The Quiet Picture

Time to do my traditional sum-up of the year in pictures! As usual, I’m posting my favourite from each month and because not all months are created equal, these may not necessarily be my 12 best pictures of the year. 2011 was a bit of a revolutionary year for me. There were two major things that happened, the biggest surprise was that I discovered wideangle photography which resulted in me buying no less than two wideangle lenses, when to my utter surprise I found out that my first wideangle wasn’t wide enough. Who would’ve thought? The second thing that happened was that I found myself liking black&white photography. I’ve always said that colour is important to me as a nature photographer, because what is nature without colour? It turned out that it’s form and pattern and it’s quite nice, when used right.

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January
Winter 2010-11 was unusually cold. When the cold weather arrived in November, it never let go until February and when it was cold, it was really cold. And without any warmer periods, the snow just kept piling up. This picture is from one of my many skiing trips, during a day with overcast skies and a little bit of snowfall. That kind of weather turns the world into monochrome, which gives you good opportunities to strip the pictures to the bare necessities. I’ve reprocessed the picture since first publishing it, deliberately overexposed and then converted to b&w (there was only very little colour in the branches to start with).

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February
February full moon was an amazing event. The landscape was looking at its winter’s best and the night was clear (and cold). It was almost surreal to be walking around in the moonlight but unfortunately I don’t have any great landscape options within a convenient walking distance from home and I didn’t feel like going for a long hike at night. Next time this happens, I will have to do that hike because it will sure be worth it!

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March
I was starting to think that I wouldn’t photograph the squirrel this year, but the squirrel had other ideas. I noticed how it would run up the tree when it got nervous, and then climb back down a moment later. I tried to be ready for it but it’s not easy because those things move really fast… so needless to say how amazed I was to see that I had actually nailed the sharpness on this one and didn’t clip off any body parts. The composition wasn’t ideal though with the space being really tight on the left and at the bottom, so I needed to invest a few hours of work to increase the space and in the end I think it was well worth the effort. This pose definitely stands out from my other squirrel pictures.

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April
After all that cold weather and snow, I thought that spring would be late this year but it came with a bang instead and we had summer temperatures at easter. The crocuses, as always, launched the flower photography season and even if my crocuses are not very numerous or big, I found this one individual which gave me a great macro opportunity. I love a frame filler!

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May
It shouldn’t be possible but May was actually a cooler month than April. Or rather, the warmest day in April was warmer than any day in May, but the medium temperatures were obviously creeping up and the nature blossomed out. Traditionally my May favourite should be a flower… but this year it was a tiger! We visited the Orsa Björnpark zoo, mainly because we wanted to see the snow leopard which is a new addition in the zoo. It was close to the closing time before the snow leopard showed itself and I got one fairly bad picture out of it, but it seems like the tigers always put up a good show. And they are magnificent animals! If the picture looks dark, it’s deliberate. A trained eye will see the pattern from the chain link fence but by selectively underexposing, I can hide it a little bit and bring focus on the face instead.

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June
Surprisingly, no orchids in the list this year. It starts to feel like I’ve done all I can with them, so I have to think of some new ideas. In the meanwhile, other flowers will do – like the twinflower, which were growing so numerous that they formed a white carpet on the forest floor in some places. I have a big patch of them growing right behind my garage so sometimes you don’t have to go far to get great pictures. Speaking of which, the crocus from April was shot under my kitchen window, and the March squirrel from my living room…

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July
July was a great month. It normally always is, with great opportunities for both flowers and landscape. If I did a top 10 list of the year instead of by month, I could probably fill half of the list with pictures from July. But my favourite is this sunset picture with layers, it was the last picture on an evening that was one of the best photography sessions I’ve ever had. Warm, sunny and calm – the stuff memories are made of.

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August
If July was a great month, then August was bad. As usual. We had a great full moon opportunity and while I had this incredible fortune of having the sun come out just at the right moment to light up the foreground, I screwed up the picture by missing the DOF. So what looks great at first look, doesn’t really pass a closer inspection. And the pictures which have the DOF are lacking the light or the composition. So it was a tough choice. But this time I let the visual aspect come before the technical aspect, so my photo of the month is the DOF impaired full moon composition.

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September
I had really counted on September to give me great pictures. I mean, with the mountains and autumn colours, how could you fail? Well, take out the autumn colours and suddenly you’re looking at a landscape which is twice as dull, instead of twice as great. A fungal disease started killing the birch leaves already in August, leaving nothing for September. I did the best I could, under the circumstances, and once you accept that you can’t change the situation, then it’s just a matter of making the most of it and I ended up having a great vacation anyway. But the conditions did affect my choice of the favourite picture so instead of a grand landscape with glorious autumn colours, I chose a black&white intimate scene. This is a turning point – if you had told me last year that one of my favourite pictures would be a monochrome taken with a wideangle lens, I would’ve laughed at you!

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October
For a long time, a crested tit held the favourite spot for October. But the more I look at this squirrel picture which is obviously a total fluke, the more I like it. Nothing is sharp in the frame, not even the perch in the lower right corner (shaken by the jumping squirrel). But I mean… what are the odds of getting this? A perfect diagonal direction, the tail, the “just right” motion blur… I’m sure that people will think that this is a joke, and that’s fine by me. I think it’s a good joke!

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November
November, my nemesis. On average, the worst month of the year by a wide margin. It wasn’t a particularly productive month this year either, but I got a few surprisingly good frames. And now you see what I meant about me and monochrome – I’m actually starting to get the hang of it! I knew I had a keeper the moment I saw this root, and I also knew it would do great in B&W.

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December
In 2010, winter came early. In 2011, winter was late. But then finally in early December, we got a lot of snow and things started looking up, giving me a few days of good photography. But these good days were followed by warm days with a touch of rain and finally culminated in a big storm on Boxing Day that wreaked havoc and left a destroyed landscape behind it. Today, on the last day of the year, it is a sorry sight that I can see from my window. The forecast says that it will snow tomorrow, so I hope that I can get the year 2012 photography off to a running start!

With the landscape looking like it does, I decided to concentrate on the birds this morning. I struck out, the birds just wouldn’t settle on the perch, nothing I can do about it. But to my great surprise, the squirrel turned up. I mean, this is me standing in full view without any camouflage, and still the squirrel came down to eat. Must’ve been really hungry! It even allowed me to change the camera orientation from horizontal to vertical and shift my position a little bit, never happened before. But then I started moving more and more, checking the limits of the squirrel’s tolerance, and it finally had enough and fled.

While I was waiting for the birds, I looked behind me to check the sun’s position. I saw that the distant hills were layered nicely in the morning light, so I turned the camera around and did some landscape photography with the 300mm lens, and wished that it would been even longer so I could’ve gotten a tight horizontal composition on the hill.

I liked the way the sky changed colour from orange to blue, so I went for a vertical stitch. When it was time to put the pictures together, I just couldn’t make the transition from orange to blue work properly (not an issue with the stitch itself, but just the way the natural gradient came out) so in the end I sampled both the blue and orange colours and used an artificial gradient instead. Since the colour is an exact match, almost the only difference between the original sky and the fake one is that the muddy transition part in the original is now clean. Would you miss the muddy transition if you didn’t know it was removed?

Last night we got hit by a storm. I had trouble sleeping because the wind was screaming in the forest and I heard some cracking sounds which told me that trees were falling or breaking off. I was really nervous that a tree would fall on the house, but as far as I could see when I looked outside, the wind was blowing in a rough west-east direction which meant that the only part of the house at risk of a fallen tree is my neighbour’s flat (this house consists of two flats). I also check the weather forecast and it said the same thing, winds blowing from west or south-west. So I finally decided to put on earplugs to get some sleep anyway.

In the morning as soon as there was enough light, I looked out the window and saw that a tree had fallen outside the bedroom, almost touching the house. I went outside and found almost total destruction – well over half of the trees in that part of the forest had fallen or broken off. More so, the direction they had fallen was north-south, which means that they had all come down towards the house! I was happy about the earplugs… had I heard what’s going on, it would’ve frightened the living daylights out of me for sure. This forest closest to the house, they did some logging here a couple of years ago so the forest wasn’t very dense to start with, thus making it more vulnerable to the winds. And now it’s obviously even less dense and the few trees that are left standing are probably weaker than they were before. Which means that when the next storm arrives, there’s a big risk that more trees will fall even without a tornado. There is safety in numbers, but those numbers don’t exist any more.

When I walked around, I started getting a better picture of the night’s events. In some parts of the forest there were only a few trees fallen, but they were in the west-east direction, thus following the direction of the storm. But the areas which had suffered the worst damage were more in the north-south axis and I can even plot the path this tornado took through the forest and my house was right in the middle of it! So I’m counting myself lucky that no damage was done to the house. I just hope that my cabin fared as well, considering that the storm was even worse in that region. Maybe I should go and take a look next weekend… in my new car…

Considering the havoc from a photographer’s perspective, things are looking pretty bleak. If I thought yesterday that the snowcover was spoiled, then today you can hardly even see the snow from under all the debris. But maybe in some places which were spared from the hurricane, new snow can still rescue the landscape and give me something to shoot this winter. But this forest closest to me, which has given me so many pictures through the years, it’s gone. It’s just a wide open space now.

Isn’t it wonderful, the days are getting longer already! But the winter has hardly begun, we still have to get over January which really is the dead of winter. Today however, it reminded me more of a day in March with mild temperatures, bare trees and totally spoiled snow cover. Definitely no conditions for landscape photography but I had the Powershot with me just in case. And would you know, you can always find something. If the nature doesn’t provide, then make it yourself…

Now this is what I call a Christmas present – new car! It’s a Nissan Qashqai 1.6 diesel, and I hope it will be everything the little Yaris wasn’t. My patience with the Yaris ran out last summer when it became painfully obviously how hopelessly inadequate it is on the mountain roads I was driving. And then of course I’ve always had a problem with the ground clearance, it’s just not enough for the forest roads around here. And the small engine with semi-automatic gearbox… I promise you I was starting to tear out hairs in frustration when I had to literally floor the gas pedal to get any decent acceleration out of it. And then you were suddenly doing 60 kph on second gear… I’m no race driver and the Yaris is not a racing car for sure.

The Qashqai fixes all these issues I’ve had. High ground clearance, bigger and more powerful engine, manual gearbox… and then it has a bigger trunk, more space inside (so it’s just simply bigger in every way and this time bigger is better), it’s actually more quiet to drive with an efficient sound proofing and you almost never hear the typical diesel engine noise, and the interior is less plasticky which means less rattling noise when driving on rough roads. And it’s smoother over bumps, all these little things which make the driving experience fun and not frustration.

There were some things about the car that made me so happy I was grinning for ear to ear… like for example, the car actually accelerates as soon as you push down the gas pedal, instead of waiting for a couple of seconds and then shifting down to a lower gear and then slowly going faster. And even when driving at 95 kph, the Qashqai is not even doing 2000 RPM. Do you know what the Yaris does at under 2K revs? Nothing!

Of course, when I got the Yaris I was initially very happy with it, I mean you’re always happy with a new car, right? But when the novelty wears off, the little nags start to surface. But considering that the Qashqai fixes all those nags I had with the Yaris, I have high hopes that I will stay happy with the “KasKas” (you need to be a Finn to appreciate that nickname…) for many many years to come!

Awesome! It’s snowing, so the snow cover will be pretty again.

I wanted do a long hike that would take me to some areas where snowshoes are required, while about half of the hike would be on a road where snowshoes would be more of a hinder. I’ve never liked carrying the snowshoes in hand for any longer stretches, so I decided to do something about it now. I rummaged through my sparepart drawer and found a shoulder strap which was just perfect for the snowshoe bag. As long as I’m hiking lightly (small backpack with only the camera, no tripod), it’s possible to sling the snowshoes at the back so they’re not hindering hand movement while walking. Problem solved.

Part of the trail goes under the power lines. They were making their buzzing bad-weather sound and it was a bit creepy to walk under them, with this constant reminder of the high voltage just above my head. For a moment I imagined that the power line was affecting my heart rate, but of course it was all that heavy walking through the snow with snowshoes on my feet that got my heart racing… a good workout for sure!

It’s been a windy week with temperatures above freezing, so the beautiful snow we had last weekend is looking a lot less attractive now. But I wouldn’t let that stop me from going for a walk, I had an idea of a picture so I set out in the forest. The path took me past a cabin which I’ve never taken a closer look of, I just think it’s impolite to trespass. But now with snow on the ground, I didn’t see any tracks going to the cabin so I thought it would be safe. When I got to it, I realised that I wouldn’t have needed to worry about anybody being there – ever. Clearly an abandoned place, and I was really intrigued when I saw a pink Minnie Mouse backpack hanging from the chair on the porch. This was definitely not the kind of subject I had had in mind, but I’ll take it. The original picture idea I had didn’t work out anyway!

Sometimes I’m absolutely convinced that I am the stupidest person ever to hold a camera. This morning I had this great plan to do a double whammy – drive to a spot which would provide me a view to both the moonset and sunrise. I was even going to take a closeup of the almost full moon so I had the 300mm lens mounted on the camera. I figured, first the closeup, then swap lenses, shoot sunrise, shoot moonset. Great plan, eh? So I was driving to my spot and on the way I saw a very nice scene with snow covered pines lit by the early dawn light and full moon above. But I was going to my spot, so stupid me drove on without stopping. I got to my spot, viewed the sky towards sunrise and noticed that there are no clouds, boring, viewed the sky towards the moon, there are clouds in the horizon and the moon was rapidly going down. Stupid me decided that it’s no point in stopping here when I wasn’t going to shoot the boring sunrise and drove on. And drove on… at this part of the road there were no spots to get a decent foreground for the moon and time was running out. But then my luck changed and I found a great spot and half ran out of the car so there I was, stupid me, with a 300mm lens attached to the camera and a scene that required the 24-105mm lens (in the bag)… and the moon disappearing behind the clouds. Absolutely no time to change lenses any more so I just stood there in total disgust and hated myself for not stopping at that first good spot I saw.

When I got back home, the first rays of the sun where lighting up the bird feeder and my anger quickly subsided when I saw that I had quite a few birds as well. It’s been relatively quiet at the feeder in the past weeks, I’ve only had to refill once a week instead of every other day like it was in the autumn. But with that sweet light now, I made use of the 300mm lens that had been so wrong a moment earlier and desperately wished for a bird to settle down on the perch during those few minutes that it was lit by the early sun. No such luck – goes without saying – but if there’s any benefit of the short days, then it’s definitely that the light is good any time there’s any of it so I got a few pictures when the sun had climbed a bit higher in the sky and the perch was lit again.

I’m still thinking about the missed opportunity with the moon. Sure, it was a big mistake to drive past the first spot. But the second spot I found, it would’ve been ever better but I got unlucky with the clouds. Last week we caught the sunset because we took the first best spot instead of searching for something better, but it appears that I didn’t learn anything from that. Stupid me.

In the past few weeks I’ve been thinking that maybe I don’t like winter as much as I used to. Or rather, I still like winter, but I also really really want it to be summer so I could go hiking, I have all these big plans already.

But then it started snowing. A lot. And I can’t even think about summer any more, I was just so happy to be walking around in this winter wonderland and marvel at the snow covered landscape! So that’s the problem I’ve had in the past few weeks, it’s not the longing for the summer but it’s the longing for the snow.

It would’ve been a total lunar eclipse today and I was ready to jump in the car and drive to my designated spot at the first sight of a crack in the clouds. But it only started snowing again so it was pointless to drive out, not that I’m terribly disappointed anyway – I’m too happy about the snow to care about missed opportunities!

Another quick visit to the mountains yesterday to fix one last detail before letting the cabin hibernate over winter – I’m not planning to use it until March. There was plenty of time for photography as well, but in these days when daylight is at a premium, time is a relative concept. We thought we would wait out for the sunset at a scenic spot, but when there was no sign of gaps in the cloud cover we decided to drive back home. Only problem was that only a few kilometres on, there was an orange glow in the clouds. The closer to Funäsdalen we got, the better the glow but now we really had no time left to scout for the best spot. We took our chances and caught the glow and as we continued the drive home, we had the nagging feeling that it would’ve been even better if we had driven all the way down to Funäsdalen. But the important thing is that we got some pictures, instead of going for the big win and miss out on it completely!