The Quiet Picture

Visited Järvzoo today. A somewhat windy day with grey overcast skies, absolutely hopeless for landscape photography and I don’t want to do a 2nd straight weekend of nothing but bird photography, so the zoo sounded like a good idea. I didn’t have any expectations though, there wasn’t a lot of light for shooting in the forest so I was fully prepared to be happy if I could get just one nice picture. It turned out that I got more than just one so it was definitely a good visit, and the best part of it is that I finally got a nice picture of an arctic fox! After all these years of visiting Järvzoo, I only had one arctic fox picture and I’ve kept it in my library for comic relief, because it only shows the back of the fox. But now, finally, I got the face as well! Granted, spruce forest is not the natural environment for an arctic fox but I’m not even trying to pass it as an authentic wild animal, so I’ll treat it for what it is – a zoo picture. I liked the way the spruce branches formed a frame around the fox and it seems like I made more use of the OOF foreground on this visit than I normally do… sometimes the bricks just fall that way.

After getting the crested tit portrait last week, I feel like my bird portrait quota is full. So I decided to try something new and catch the birds in flight, or at least with their wings raised. Now that’s a challenge for sure! I stood a little bit further away than normal to give the wings some room in the frame and then when a bird sat on a perch, I kept the finger on the shutter to catch the moment they take to flight. And then of course the bird would just sit there until the buffer was full and lift off right after that… But even when the buffer didn’t get full, it’s incredibly difficult to catch the right moment. I also found out that the 40D is not fast enough, and all too often I would have a sitting bird in one frame and an empty perch in the next, because the bird flew off in between the frames. That’s how quick they are! And stuff like getting a sharp eye, I can just dream about it. It wasn’t the brightest of days and I was working with shutter speeds of about 1/500 which would be plenty enough for the portraits, but for the birds on the move it’s not enough and there was motion blur in the eye.

So doing this perfectly, in natural light in the late autumn, with the 40D, is borderline impossible. I could of course keep shooting hundreds and hundreds of frames and at some point the numbers would tip in my favour and I would get that perfect shot, so we’ll see… until then, I’ll settle for this compromise where the eye is sharp for a sitting bird, and the wings are spread for a bird in flight. I had no idea I had caught this until I saw on it on the computer!

After taking hundreds of pictures of birds (and other moving things) last weekend, there were obviously quite a few shots I threw away. I mean, out of about 500 pictures, I kept 14. Either I suck at this, or the birds are really difficult, or then it’s the combination… the good news is that with digital, it doesn’t matter how many hundred you shoot if you just get one that you’re really happy with. Out of those 14 I kept, there are 3 I’m really happy with. And another 3 of them should go to the recycle bin because of motion blur and other defects, but I felt that the pictures weren’t completely without merit so I’m keeping them. For the joke factor, if nothing else!

A pre-cheating era Terje Hellesö would’ve received loads of appraise for these. If you take blurry pictures with cropped-off body parts and claim you did it on purpose and call it art, you’ll be everyone’s hero. If you’re a no-name like me and confess that these are pure accidents, then you’re everyone’s zero. I mean c’mon, the least you can do is to get the whole animal in the frame and god forbid if you miss focus on the eye!

It’s a fine line between art and the recycle bin…

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The crested tit picture came very close to the recycle bin. The lack of sharpness in the eye is a real bother but I think it’s also fixable – I could pick up the face from another picture and paste it here and .. well, then the missing wingtip would be a real bother.

The great tit has an even more blurry eye, but I think a lot of blur is better than a little bit. Both wingtips are missing, but the bird’s body and the wings make two opposing diagonals that I thought was nice and saved the picture from the Bin.

And finally the squirrel. No eye in sight, although I swear it was there when I pressed the shutter! But honestly, how could I possible delete this one? I think it’s hilarious and it’s gotta be a 100 times more unique than any other squirrel picture I’ve ever taken!

I had a great day at the feeder today. I’ve finally figured out which angles to use when it’s a sunny weather so I can avoid the the shadow/highlight nightmare that has previously bogged down my sunny day bird shoots; the trick is to shoot up so the background is made up of tree crowns which are more evenly lit than the tree trunks. And I’ve also figured out how to get pictures of those more jittery customers like the crested tit. There’s no point in trying to chase them because by the time you’ve spotted the bird and moved the camera in that direction, the bird will be gone. After a while of doing this, I finally noticed that the crested tit stopped at a specific spot on the perch a couple of times. So I thought, if  it’s done it twice, then maybe it will do it for a third time. I pointed my camera at that spot, kept looking through the viewfinder and ignored everything else… until the crested tit settled on that same spot again! I was sure that this was the last time I was going to see it perched, so I started looking around again and catch some other birds.

So I got the greenfinch, blue tit, great tit, coal tit, willow tit… basically, every bird I get at the feeder except the nuthatch (blurry pictures don’t count). And the squirrel. There’s no doubt about it, the camouflage works because suddenly I noticed that the squirrel was eating on the ground just a couple of metres in front of me. I was even able to change position (slowly shuffle sideways for a better angle) and it didn’t scatter. So maybe I should start thinking about a set-up for the squirrel as well; the perch I’ve been using for the past few years is getting old.

And then the crested tit came back and settled on another perch. Happy!

Oh boy I’m excited, I had two crested tits for visit! I’ve only ever had some fleeting encounters with them before, but today there were at the feeder all day and they were completely fearless. They didn’t mind me moving around and they happily flew so close to me that I couldn’t even try to shoot, but the biggest problem was that they like to forage the fallen seeds on the ground and very rarely sat on any proper perch. And even when they did, they move too fast to catch them in the viewfinder and focus and shoot. I thought that the nuthatch is a difficult bird to photograph, but it’s downright pedestrian compared to the crested tit! I was happy I got anything at all, and I learned from the experience so I’ve made some changes to the feeding site and I sincerely hope that they will be back tomorrow. It is such a fascinating bird… not very colourful, but the pattern is exquisite and then there’s of course the crest.

I was wearing full camouflage today. For some of the birds it doesn’t make any difference, for example the willow and coal tits don’t care what I wear. The great tits are somewhat more suspicious and the greenfinches even more so, but today I got some nice pictures of a greenfinch. And a great tit sat on my shoulder! Even the squirrel came for a visit, it kept giving me the eye but it didn’t find anything to worry about because it came down a tree just a couple of metres away from me.

It is another gorgeous day with nothing but sunny blue skies and frost in the morning. I felt it was pointless to try and top yesterday’s shoot at the lake so I stayed home and waited for the light to fall on the bird feeders. Even when I knew that sunlight is the worst kind of light at this location, I mean it’s not that it makes the birds look bad but it sure makes a mess of the background. I’ve taken great care that my background is far enough from the feeder, but when the light falls on some trees while others are shaded, it’s just a nightmarish contrast that’s impossible to work with. Not that I would let that stop me from trying, all it really means that I throw away about 200 frames because they’re either underexposed or overexposed or both at the same time. And then of course I throw away another 100 frames because they’re blurry… it’s a numbers game for sure!

I’m starting to give up that I can get any variety of birds at the feeder, it’s just the same small birds I’ve had every year. Last year I had huge numbers of greenfinches for a few weeks (I read somewhere that if you let your feeder run out of seeds, the greenfinches leave your feeder and don’t bother to come back) and I’ve seen a few of them now as well, but they are very skittish. They even react when they see me in the window, and when I approach they fly away. This year I have food hanging from two trees, and when I was shooting the birds at the main location, the greenfinches finally came back to eat from the feeder behind my back. But then when I turned around to look, they flew off again. Very un-cooperative! The small birds like coal tits and willow tits don’t mind me at all. I usually stand 2-3 meters from the feeder and they don’t care, and I could stand even closer but it would be too difficult to shoot then!

We are now in the time between where autumn comes to end and the waiting for the snow begins. The nights are cold and the weather forecast said that it would be a sunny weekend, so I was really looking forward to a morning shoot at my favourite tarn of the year (it keeps changing, because the tarns are so small that the photo ops are soon exhausted). When I got to the place, I sure wasn’t disappointed. There wasn’t as much ice on the water as I thought there would be but as long as it was calm, the open water worked just fine. The moss was almost frozen and half the time it carried me without breaking, giving me this surreal feeling of walking on water and then on the next step an actual feeling of walking in water when the crust broke…

As the sun climbed higher on the sky, it started melting the frost and the magic. It was surprisingly warm, actually, but I knew that I had already taken my keepers so my heart wasn’t in it any more and I left. But I will tell you one thing… my disappointment at missing most of the autumn colours is gone. I couldn’t possibly have any regrets after a morning like this!

I’ve had the whole summer to prepare a new bird feeding setup but since I’m a master procrastinator, I didn’t get it done while I still had plenty of time. Now it’s already October and the set is still not complete… But I did hang up have one seed dispenser and I know there’s plenty of traffic, because it needs refilling every day. That’s the way it normally goes, I get plenty of birds until about the snow when other people put up bird feeders as well, and then it’s more quiet. With nothing better to do on Sunday, I had a go at shooting the birds even if it was a bit too dark to my liking. The result was nothing special, but it was nice to observe the birds so close and I look forward to many more weekends at the feeder!

I’ve never done a hike in the mountains in October before, so it was exiting to see what the day had in store. It turned out that it was all good – the first snow had fallen in the tundra and apart from the occasional snowfall that flew past in the heavy wind, it was a sunny day which allowed us to see the landscape in all its glory. The colours were muted under the thin layer of snow and all the features of the landscape were highlighted, giving it a very graphical quality that you normally don’t see.

We hiked up to the Lill-Skarven fell because there’s a road that takes almost up to the tree line, thus sparing us from wasting time and effort on climbing up the boring part through the forest. Once you’re up there, it’s easy going until you’re at the foot of the mountain but it’s not such a bad climb anyway. It was cold though, so much so that the water in the tube leading out from the water bladder in my backpack was frozen! The October weather is nothing to toy with, the wind was biting through my supposedly wind proof clothing but by the afternoon the sun was sufficiently warm to melt the snow on the ground and the ice in the water tube. But the slight discomfort aside, it was an amazing hike. There’s nothing like the first snow in the mountains!

A little bit crazy. It’s October and it’s so warm that I was walking around wearing a t-shirt. The jacket was just too much! This must be a first, I sure can’t remember an October when it’s been this warm. So it was nice to walk around in search of autumn colours, and it should’ve been easy because we actually have them (unlike the mountains). I tried it in the morning, and then spent most of the afternoon on it, and got nothing! It was getting so ridiculous in the end that I could just laugh at it. I visited a lot of spots that have been productive in the past, only to discover that pine and spruce are the dominant trees everywhere, and in those places with some birches the leaves had already dropped. So I was driving… and driving… on roads that are lined up with birches in beautiful yellow colours, and didn’t take a single picture of them. Because I didn’t want to shoot a birch by the road, I had higher ambitions than that. And got nothing.

Note to self: Find birch locations next summer.