The Quiet Picture

Very windy on Saturday but I had planned to drive to Funäsdalen anyway so it was fine. I did some shopping; got myself a new backpack again! My quest to find the perfect photo hiking pack, part 7.

Back at the cabin, did some more cleaning and cleared out some junk, so now it’s starting to look like a liveable place. Just needs a lot of furniture. I also discovered that I have no talent whatsoever as a DIY handy(wo)man, I even fail with the simplest things like setting up blinds on a window. But it sort of worked anyway, the important thing is that it blocks the light in the bedroom, I’ll fix the rest later…

In the evening when the wind wasn’t so bad any more, I did a small hike. I wasn’t planning to go to the Fiskhålsgraven ravine, but somehow I ended up there anyway. On the way up I followed the little brook with its many small waterfalls but the sunlight made it difficult to shoot in the forest for all the contrast. Not that there were so many opportunities, the brook is still a litte bit flooded and it desperately needs some greens for decoration.

Up at the ravine, I saw the sun bathe the cliffs in warm evening light, and the light also reached a birch inside the ravine. Just the perfect opportunity so I set up the tripod and got ready to shoot – and a cloud appeared. Well, the wind is still brisky, so it will blow away the cloud soon, right? Wrong. Somehow the cloud was morphing on the spot so instead of moving away, it just simply stayed there and blocked the sun. Extremely frustrating, because it was just about the only cloud in the sky at all! I have seen this phenomenom before, I guess you have to be a photographer waiting for the light to notice that half the time the clouds morph instead of move. But I waited, and then waited some more, all the while knowing that the more I waited the less chance I had that the light would still reach the birch inside the ravine, with what the sun going down. And then finally, I had an opportunity that probably lasted all of 10 seconds, and took my picture. Sure enough, only the tip of the birch was lit at this point so that was an opportunity lost.

Then I set up the kit on a new spot. And waited some more. I think all in all I waited about half an hour, all because of one small cloud that just kept changing its shape in front of the sun! But I got my second picture at last and and the cloud looked like it would be dissipating, but I didn’t care any more. My fingers were numb with cold, I had heard on the radio that it has been a very warm day elsewhere in Sweden but it sure wasn’t warm up there.

On the way down, I noticed that the cloud was gone. It never blew away, just morphed itself out of existence.

I have a mini-holiday and this is the first time I’m actually going to sleep over in my cabin. I’ve got electricity there, the radiators work, there was a good chance of getting running water – luxury!

When I got to the cabin, I met with guy who was going to help me with the water. Sure enough, we got it going with just a minor flood in the bathroom, nothing that good mop doesn’t fix.

Then I set to work with cleaning and mounting more furniture. While I was getting along with it, I met with some new neighbours (they are all very nice here!) and a guy who had an expert eye and pointed out some more problems with the cabin. Not what I needed, so I made a few phonecalls to try to organise things again and felt better afterwards so I could concentrate on an IKEA chair with a missing hole. Exactly, a missing hole. I had a powertool with me and I had a toolkit, but I had left the drills at home. So I took the biggest screw I could find and screwed it through where the hole was supposed to be, and then I used a sandpaper technique (without sandpaper) to make it large enough – it figures that the missing hole is the biggest one of the lot. And when I finally got frustrated with it, I took a hammer and just simply tried to hit the darn metal plug but all you achieve with violence is to break things, so the wood split… Note to self: Always bring the FULL toolkit when you’re going to work with IKEA furniture!

With all the time I had spent on one lousy chair, I decided to enjoy the warm evening sunshine instead. I wanted to check out the lake and the Mittån river that runs from the eastern end of the lake, so I took the trail that is very conveniently almost behind my cabin and headed down to the village. Now, the only problem is that there are lots trails here. I was sure that the trail I needed was going straight so I ignored all the trail crossings, but soon I was starting to feel that it was sure taking a lot longer to get to the village than I had anticipated. I found the reason – I had walked in the wrong direction and ended up too far in the west. But at least I came out from the trail in a place which I recognised, so knew which way to go from there. Sort of – after another wrong turn and time wasted, I finally got down to the lake. Of course by now it was getting a bit late so I just walked to the bridge that crosses Mittån, took a picture (no points for the wind beaten lake) and headed back. I made an educated guess where I would find the trail that I was supposed to follow in the first place and I actually found it right where I figured it should be. Walking the trail this way, I got back in a fraction of time I had taken me to go out and indeed, it’s a very short bit to walk from the cabin to the village. It will probably take me some time to learn where all these different trails lead… but time is something I should have now, and I’m not talking about this mini-holiday!

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I have no Internet connection from the cabin, no telephone coverage either for that matter. So I’m posting this from Funäsdalen, the wind is blowing almost storm so it’s a perfect day to do some shopping. I’m not the least bit tempted to go up on a mountain in this wind, but at least it’s a bit sunny so I need to find something to do in the afternoon that doesn’t involve cleaning or furniture or lakes or alpine tundra.

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Oh and my first night in the cabin! A little bit sleepless to be honest, until at sunrise (I can see the summer sunrise from the “kitchen” window) I finally put on the earplugs to shut out the birds’ chirpy chatter and the occasional cracking from the radiators. I’m a light sleeper.

I had a walk around the forest to see what’s happening with the flowers. I was particularly interested in the lesser butterfly orchids, they are already growing but will probably take a couple of weeks to bloom. Most things in the forest seem to be in the same stage and I saw a lot of buds of different kinds. A week or two and it’s the high season!

There is one spot in the forest which is covered by a green mat of ferns. I’ve always eyed this spot and tried to find out ways to photograph it, but even when it at first looks wonderfully light green, at closer look you find that the mat is a little bit “broken” so I never created any pictures here. Until today, when I saw the half grown wood cranesbill break up the fern pattern and this one leaf with a young fern nested on it. It really was like that when I found it, not sure I could’ve come up with the idea myself!

I tried to clean up the leaf before taking pictures and it looked ok in the viewfinder, but on the monitor I could see the leaf was full of little spots of different kinds, some kind microscopic debris that’s really easy to miss in the nature. So I did a great deal of healing to get rid of the worst, but when I realised that there were probably a hundred of these smaller spots, I gave up and used negative clarity instead. Which is a little bit ironic, considering that I shot it at f16 to get enough depth of field to keep the fern sharp!