The Quiet Picture

The snow cover isn’t very thick yet, but it varies from place to place even within a small area – altitude plays a big role. When you drive north from Loos, you get to over 500m above sea level and in winter it shows quite clearly. Already now there’s more snow and we also found the trees covered in frost and with the low clouds that hung just above the tree tops, it was quite an amazing sight. That’s as close to natural high key as it gets! I would’ve liked to walk around the marsh a bit more, but the snow had covered it before it was properly frozen so it was tough going and a bit too wet at places so we kept in the forest instead.

The forest roads are not ploughed which gave us a problem. A car with a high clearance would still be ok on these roads, but in a normal car we struggled through the snow and at one point got stuck. But my guide was well prepared and had a shovel in the car so we just dug out the snow and got past the bad spot, no worries. Having said that, it’s not something I would like to encounter on my own so I will have to stick to the ploughed roads from now on!

I thought yesterday was a great day. Today was better! During my walk, it suddenly started snowing. A lot. I loved every second of it! And the walk which wasn’t supposed to be as long as the one yesterday just kind of got extended so I hiked 12 km through the snow and I was almost regretting I didn’t extend it further because the landscape and the trees in particular looked so nice.

I have a favourite spot every time there’s new snow, an old meadow with a barn and a forested hill in the background. Last year I noticed that the barn is barely visible behind the young birches that grow in front of it. And today when I was approaching the spot, I found myself surrounded by the birches! I’m sure I was here last year and the birches didn’t reach above my head. I didn’t even think there was this kind of a tunnel through them at all. They grow fast – I also found that the barn is no longer visible at all behind the birches. I need to find a new favourite spot!

We got some snow this week and the landscape looks just amazing. I can’t help it, I love snow! There’s not too much of the good thing yet so it’s still possible to walk around without problems, just ankle deep mostly. I made good use of it today, took the new road down to Öster-Hocklan and then past the shooting range to Loossjön and back home. It was an 11 km hike, I think I earned my slice of chocolate cake. What a perfect way to spend the day!

I had a new camera with me. I bought the Canon PowerShot S95 compact, which I hope will be everything that the PowerShot G10 wasn’t. The idea with the compact is that I can have it with me even when photography is not the main thing on the agenda. It’s true, sometimes I actually go for a walk just for the sake of the walk! Dragging around a heavy camera/lens combo and a tripod “just in case” is really not much fun. The S95 is small and light and so easily pocketable that I didn’t even notice I was carrying it. Doing a long walk like the one today is pure pleasure and it’s even better when I know that the image quality is so good that it holds up against the 40D, and I’m not kidding about that. It really is that good. I wouldn’t compare the IQ past ISO 200 of course but it’s not an issue because I would never go beyond ISO 200 with landscape pictures anyway and I doubt I will use the S95 for anything else than landscapes.

The problem I had with the G10 was that it was not small and light, I wouldn’t have stuffed it in the jacket pocket and that horrible 15 megapixels was a real turn-off (and Canon realised it, considering that they reduced it to 10 MP in the follow-up G11). So as soon as the novelty of having it had worn off, I was less and less interested in using it until it got to the point where I realised that I might as well sell it and wait for something better to come up. When I saw the specs for the PowerShot S95, I knew that this was the right compact for me. There is only one thing where the G10 beats the S95 and it’s the zoom range, the G10 went a little longer. So I know that there will be times when I wish I could zoom in a bit further when using the S95, but it’s still a minor problem when everything else about the camera is just so perfect for my needs! Granted, I’ve only used the S95 on a couple of occasions so far so it’s a bit risky to make any grand statements, but I honestly feel that this little camera is very capable and I will have many a good walk with it in the future!

Don’t worry, these are probably the last bird pictures I’ll post in a while. The season is getting so late that the light just never seems to be right. Yes, that’s what I said! Here’s why. Shortly after sunrise my bird feeder is lit by the warm light. Now that would normally be a good thing, but there’s a forest behind the feeder and the light is just crazy when some tree trunks and branches are lit and others are not. It’s just simply impossible to contain the detail in both, so my only option is to find an angle where the background is even – either lit, or shaded. That first nuthatch was almost overexposed while the background, while not completely blocked, is a featureless black hole. In the second nuthatch, when I took it I thought the forest would be a nice backdrop to the classic nuthatch pose. But that shaded tree trunk in the middle, ugh.

Then I have this one little window of opportunity where I can use the forest floor as background, which gives that nice yellow tone. But I have very little margin for changing the composition, so I just have to hope that the bird sits on that branch in just the right way. But in order to use the forest floor, I have to use a slightly downwards angle to shoot. I can clone off distractions (had to do it with this blue tit) but there’s no amount post-processing that will fix the angle for me.

In October I was still praising overcast weather to get over this problem with contrast. Well, now it’s November and the days are only going to get darker, so I can just about forget bird photography in overcast weather. All of this means that I can just about forget bird photography, full stop. It remains to be seen if I have any birds visiting the feeder in the spring. In the past two years they’ve all but disappeared.

So no birds, no landscapes, no nothing. Is it any wonder that November is my least active month for photography? The only thing that can save the month is some snow. Well, a lot of snow, actually!