Archive for October, 2010
En finne på Finnberget
We had a long trip to the Orsa-Finnmark today. The weather was anything but photogenic, overcast and very windy so the grand view we had from our first stop at Finnberget was wasted. Since my only picture from the place is not a very good, I won’t post it but I couldn’t resist using the name in the post title (“A Finn on Finnberget”)! Finnberget is situated on top of a mountain at 638m in the western-most reaches of the Gävleborg county.
From Finnberget we drove south via Tjäderåsen and then turned west towards the Ämåsjön lake. And this road was a real discovery! The road goes very high, almost at 600m so the landscape takes on some sub-alpine features. There are big areas of marshland surrounded by forest covered hills and the really special thing here is that the hills really are covered by forest instead of ruined by logging. So this is definitely a road I will be driving again, but under better conditions so it’s possible to take pictures.
Then we followed the Ämån river south-east. There’s a couple of waterfalls along the way, the first one was a disappointment (just like Storstupet and Helvetesfallet I visited a couple of years ago, they are further downstream) but the second one was marginally better. But still, the most interesting part of the falls was the path there. I usually don’t shoot wideangles in the forest because I’m just not able to bring any order into chaos, but this half-fallen tree provided enough of a focal point for me to compose around it. And for this picture, it was the right weather!
Instead of following the river all the way to E45, we swung north towards Vässinjärvi because we also wanted to take a look at Korpmäck (Korpimäki). It’s about 20m higher than Stora [big] Korpimäki we visited a couple of weeks ago, so I’m just wondering, shouldn’t it be called Större [bigger] Korpimäki? (LOL) On the map it looks like it would be possible to get some pictures of the mountain with marshland or a tarn in the foreground, and this time reality turned out be as I imagined it. Except, not in this weather of course.
So now I have two new places I have to visit some other time in better conditions. And I’m fairly sure that there will be a lot more to shoot that these two places, I just need to get the timing right!
1 commentNuthatch
Let’s see. Last Sunday was supposed to be sunny but it wasn’t. Then all week it has been sunny and calm, just simply gorgeous weather that I wasted in the office. And now it’s Saturday and it’s overcast and windy. I’m sure that the weather doesn’t read the calendar but this is just cruel.
But at least I have the birds. No greenfinches anymore and it was a challenge to find anything else in the viewfinder than great tits. When the birds don’t have to queue to the food, they only stop on the branches for a fraction of a second so it was impossible to move the camera fast enough to get the bird in the picture. 
But some birds follow the same pattern and and one nuthatch, I noticed that it would sometimes quickly stop at this spot before flying away with the loot. So I kept the camera pointed at the same spot and just waited… and waited… and finally the nuthatch stopped there! I think I had a generous full second to adjust the camera position, focus and shoot before it flew off. Thankfully the 300mm f4L is a fast lens! And the result is my best nuthatch picture yet. I know it’s not really good, but that just says more about my old nuthatch pictures than this new one. It is not an easy bird to photograph!
