The Quiet Picture

So it’s finally here, the snow. Looks like it’s only temporary though, so I made sure to enjoy it today. When the snowflakes were falling big as mittens, I was all smiles. Then it started raining instead, and I was slightly less happy and desperate to get some pictures before it all would be gone already. But then it started snowing again and… oh well. I came back home and realised it was colder up here than down where I was, so there’s more snow on the ground. So much for my plan to find new scenery for my “first snow” pictures, instead of walking the same old routes in the village that I’ve done in previous years.

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As mentioned yesterday, I did a hike up the Svartån creek. I took the new trail for the expanded national park, something I’ve been meaning to do all year but never got around to. Glad I did it now, because I was pleasantly surprised. Svartån close to Voxnan is hard to photograph because there’s a lot of vegetation at the water’s edge, but I found out that it gets better upstream. Basically, once you reach the bridge, the landscape around the creek starts look like my favourite spot further upstream, meaning that it’s a lot of cliffs and rocks and pine forest. I found a whole bunch of photo opportunities that will require better conditions and a bigger lens; I had the Canon 24-105mm in the bag but considering the season, it wasn’t worth switching lenses. I must come back here in the summer and/or autumn, it was good enough to endure the mosquitoes!

Only three months ago I wrote about my new wideangle lens, Tokina 16-28mm. I was mighty impressed with it, but what I really didn’t see coming is that I would find out that it’s not wide enough. Yes sure enough, it’s 26-45mm on a crop sensor, but you have to consider that my previous “wide angle” was the 24-105mm zoom (38mm at widest on crop sensor). So going from 38mm to 26mm, I was sure it would be enough for me. But it wasn’t. So I did something I’ve never done before, which is by a second lens within three months so I’m now a proud owner of a Tokina AT-X 11-16mm f2.8 Pro DX and today was my first day out with it.

First impressions: It’s much smaller and lighter than the Tokina 16-28mm (of course). The build quality is just as solid as the bigger zoom, the zoom ring is a little bit stiff but it’s not a problem, and anyway it’s better like that than the Canon 24-105 which sometimes suffers from zoom creep when the lens is pointed down. And it takes on filters without any vignetting; I haven’t tried any stacking yet but as long as a polariser works, it’s all good.

Second impressions (after reviewing the pictures): It’s sharp. Even wide open. Corner sharpness is better than with the 16-28mm lens (I haven’t done any scientific testing yet, but I was impressed with what I saw).

So now I have a problem. I had almost decided that my next camera will be full frame (Canon 5D MkIII, whenever it is released), but after just one day with this new lens, I start hesitating. The small size and filter thread… it could just tip the scales towards another crop sensor (follow-up to Canon 7D, whenever it’s released). So I would say that it’s a tie at the moment and Canon will have to make the next 5D something very special to make me favour FF. Or make a total mess of the next 7D, that would also force me to reconsider my options. But all of that is still a long way ahead, until then I will happily shoot with my trusty old 40D and the trusty new Tokina 11-16mm f2.8. Honestly, if you’re looking for a serious wideangle for a crop sensor camera, then you can’t get better value for money than this!

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I did two small hikes today, first one to Hägenlammsmyran which I visited the other summer to look for wolf lichen. I found the lichen and I found a fascinating bog, I mean just look at the satellite picture (shamelessly stolen from Google Maps), all those ridges with water in between. It’s a real maze when you’re walking around, you always have to look ahead for which ridge leads to the next one, and when it leads to muddy water. Except now of course almost everything was frozen and I was able to take some shortcuts, but like I’ve said before, walking on ice makes me very nervous so I preferred to keep on the moss. The water wasn’t all frozen anyway, it was still open in the places where it was flowing from one terrace to another so you had to keep an eye out where you put your foot. But on a windy day like this, that ice worked just fine because it doesn’t ripple!

My second hike was to Svartån, but I have a few HDR’s still to process so I will put that in another post.

I’ve noticed that lately (=past few months) I’ve been doing a lot of  (=a few more than usual) black and white pictures. It has gotten me wondering if something has changed with me, because I’ve never really had any appreciation for b&w pictures. Which is kind of strange actually, because if my goal is to simplify my pictures, then wouldn’t it be logical that I would also eliminate the colour from them? But the answer to that is that I’m a nature photographer. Most of photography (if you don’t like the generalisation, then read it as “most of my photography”) is actually documentary; what sets photographers apart from each other is how we document it. For me, colour is an essential part of nature. I don’t think I’ve ever even considered converting any of my flower pictures to b&w, because what is a flower without its colour? The botanist in me wants to portray the flower, the only tricks I will use are a careful selection of background and foreground, DOF and composition. That’s flower photography 101.

So back to this b&w issue then. Since colour is so important to me, the only times when I’ve converted a picture to b&w, it has happened out of necessity, not out of inspiration. In other words, I’ve had a picture I’ve otherwise liked but where I just can’t make the colours work. Use greyscale, problem solved. So why are so many of my recent favourite pictures b&w? Just a coincidence of having a lot of colour issues recently, or a shift in my thinking?

I decided to put this to a test. I couldn’t have picked a better day for it for sure, a typical November’s day with sleet, rain, drizzle, fog, low clouds, icy lakes and creeks and low light. I drove to one of my favourite places, the Svartån creek with old pine forest, rocks, cliffs and all kinds of mosses and lichens. Normally I visit this place to shoot the waterfalls, but this time I was set on exploring the forest instead. A good choice, because I found that the cliffs around the creek were covered with wet ice; it would’ve been stupid dangerous to venture on them when they were so slippery that you couldn’t even stand still on the cliffs without your feet starting to glide. So there I was in the forest, with a goal to find b&w pictures – not something that I will convert to greyscale as an afterthought, but something that I know even beforehand that I want in b&w. It was a good exercise and I spent a lot of time exploring the place, which gave me a great opportunity to reflect on this b&w issue. I came to the conclusion that my photographic preferences haven’t really shifted. I think what has happened is that I have learned to accept b&w as a creative option, so it has become a tool in my photographic toolbox just like DOF or background control or the shutter speed. But one thing hasn’t changed – I still don’t think that b&w is a “one size fits all” option. The best way (only way?) to use it is when it brings out something in the picture that colour can hide. But let’s face it, how often does that happen in documentary style nature photography?

Since there isn’t any snow yet, I haven’t given up on the ice patterns. I drove to a small lake that I’ve visited a few times before but never photographed, maybe it doesn’t make much difference with the ice but I also wanted to check out the forest around it. It hasn’t been very cold since yesterday so the frost was gone in most places but the most shaded ones, which of course meant that the ice was nice and clear with a sheet of water on it.

I shouldn’t have been surprised but I was, when I saw that the ice was at least 5cm thick. For new ice, it means that it would’ve carried me if I just dared to walk on it, but I’m the kind of person who’s nervous about crossing lakes in January! The weird part of the ice is the sounds it makes. In the dead of the winter you can hear the ice crack, but right now it sounds completely different. A bit like playing a saw, except deeper and muted. Many times when I stepped on the frozen moss on the shore, the vibrations planted into the ice, making it sing. In my ears, it was saying “stay out of here”…

I wasn’t going to do anything about this nuthatch picture from yesterday, but for the lack of anything better to do (except work), I picked up the gauntlet thrown by Miika in the comments. At least it’s a nice spotlight on the bird, but the perch isn’t much to cheer at. There is this one place on the branch with different kinds of lichen and I was really hoping that some bird – any bird – would sit there but of course they wouldn’t. It seems like they sat everywhere else on this branch except the most photogenic spot!

Anyway, so there’s canvas added at the bottom. Easy enough, except the branch itself. Funny how time flies when you clone and heal those small details to hide the edits… but I think it’s ok now. Question as always is, would you know it was edited if I didn’t say so?

It was another cold night so frost and ice was guaranteed. I wanted to shoot some ice bubbles and formations, kinda like those I shot last year. So I drove to the same lake as last year, but I found that all ice is not created equal. For one thing, there wasn’t as much ice on the shore as last time. And the little ice I did find was totally uninteresting so I decided to check out a smaller lake, because I knew that the small ones have full ice cover by now. Well, I still struck out on the ice patterns, but I found something else. The shaded part of the shoreline was still covered with frost while the frost on the other side had melted during the sunny periods (half overcast today), creating this nice contrast. White pine here, green pines over there. Although the picture I posted on Google+ illustrates it better than this one, but I don’t want to post the same picture in both places…

The weather forecast said it would be -4°C degrees in the morning. Bah. It was -8 when I got up, and -5 when I left. Not that I’m complaining, because it meant that there was frost everywhere. In some places the frost was so thick it looked like snow.

I had a plan, at first check out Svartåmyran because it was open enough for the sun to reach it in the morning, and it was a sunny day – no a cloud in sight. It didn’t quite work out though, I took quite a few pictures but in the end I deleted almost all of them. All hope was not lost though, the second part of my excursion was my old favourite, Svansjöbäcken. I haven’t been there all year but I was really hoping to find an icy lining to the water… but it turned out that there was quite a lot more ice than that. It wasn’t just a lining, it was a full ice cover everywhere but in the waterfalls.

So you’d think that I was disappointed, but no such worries. What makes this place so great is that there’s more to it than just the water, so I turned my eyes towards the forest instead. There’s a lot of old fallen pines around and now that they had a frost all over them, it wasn’t hard to find something interesting to shoot.

But all that standing around in the frozen moss, my toes were freezing. Seriously. The kind of thing that hurts when the circulation comes back. Note to self: the hiking boots are not rated for four seasons!

Been a warm autumn. Despite the cold nights we had in October, and the little bit of snow that came and went, there’s not a sign of winter yet. The days are just getting darker, that’s all. Even in the mountains it’s warmer than usual, the first cross country skiing race should go off in Bruksvallarna next weekend but I reckon the only way they’re gonna pull it off is if they had stored some snow from last year (they do that in some places you know). The only snow I saw was on top of the higher mountains and even that was melting, it was patchy and not very pretty. I walked around in some boggy areas and felt that the moss pillows were hard under my foot, so there has been some colder periods to freeze them. There was also a little bit of ice left on the small and shaded tarns. The kind of thing I’d expect in September, really.

But at least the weather was nice up there, with a little bit of sun. At home it’s just foggy and damp and the day was too dark for photographing the birds, but what else is there to shoot these days anyway? I had to go up to ISO 800 to get any decent shutter speeds, not a favourite thing to do but since the fog was providing a light background, it was possible to pull of some pictures like the squirrel closeup. Unfortunately I didn’t have a chance to flip the camera for a vertical (the squirrel would’ve been gone long before) so I just barely got the ear tufts in the frame and was happy with that. Added some canvas afterwards, no problem with that when the background is so even. And the crested is a bonus, nothing spectacular but I’m still just a little bit thrilled for getting any pictures of it at all. The crest says it all – it’s damp in the forest.