The Quiet Picture

After all the warm weather last weekend, I’m having a hard time figuring out what to wear now. It’s not as warm but the sun is shining, so do I need the middle layer or not? I decided to have faith in the sun and left out the middle layer and I was very nearly freezing. The wind isn’t helping. It didn’t help me when I tried to shoot the young birch leaf either, the branches were dancing like crazy and I had to hold the branch with one hand and shoot with the other. The Sigma 150mm macro is not made for one-handed shooting, let me assure you… but the shutter speed was fast enough to pull it off. More DOF would’ve been a bonus, but the leaves are growing so fast that either I grab the opportunity when I see it, or wait until next year.

I was short on ideas on what else to shoot, I actually contemplated to skip the daphne because I’m starting to feel that I’ve done everything with daphne that I can and it’s not very inspiring to take the same pictures all over again. But then I figured that it doesn’t hurt to check them and it’s not like I had any better ideas anyway. And oh boy was I happy that I didn’t give up on them! I found this branch which made it possible to fill up the background with the flowers, instead of having to fill the frame with extreme closeups (like I did on Monday). Having done this, now I really don’t know what else to do with the daphne… but at least I learned that it’s worth checking, because you never know what surprises Mother Nature will throw at you.

Surprises like being pounded by hail when I was doing my afternoon walk. I had to take refuge under a bridge and wait for the hail to pass, in the meanwhile the ice that was stuck in my hair started melting and the cold water trickled down my back. Now this is the April weather we all know and (don’t) love!

Yesterday on the way home, when I looked up from my book I saw a glorious double halo around the sun. It’s a pretty desperate deal to shoot through the bus window, but I had to try – I can’t remember I’ve ever seen a double halo. I just kept hoping that the halos would still be there when I got home, and this time I had luck on my side. They were fading and the rings were no longer complete, but both of them were still visible so I hurried home, put the fish-eye on the camera and ran back out, trying to find a decent spot to shoot from.

I think that this is the first time I’ve wished for something wider than 24mm. I couldn’t fit both halos in the frame, so I had to settle for partials. Although come to think of it, since the rings had faded out on the right side, I guess I wasn’t missing out too bad. But at least I was able to document the phenomenon and this time it’s enough. Btw, I was shooting at f/16 but it was impossible to get a starburst because of the thin veil in front of the sun, dispersing the light. Which made it possible for the halo to happen in the first place…

Afterwards, I did some reading to find out exactly how rare this double halo is. I found out that the inner ring is called a 22 degree halo and it’s actually quite common, even if I’m sure that I haven’t seen quite as often as they claim it occurs. The outer ring is a 46 degree halo and that’s the rare one, although it seems like a 46 degree halo can sometimes be confused with other halo phenomena. But having read the documentation and studied the picture on the linked page, I’m fairly sure that this was a genuine 46 degree halo.

In the first picture, the parhelia is clearly visible (the ray that is shooting to the left from the 22 degree halo) and it’s also possible to distinguish the tangent arc (on top of the 22 degree halo). In the second picture, the halos were seriously fading out and you can just barely make out the circumzenithal arc on top of the 46 degree halo. There’s also a curious cloud formation that looks like sun rays.

Cool. I learned something today!

Flowers, give me flowers! I went to my favourite daphne spot to see if the flowers would already be in bloom. They were, but only by a very narrow margin and there were more buds than open flowers. But the scent, it was already there. Love it!

In the afternoon I took my bike down to the lake and found two pairs of cranes and one pair of swans in the flood plains. The weather is so warm that I can hardly believe it… cycling in a t-shirt in April. That’s a first!

Later on, I drove to Kullas to see if the crazy pair of cranes would be nesting by the road again, and sure enough, one of the cranes was lying down so I think it’s incubating an egg! But at least the nest is not completely in the open, it’s visible from the road (if you know to watch for it) but behind some trees so there’s no clear view. I won’t even try to approach the nest, obviously, so if I want to photograph cranes I will have to find them elsewhere.

One of my spots was the road that my guide took me last year to see red-throated loons. And oh joy – I found a pair of them! It was difficult to get a good shot though so I drove on to the small lake where we found a red-throated loon last year. Only this time, I saw two. This is absolutely brilliant! I’m not a loon expert but I’m thinking that they are out fishing during the day and come back “home” for the evening (black-throated loons live in the big lakes, but red-throated loons only fish in them and breed in the small lakes or tarns). Just perfect for me, it means that I can expect to see red-throated loons just about any evening and I have two lakes to choose from, as well. Today I settled with shooting from the car so I have my work cut out for me to get out of the car and crawl to the water’s edge without disturbing the birds.

But I found something else at this lake as well. I saw a dark spot on the opposite shore – a black grouse! It was way too far for any meaningful pictures but of course I had to try and as I was looking through the lens, I realised that there were actually four of them. Four black grouse and two loons… and then that other pair of red-throated loons in the other lake, and I also saw a pair of cranes between these two lakes. I wasn’t even disappointed when I didn’t see any cranes in the flood-plains at Loossjön!

I’ve never been to the mountains at this time of the year, so it was quite exciting to see what they look like. But then I heard that this is a rather unusual spring, the snow has melted very early (it has been warm over there as well) so I guess I can’t draw any conclusions as yet.

The day was glorious, blue skies and sunshine. [rant] Which was just well, because my cabin is a big dark thundercloud weighing on my head (and heart). It hurts, it really hurts. If anyone knows a reliable carpenter, I’ll be all ears – that darn thing has to get finished asap, if my contractor can’t do it then I bloody well take care of it myself! [/rant]

We took the scenic road back home and the same place which gave us those nice “in the cloud” pictures three weeks ago provided a great opportunity once again. This time with sunrays filtering through clouds, I had to use HDR to make any sense of it and the pictures need some more processing, I just quickly put them through LR/Enfuse to get a preview. I’m just not inspired to work on them at the moment, the cabin is killing both my creativity and my will to live. Ok, creativity anyway. But if you’re a carpenter or know one and can finish my cabin (it’s probably just a day’s job anyway), I’ll be much happier!

It’s amazing how quickly the spring is proceeding. It seems like in November when winter arrived, it arrived all at once and didn’t let go until March. And then when it got warm, it did it with a bang. This feels like the warmest Easter on record!

I walked down to the lake to check if there would be any birds in the floodplains (only some ducks and gulls) and then checked out the situation with the ice. Seems like 50/50 at the moment and in the warm sunshine the rest of the ice will probably disappear in just a few days. Loossjön is not a photogenic lake as such, but when the water level is low like it is at the moment, it becomes much more interesting. The lake is man-made so the shores are lined up with old tree roots which can be quite nice, but the best part would be that it would be possible to walk around the lake. I mean sure, you could do it even during normal water level, as long as you don’t mind hiking through thick forest. I’m waiting for the low water so I could walk on the dry mud – easy! At the moment the exposed ground is a little bit too wet and I can see that there’s still some big blocks of ice in the shaded part of the shore but I hope that in a couple of weeks it will be both dry and ice-free and that the water level hasn’t risen any higher than it is at the moment. There’s a risk that it will rise though, normally it happens every year – low water in the spring and normal until winter when the water mostly just flows out, creating the low water situation in the spring.

The landscape is transforming quickly. Snow is receding visibly every day and now it’s just patches rather than any real snow cover to speak of. The next major breakthrough will come when the lakes break free of ice, normally it happens at the end of April or early May at the latest.

The early spring flowers are popping up in the warm spots and my crocuses are always early. The flowers closest to the house were blooming while there was still a pile of snow a meter high in front of them! But now that pile is gone of course and I had plenty of space and dry yester-year grass to kneel on to shoot them.

In the afternoon we made a major effort to find cranes and other migratory birds. I’ve been a little bit perplexed that I haven’t seen the big crane flocks in Veckebo that normally are there every year, now it’s only been a handful of cranes in the distance. And when we were driving around through all the big fields around Ljusdal, all we saw was one pair of cranes! Since I don’t think there’s been any major drop in the crane population, the only conclusion I can make is that the cranes’ breeding wetlands are open enough for the cranes to move straight home instead of gathering in the fields while waiting for the thaw. Proof of the point, there’s a pair of cranes in the marshland in Kullas (the highest point on the road between Korskrogen and Loos) already. They nested there last year and I wondered if it really could succeed. They don’t seem to mind the traffic, but I’m fairly sure that somebody got out of the car to take a closer look. The cranes have a zero-tolerance policy about people and sure enough, the nest was abandoned before the baby hatched. On the other hand, it’s normal that a crane couple would have a failed breeding attempts in the first years they’re together. So provided that people leave them well alone, maybe they’ll succeed this year?

One thing I’m always very careful to point out is that photography is a hobby for me and that I don’t have any intentions of making it a profitable such. So I don’t market my pictures and a few years ago when I had a photo exhibition, I decided that it’s just not worth the trouble either. A hobby is a good hobby only as long as it’s fun, and the exhibition felt like too much work. So it’s a bit surprising that I’ve volunteered myself to go through it again and now it’s a more high profile exhibition than the last one which took place in our small library here in Loos.

When I agreed to do the exhibition, I didn’t even have a clear idea of what kind of pictures I wanted to put up. Now I’ve had a few weeks to think about it and I’ve decided to go for the pictures which are closest to my heart – the quiet ones. The name of the exhibition is “Den tysta bilden” i.e. The Quiet Picture. The exhibition will take place at the Rosehills garden market in Ljusdal so it was natural that I gravitated towards flowery motifs. I still haven’t selected exactly which pictures I will show and I even have time to take some new ones, now that I know exactly what style I need. The strange thing is, I’m always talking about keeping my pictures simple but when it really comes down to it, I don’t have a lot of pictures that qualify. I’m talking about extreme simplicity, where the picture comes down to just one or two elements, but without making it completely abstract. The picture I’m posting here is too abstract to qualify, but it’s a good example of the simplicity I’m referring to. One colour and the subject fills the frame.

In order to advertise the exhibition, I’ve created a Facebook page which features more of these quiet pictures. Not as simple as the exhibit pictures will be, but I want to concentrate on this theme now and will make a serious effort to think before I shoot when I get down with the flowers this summer. It will be a challenge… experience tells me that it’s surprisingly difficult to find subjects which are completely free of distractions so I have my work cut out for me!

The exhibition will open on 30 July and run until 11 August. If you’re in or around Ljusdal during that time, welcome!

I’m trying to fight off a cold and it seems like I’m doing a good job at it, because I’m not getting very sick… but I’m not fully fit either so something is going on. Normally I stay indoors when I have a least suspicion of having a cold, but yesterday was an exception. We had agreed to drive to the mountains so I just packed up some painkillers and hoped for the best. And to my pleasant surprise, it was fine. In fact, it seems like doing something like that just helped me feel better!

But anyway, the trip. I was rather naively thinking that we would get sunshine, blue skies and white mountains but we got clouds, heavy wind and snowmelt instead. Oh well. The weather is obviously always a game of luck, but I didn’t expect to see so many black blotches on the mountains. I’ve done many April mountain trips and now that I checked my old pictures, it proves that I wasn’t completely wrong in expecting those white mountains (just check out the pictures from my April trip last year!). But if the weather is a game of luck from day to day, then the seasons aren’t the same from year to year either.

If the clouds hadn’t been bad enough during the day, they just got worse in the evening. In fact, when we drove through Slagavallen which is at about 850m altitude, we found ourselves inside the cloud. So just when it was at its worst, it was at its best – the best pictures of the day, right at the end of it!