The Quiet Picture

I’m so happy to see some flowers already coming up. I have a pile of snow about one meter high in front of the kitchen window, but right under the window where it’s very warm when the sun in shining, the ground is already bare of snow and I found the first crocuses coming up! Happy days. And then I also checked one spot where I know the coltsfoot are the first to bloom and sure enough, in that about 2-3 sqm area which is free of snow, the coltsfoot buds are pushing through.

Walking in the forest, it’s also quite clear that one season is coming to an end. The snow crust is hard and as long as you can find some old snow mobile tracks which have frozen, it’s like walking on pavement. It’s easy, but it’s not pretty. The snow is covered with fallen debris from the trees, but I want to see the good side of that, too… it will help the snow melt faster when the sun heats up the debris!

I had a whole family of roe deer pass by the house today while I was at home and I actually managed to get some pictures and managed to mess them up pretty good, too – I had somehow left the camera on +1 EV while metering from the animals in the dark forest. Talk about hot snow… Anyway, it wasn’t a good opportunity anyway so I’m not disappointed, but what really has me distraught is what I discovered when I was viewing the images in full resolution.

The thing is that I use metal wires to attach some of the bird and squirrel food. In the autumn when I set up everything, I had a few wires over so I wrapped them around a branch in case I would need to re-arrange things. Since it’s metal, I didn’t think there was any risk the wires would come loose but what I didn’t count for was the snow cover, rising and rising… until it was level with the branch the wires are attached to. Since this is the bird feeding place, there’s always some seeds on the ground and the roe deer stop to check if there’s anything left over for them. And so it must have happened, one of the deer had managed to get his antlers inside the wire loop and pulled it off when he raised his head.

I feel horrible. This is just the kind of thing I rant about when other people do it. My only consolation is that the wire doesn’t seem to be stuck in any bad manner so it will hopefully drop off soon.

Needless to say that I won’t be leaving any spare wires out ever again!

I warned you that I would post some more squirrel pictures! The “problem” is that I’ve taken better squirrel pictures in the past two weeks than I’ve done in the past whatever years. The second problem is that every picture I have from the past weeks is the animal sitting on the same little perch, which only leaves me trying to catch different positions and hoping for different light.

This is my favourite from the previous week’s session. Nice position with curled tail and some blue and gold hues in the background.

While it’s nice that the squirrel faced the other direction so I get some variation, it’s probably not ideal anyway. I get a feeling that the picture is unbalanced because everything of any weight is on the left side. I tried to remedy the situation by cropping from the left to get rid of the background, which you can see in the next picture.

So now we have some more empty space on the left and the squirrel is sitting on the right side (by a whisker). But I still don’t think it’s well balanced, even if it’s better than the previous picture?

And finally, my favourite! The squirrel got nervous a couple of times and ran up the tree to calm down. I could hear it coming back down, but it moves very very quickly and it was impossible to catch it in a frame and stretched out while climbing it’s too long to fit the frame anyway. But there was this one moment when it settled on the stick and curved the tail and gave me just enough time to focus on the eye and re-compose… imagine my joy when I found that the eye is tack-sharp! Needless to say that I didn’t get a second chance at this. And please don’t break my heart by saying that it’s too tight at the bottom. I think I could get some more pine trunk from another picture and add it here if I really really must, but I’ve decided to love this picture as it is!

And wanna hear something funny? I still have some squirrel pictures left…

I had quite a day yesterday. In the morning I had the pleasure of having the squirrel as company and was quite happy about the resulting pictures, and then in the afternoon we did a skiing trip in Lofsdalen and in the evening I shot the perigee moon rising over the Hovärken mountain. I can’t imagine any better way of spending the day!

I didn’t get many pictures from the skiing trip, actually, but I don’t mind at all. When the light should’ve been at its best, the sun disappeared behind some thin clouds so the red glow never materialised. The only direction I cared about was east and initially the moon was hidden by some strips of clouds but higher up, it was all clear. Obviously, it was so dark by then that the only way of getting anything out of the pictures is to use HDR which in this case consisted of the light frame for the foreground, and a dark frame where I only needed to extract the moon and then try to make it look natural in the light frame. It’s surprisingly difficult, actually, and in those frames where I had clouds in front of the moon I almost gave up completely!

New location added to my Location Reports: Ängerån

When all else fails, go back to basics. Or in this case, go back to what you know best and for me it’s detail. A birch as a whole is tragically un-photogenic at this time of the year, but this bark detail caught my eye and I was happy I had the little Powershot in my pocket, “just in case”. Just in case of just this!

The sunlight was diffused by high cloud which was fine in this case. I even considered making it b&w and really bring out the texture, maybe I will play around with it later. This colour version seems unnecessarily pale and there’s no point in trying to boost any colours anyway!

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EDIT: I got around to the b&w process sooner than expected, so I’m adding the new version for comparison.

Since I have nothing else to post, I thought I would share a couple of a squirrel pictures caught the other day. It was a pleasant surprise that this time the squirrel didn’t run off when I opened the window, so I got a number of a frames and some of them quite nice, too. But it seems like there’s plenty of food in the nature because the squirrel doesn’t visit my feeding spot every day and when it finally comes, it doesn’t stay around for very long. A few years ago when I had up to five different squirrels in the neighbourhood, they would come by every day and fight each other over the food so either they were lazy or food was running short in the wild. Although maybe squirrels are solitary and just don’t like the company, rather than fighting because they were starving!

I was supposed to be studying last night, but at 8pm I couldn’t resist checking the aurora forecast and it looked like there would be a chance of some activity. So I packed up and left – I mean give me a break, I had been sitting in front of the computer for 13 hours straight already!

My usual spot (even if it’s not very good) is at the skiing track. We have the luxury of electric light on this track but hardly anyone ever skis there at night. Except tonight – it was lit. Horror! I had no chance but the walk a bit further; there’s a deforestated spot on the other side with an open view north. The only foreground interest at this spot is a lonely birch with hanging branches but at least there wasn’t a lot of wind so I got away with it. The sky was almost clear but I was looking at these things in the horizon and couldn’t quite make up my mind what it was. High cloud? Auroral glow? It all looked grey to me, but I knew that a long exposure would extract some colour in the scene if anything existed. So I took a shot and looked at the LCD and sure enough, it was greenish! (Yes I know that AWB and camera LCD is hardly a reliable source of information, but a comparison to the snow told me that there’s a difference.)

But now I had another problem. The clouds. And they definitely were clouds because they were obscuring the stars, even the bright star of Vega which at that point was in the northern sky disappeared from sight. So I kept moving about, changing my composition around this lonely birch, and glancing towards east where I could see this fairly consistent formation of clouds. I mean east, gotta be clouds, right? And I turned my eyes to north again, waiting, waiting.

I had been standing there for an hour, still trying to figure out the difference between cloud and aurora. At least the sky was starting to clear a little bit, but it was cold and I couldn’t decide if I should stay or go. And just when I was getting closer to leaving than staying, I saw something in the horizon… that must be it! I’ll stay.

Miracles do happen. For a brief moment, I saw the aurora dance in the sky and I was so happy I nearly cried.

All the while this was going on, that persistent cloud formation in the east was getting brighter. At one point it looked like two gigantic spotlights pointed towards the sky and I was starting to have serious doubts. How can clouds get brighter at night? They can’t. The light show was already fading so I took a few quick steps, pointed the camera towards the lights and hoped for the best. I hit the bullseye with the birch and by the time I had I moved into a better position, the aurora had visibly faded, just one minute between the frames and the difference is clear. Nothing to see here folks, go home.

Waiting pays off. I may only have a few noisy frames with modest auroral activity to show for it, but I don’t regret trading my studies for those hours in the snow. Magical, as always.

It’s spring, there’s no doubt about that. Warm during the day and cold during the night, and the trails are covered with crushed ice rather than soft snow. I went skiing yesterday and the glide was fabulous – unfortunately it was as good sideways and backwards as it was forward. So I took the snowshoes today but I ended up carrying them rather than walking with them because as long as you’re following any tracks or trails it’s like walking on pavement. Photographically speaking, the highlight was this squirrel that allowed me to take one shot. I literally mean that – it’s the only one frame I got before it scurried away!

There’s a new link on the top of the page for Location reports. I will be adding some location tips here, some favourite places I’ve visited that some other photographers may be interested it. I won’t add any detailed tips (such as, “in June, stand at these coordinates at exactly 21:30 and point your wideangle lens to north”) but the information is more generic in nature and I leave the rest to your imagination and curiosity to visit the place and find out for yourself. A place can be great on day and totally uninspiring the next, so sometimes you need to give it a second chance. In fact, many of these places are such that I haven’t explored fully but I know that the killer shot is there, if I just get back there at the right moment!

So far I’ve added four locations:

• Fättjeåfallet and Sångbäckfallet waterfalls
• The Wilderness Road
• Gröntjärn
• Hornslandet