The Quiet Picture

My cabin is shaping up nicely. There are only two major jobs remaining and I have a reliable guy to do them and then it’s pretty much done, actually. There are a few minor things that I have to take care of myself, but then again, a cabin owner’s job is never done. Most of the furniture is also in place, I only have one cupboard that’s waiting to be compiled and then I have to get a bunk bed in the guest room. The cupboard can wait, and the bunk bed arrives next week, just in time for my parents’ visit!

I have a two weeks vacation in September. Unfortunately this is a wrong year for a long autumn vacation because the birches are suffering from some kind of fungal infection which turns all the leaves brown and then kills them before the leaves would naturally turn colour. In some places the alpine birch forest was already stripped of the leaves and it looked more like October than August. In some other places the leaves were still hanging on, but they were infected so I expect the leaves to be gone by the time I have vacation. I’m not going to cancel my vacation though, because September is a wonderful time in the mountains. There won’t be any colour explosion but I can still enjoy hiking in the fresh mountain air. And if the weather is not so good, I can just sit on my couch in the cabin and read a book and take it easy… isn’t that what vacations are for anyway?

It was great weather on Monday evening. I was looking through the bus window towards a dark cloud behind me, and sunlight in front. An amazing sight and I knew the rainbow would be somewhere there, so I half ran home from the bus, grabbed the camera and drove out. I had to stop at every possible spot, because I didn’t know how long the rainbow would last. Didn’t want to risk it fade away while I was driving to the best spot (when I didn’t even know where that spot was). Unfortunately another bank of clouds had materialised in the west, so the sun was obscured again. After chasing that rainbow for a while, the clouds started to disappear in all directions and it was a nice evening in the end. And then I found my best spot, but by then of course the rainbow was but a memory.

I noticed a weird phenomenon in the clouds, I haven’t been able to find an explanation yet. There were some kind of rays radiating out from the horizon… in the east. Light rays coming from the direction of the sun is nothing new, but this was perfectly the opposite. You can see the rays in the second picture, if anyone can explain them to me I would appreciate!

The weather forecast said it would be sunny. Right now. I looked outside and the sky was overcast. I had a plan though and I intended to the follow it, maybe it would be clear out a bit later… so I drove to my spot and found out that I had nothing to do there and the cloud cover didn’t show any signs of lightening up. I took some pictures with the analog camera to try out what 16mm really feels like (so the pictures will be worthless but what am I going to do with slides anyway?) and had the 300mm lens on the 40D because I had this great idea that I would use the wideangle on analog and then shoot dragonflies with digital. The only insects I saw though were mosquitoes so I just walked back to the car, it was pointless. I had no plan B so I had to sit in the car for a while and figure out what to do. In the end I decided to drive to the little tarn I discovered earlier in the summer, there’s a nice wind shelter where I can drink my coffee and wait for the sun.

There was a little bit of wind that broke the surface of the tarn, but sometimes the wind quieted down and gave me nice reflections. I really like this tarn, you can walk all around it and the shoreline is filled with interesting features so there’s always something to catch the eye. You just have to remember that the shore is really just more or less moss floating on water so watch where you step and be prepared to fall back and you’ll be fine.

Of course it would’ve been nice with some sunshine but it just wasn’t happening and I wasn’t too disappointed to be honest. I might be a little bit odd but I don’t mind overcast weather, it’s not necessarily a bad thing for landscape pictures. Purists may scorn at it, but maybe it’s the flower photographer in me that can settle with flat light! By the time I had done one and a half rounds around the tarn, I saw that the clouds were a little bit brighter in the horizon. I didn’t bother to wait and see if they would clear out, I was happy with the shooting I had so far and didn’t feel the need to take the same pictures all over again in the mid-day sun. So I drove off and on the way home when the sun really did come out, I stopped at another tarn and walked around it in search of dragonflies. I found some, but need a little bit more practice before I’m going to post any dragonfly pictures here!

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I’m already good friends with the new Tokina. I know I have to work harder on my foregrounds and I also need to figure out how to take horizontal pictures because I’m mostly taking verticals at the moment. Then again, I’ve always liked verticals… so maybe I shouldn’t blame the Tokina for that. I also took some pictures at f2.8 and the centre sharpness is really good. At first I was horrified though at the corner sharpness until I realised that it’s more of a DOF problem than sharpness issue as such so I’m not worried about it. It’s a great lens and I can’t wait to see what I can do with it in the mountains in September on my vacation!

Or, Tokina AF 16-28mm f2.8 AT-X Pro SD FX as it’s officially called (I’ll just call it “Tokina” in the rest of the post, I’m sure you understand why…). This is the new lens in my bag, when I finally gave in and got the wideangle I had been long wanting and long dreading!

Used on my 40D, the lens becomes 26-45mm. Not an extreme wide angle at all, but certainly wider than my 24-105mm zoom that has been my widest lens for years. The Sigma 15mm fisheye is obviously just a little bit wider, but with it being a fisheye it has very limited usability and I’ve only really used it in the winter for night photography. And this is the reason why I wanted to have a lens with a wide aperture, I mean in normal landscape photography the wide aperture means nothing, but in the winter I would sorely be missing the extra stop of light, considering that in order to shoot stars without trailing them I’m reduced to a shutter speed of 15 sec and I sure don’t want to crank up the ISO to compensate. I also wanted to have a lens that works with full frame cameras, so I only had two lenses to choose from and the Tokina was cheaper than the Canon 16-35mm f2.8L.

If I had had the budget for the Canon, it would’ve been a better option in that it is smaller and lighter than the Tokina and it also accepts filters (82mm, which would’ve been an additional investment). Because those are really my main complaints; no filter thread and the Tokina is heavy, I mean how can a wideangle lens be bigger and heavier than a 24-105mm zoom…? But it can, so I hope that the bulk gives me something nice in return. Nice being, low CA and distortion and overall sharpness. Having taken my first pictures, I can say that the CA is indeed well under control, in fact it has less CA than the Canon 24-105mm! Distortion is negligible, I could barely detect any distortion at all when I lined up the lens with walls. I even tried with the analog camera so I could see the full view but still no distortion worth mentioning, so if there is any it’s a moot point with nature photography.

Which leaves me sharpness. The centre sharpness is excellent, I won’t take any test pictures and compare the lens side by side with my Canon zoom because I’m perfectly happy looking at the pictures I took today. Corner sharpness however can be debated, but then again, it can be debated with the Canon zoom as well. But a mental note to myself, I have to try the lens full open. I was shooting at f8 today which is normally the sweet spot of any lens, so it will be interesting to see what happens at f2.8. Tomorrow morning should be sunny, so I’ll have another chance.

But as I said, today was the first day out with the lens. The weather was a bit iffy, but there was a window in the morning without too much rain so I drove to Svartåmyren after breakfast. I wanted wide open spaces to try out the wideangle, I didn’t really know what I would do with it in the forest so a big mire sounded like a good idea. I decided that I wouldn’t zoom in at all so I kept the lens at 16mm, this is a new thing for me. My photography is normally based on getting closer to things! But zooming in and never using a real wideangle means that my landscape photos become somewhat static and clinical. Composition is by the book but when nothing happens in the images, what’s does it leave me? It leaves me struggling with landscapes because I’m never as happy with them as I am with my macros. They say that equipment doesn’t make you a better photographer, but I think sometimes it helps… I hope I can improve my landscapes now. In theory I know how to use a wideangle lens, so now I have to learn to see the world in wide angles as well. I’m quite excited about this actually!

Spent the weekend at the cabin, and managed to waste most of it on putting together Ikea furniture. 8 hours on a wardrobe, and we were two people working on it! It would’ve been impossible alone. But… there was this one photo session that was worth the trip alone. Full moon rising just before sunset!

We did some scouting in the afternoon, but the first place wasn’t anything special. The second place was something I had figured out should work; I had been there before and felt that it has potential although of course I’ve never used the spot for a moonrise before.

We got to the spot a little bit too early. Moonrise was still about an hour away and to our disappointment, sunset was looking like a dud after a warm and sunny day. So that was a long wait ahead of us while the temperature was dropping, making the waiting all the more difficult. We welcomed any respite from the boredom and even I was happily shooting a distant reindeer with my short zoom, all the while knowing how hopeless it was. Then when I started feeling the cold bite through my clothes, I did some running up and down the plateau we were standing on. When I reached the lower end, I saw an opportunity towards the sunset so I gave up on waiting for the moon to appear from behind the mountain and set up shop at the new spot instead. I made sure that I still had a free view towards east (moonrise) so I would be able to switch shooting direction quickly. Just as I was trying to figure out what shutter speed to use to prevent blowing out the bright blob of the sun that was visible through the clouds, a glance behind my back told me that the moon was actually visible! I abandoned the sunset without hesitation and then realised that my lens was too short to properly compose the moon as it was rising above Blåstöten. But then, sometimes you’re lucky. To my absolute amazement, the sun came out and I found the dwarf birch glowing bright orange right in front of me! I should say that this is how I had planned it, but it really was just pure luck. With this foreground, it was easy to compose when I switched to vertical and zoomed to the max and I was glowing just as happy as the dwarf birch was glowing (unseasonally) orange. So imagine my disappointment when I discovered at home that I didn’t have enough DOF to keep both the foreground and background sharp… the mountain and the moon were soft. It almost broke my heart when I deleted these images.

But then I thought… are those images really beyond rescue? With some resizing and clever sharpening, I might be able to rescue something. With this in mind, when I was reviewing the failed images, I realised that they weren’t even as good as I had thought at first that they were. The sunlight hadn’t reached the mountain yet, I had been so concentrated on the foreground that I missed the light on the mountain. By the time the light did reach the mountain, I had switched camera orientation and zoomed out, which gave me a smaller moon and inferior composition but all-around sharpness as well.

So I’m thinking, what’s wrong with me when I miss something as elementary as checking DOF? If I don’t have the discipline by now to use my knowledge even when the situation is changing fast, then I will never have that discipline… I just have a lot of theories and more regrets. With that said, it was an awesome evening watching that moonrise. It was another awesome evening on Friday on Flatruet when we saw seven (7!) short-eared owls fly around us. And when it comes down to it, it’s these experiences that makes life interesting!

Ever since last year when we did some driving around in Orsa Finnmark, I’ve been wanting to go back to explore the places. Last year it was late autumn and the weather was a bit iffy so I didn’t really stop anywhere, just made mental notes about the places we drove through. Well today, the conditions were going to be better so we had made plans for a day-trip to see if these places were hiding any photogenic spots. The weather perhaps still not ideal, but most of the rain came down when we were driving anyway and then, with a little of waiting, we got those sunny spells when we wanted to shoot something.

The first stop was at Trollgraven at the Vässinjärvi power plant. It’s a man-made ravine for the water run-off, the photogenic qualities can be debated but it was worth checking out, especially because we were going to drive past it anyway so no de-tours required. I was more interested in the next stop, the Korpmäck mountain. It’s over 700m high, although you can’t really appreciate the height as such because the road goes at over 500m altitude. However, the eastern side of the mountain is steep so it provided a great background for whatever we could find as foreground.

From Korpmäck we continued to Majkölen, it’s a large mire at an altitude of about 600m so you can see some sub-alpine character in the forest. But I have to say, from that drive-through last year I had the impression that this would be a great place… it wasn’t. Sure, it’s nice to look at, but when you have a camera in your hand, you find your options are quite limited. So this was a disappointment.

Then we headed back north and stopped at the Sundsjön Nature Reserve. A couple of years ago I drove past here, saw a potential good spot and kicked myself for not stopping to take a closer look. Remedied.

By now it was late afternoon and we finally arrived at what I considered to be the main attraction of the day, the St. Gönsjön lake. Unfortunately the wind was blowing a lot harder than I thought it would do today, and the surface of the lake was completely whipped up. Using a long shutter speed, you could create an illusion of calmer waters but then you have the moving clouds to deal with, and there was even a moon in the sky and that doesn’t tolerate any long exposures without blurring out. So it was a kind of a lose-lose situation. Use a short shutter speed to keep the moon and the clouds sharp and you’ll have ugly water. Use a very long shutter speed and water is nice and the clouds are blurred but the moon is just a streak. Use something in between… and nothing really works. But I’ll say this – St. Gönsjön is a great place and deserves more visits, just during calmer waters. Later in the evening a bank of clouds moved in and we lost the light so there was no point in exploring the lake any further, so there’s still plenty to see for new visits.

Looking at my pictures now, I didn’t get anything that I’m completely happy about. I’m a little bit disappointed, to be honest, I had a lot more expectations. But having said that, I’m not disappointed at the trip as a whole – I think it was a great day of exploration, it answered all those questions I had in my mind. Most importantly, it gave me St. Gönsjön, I definitely I have to get back there!