, and some of the with a dusting of snow to boot. I kept telling myself that the light was wrong or this or that was wrong so I didn’t stop to photograph them. And then when the light was finally right, all the tarns were gone! If you had asked me to find a road without a lot of lakes lining it, I wouldn’t have been able to name one – until yesterday!

So this morning I was determined to get some icy pictures. Problem is that it wasn’t a very cold night, so the ice is melting. Some small consolation that the weather will inevitably turn colder soon… it’s just that this period of time when you can still see through the ice is quite short. When it gets cold enough for the ice, it gets cold enough for the snow to cover it, too.

And then I found another tarn today which turned out to be good. Just like the tarn I wrote about last week, this one also has a lot of small turf islands. It is situated in a “bowl” which protects it from wind but probably also makes it difficult to photograph in sunlight because it will be shaded. I’ll be back there, another time another light.

And then finally, a weekend wouldn’t be complete without a bird! I had a feeling that the birds would tolerate me without any disguises at all. Quite right – the only bird I wasn’t fooling was a jay, but they weren’t fooled when I was wearing camo, either. As long as I’m quiet and don’t make any sudden moves, the small birds don’t mind me at all!

I realised that I could’ve done better with yesterday’s images. The nuthatch could be cropped differently to make use of the full width of the image and get rid of some of the excess on top. And while I was processing it, I decided to add some more canvas for good measure so now there’s a bit more space in front of the bird than in the original (crop dimensions 1:2). And by the way, it’s my all-time favourite bird image – regardless of the method I used for achieving the end result!

And the picture with two birds, it was definitely too tight on the left but I couldn’t leave the ugly tree trunk in there either. But with such an even background otherwise, no problem to replace the tree trunk with more yellow. I would’ve like to expand it even more, but I noticed that the pixels started “streaking” – there was some noise from the high ISO and it doesn’t quite work with extreme canvas expansions! So I settled with a 4:3 crop instead.

And having spoken about the sunny conditions I don’t like, here’s another nuthatch to illustrate the issue. The background isn’t nearly as bad as it could be though, I deleted everything worse… That pose though, it’s classic nuthatch!

Windy today, so no fog. But overcast in the morning, so I photographed the birds, what else? Yesterday when I got some nice pictures of the more elusive birds, I started thinking that maybe I’ve exhausted the opportunities at my bird feeder. But never underestimate the birds. Instead of shooting the birds on the perch, I tried to catch them clinging to the pine bark. And then I noticed that the background in one particular spot was to die for so I carefully positioned the camera (the angle to get the background was very small) and then just waited for some birds. Any birds at all, I just wanted to use that background! When the nuthatch showed up, I couldn’t believe my luck. Granted, I had to do some serious photoshopping to get rid of an OOF blob in the foreground but this was one of those cases where I was more interested in the end result than how I achieved it. I know I recently posted a fairly similar nuthatch picture but this pose is better, it’s more of a typical nuthatch pose than in the previous effort.

Then at around noon the clouds cleared and it was bright and sunny. I just know that sunny conditions don’t work with the birds, so why I was standing there with the camera anyway I’ll never know… but I kept a watchful eye on the background so I would only use angles where it wasn’t a complete mess. But if you ever needed proof that overcast works better, just look at that nuthatch. Me happy!

When I came home yesterday, I realised that the morning fog had never dissipated during the day. It was sunny in Ljusdal but a few km before Loos the landscape was shrouded in fog, which made think that it could well be the same thing today. The fog is very sensitive to altitude and then of course the lakes and marshland have their own microclimate as well. So this morning when I saw it was foggy, I was torn between shooting the birds or shooting the foggy landscape. I decided to stay with the birds (as seen in the previous post), and if the fog would dissipate I would then have a sunny landscape to shoot in the afternoon, it sounded like a win-win situation.

It was still foggy in the afternoon but I was almost sure that there were different conditions if I would just drive out of Loos. Sure enough, already in Ryggskog it was sunny and then as I was driving towards Voxnan, the conditions were alternating between sun and fog.

After studying the satellite pictures, I had found a couple of waterfalls at Svartån that I hadn’t seen before so I wanted to see what they looked like in real life. The bonus with this plan was that I would park my car next to a small tarn which is very nice, if a bit difficult to photograph because the eastern side of the tarn is fouled by a de-forestrated area and in the summer I found that the rest of the tarn becomes difficult to shoot because it’s mostly backlit in the afternoon/evening. No backlight problems when it’s foggy!

And so it was that what was supposed to be a quick look turned into a three-hour photo session. At first it was foggy, then I made a side-trip to the big marsh north from the tarn and when I came back, it was sunny. So I walked around the tarn again!

When I was finally done with the tarn, I was wondering if it was getting too late to venture into the forest and look for these new waterfalls I thought I might find in Svartån. But it was only a few hundred meters there so I might as well check it, if it was really good I could come back some other time. I found the waterfalls but they weren’t as nice as my favourite spot along Svartån. But if you never look for anything, you’ll never find anything. I was so happy about all the other pictures I had taken today that a disappointing waterfall hardly made a dent!

The weather was just perfect for bird photography. It was foggy, but it was the light autumn fog that allowed the sunlight to break through a little bit because somewhere above the fog there were blue skies. Which means, I can use a lower ISO for the birds while the background will be distraction free.

I borrowed my neighbour’s camouflage suit to see how it works. The camo net I’ve been using so far is very clumsy so I would much prefer to use something that allows a freedom of movement. I set up the camera about 2.5m from the feeder and when a great tit came and stood on the lens, I knew that the suit works for sure! Although I have a suspicion that the small birds would almost tolerate me without any camouflage at all. A jay wasn’t fooled – I saw it in the background taking a look, but it decided against approaching the feeder. Just as well, because I was way too close for a big bird like that!

It was such a good photo session that I stood there for two hours and only came in when I started to lose feeling in my fingers and toes. By then I had a lot of keepers and some of the made me really happy. The coal tits and blue tits have always given me a problem, I only seem to have a couple of each at my feeder and they are very small and don’t like to stop for a second. Especially the coal tits, never a quiet moment with them. But now that I was so close to the feeder I got some portraits that didn’t even require much cropping! To top it all off, I got a picture of a treecreeper. I heard the nuthatches suddenly get very agitated and had a look around and found the treecreeper climbing up a pine. I quickly swung the camera around and managed two frames before it disappeared. A new species in my catalogue!