The Quiet Picture

It’s the coldest day of the winter so far, around -20°C. It was  -22°C when got up and the strange thing is that unless my memory totally fails me, it’s colder than it was last winter. Last winter was special in that the cold period lasted such a long time, but up here in Loos the temperatures never plummeted as seriously as it did in the lowlands. It happened a number of times that when I went to work, it was about -20°C in Loos but when I got to work, people were saying they had temperatures all the way down to -30°C. Warm air rises up… It’s not unusual that it’s 5 degrees colder down at the lake than it’s at home.

Anyway, as much as I like skiing and as little as I mind cold weather, I draw a line at -20°C. No point in risking my lungs. So today I will concentrate on indoors activities and I started by playing around in Lightroom. I created a collection of all my unprocessed pictures to see if I could find something worthy of working on and I was shocked to see that I had almost 3000 unprocessed photos… I had no idea it was that bad! I expected they would all be from my pre-Lightroom era but there were hundreds of pictures even from recent years.

In the end I decided to take something really old and see if I could make anything out of my first year of digital shooting (with the 3MP Canon D30). There was this special day in Järvzoo in May 2002, I got to witness the birth of two moose calves. I shot a lot of pictures just to document the event, but obviously it’s difficult to make anything photographically outstanding of such an event (say what you may about giving birth, but it’s really very messy!). After the calves were born, I did my round in the zoo and on the way back I visited the moose enclosure again and found the calves on their feet, nuzzling up against the new mom. Sweet!

May is a good month for other animal babies as well. The ural owls are cute, they leave the nest while they’re all fuzzy and they stood all lined up on the branch. Unfortunately I didn’t have my camera ready when all five of them were sitting in a row, but at least I caught three. The light was difficult and I couldn’t fade out the net with the Sigma 170-500mm lens I was using back then so I just simply underexposed the background in Lightroom until I got rid of the net, and concentrated the light on the owls.

Spring is almost around the corner…

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.

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…

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.

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…

* * *

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!