The Quiet Picture

Today wasn’t quite as nice as yesterday, but it doesn’t stop the spring from coming along. I found hepatica buds behind the garage, and they weren’t there yesterday because I looked and didn’t see any. The crocuses are also increasing every day and I can even see a snowdrop on the way, only leaves mind you no bud. I’ve only had snowdrop flowers the first year after I planted them, since then it’s only been leaves. So if they start blooming next week, hopefully this is the last of the crocus pictures this year, but at least it’s a yellow one. Out of the 23 crocus flowers I have at the moment, all but three of them are purple and the first two yellow ones were unphotogenic so I was happy to see this third yellow open already today. A small thing, but big enough for the macro lens!

Then I went for a walk down to the lake. The water level is really low as it always is in the spring, probably around 1m lower than normal. In the autumn I needed wellingtons to approach this old boat from the shore, but today I was able to walk around it without any risk of wet feet. But I did have to watch out for the numerous willow grouse droppings (if you look carefully, there’s a pile to the right of the boat). I think it’s willow grouse anyway, I’m not a bird dropping expert… if not willow grouse, then black grouse. But if it’s black grouse, then I would be very surprised because this doesn’t seem like a black grouse kinda place.

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These are the first pictures I’ve processed on the new laptop. The screen takes some time getting used to, it’s very bright so everything that looks ok on my big monitor looks too bright on the laptop. But a lot of the problem has to do with the viewing angle… need to remember to always use the same viewing angle when I process the pictures!

So, I set out to photograph water with the film camera as planned. At first I was cursing at the sun but I guess I shouldn’t have, because it started raining. Not a lot, and normally it wouldn’t be a problem but with the Tamron 28-300mm lens it is. I have to use a step-up ring to fit any filters, which means that the lens hood that would otherwise protect the front element from stray drops is now useless. And photographing running water without a filter, I’m not sure if I can do it, at all. I got a few frames though (with filter!) so we’ll see how I did with the exposure. I’ll find out in a few weeks…

When I got home, the rain had stopped of course. So in the afternoon I went to the Kvarnsjön lake and it didn’t fail me (it rarely does), I found these old wooden boats. You don’t often see wooden boats anymore, it’s all plastic and shiny colours these days. At first I was annoyed at the boat in the foreground because it was blocking the best angle to the untied boat in the background, but then I realised that I would get a much better composition if I used both boats in it. The boat in the background, there’s a chain hanging from the bow but I doubt it’s an anchor, I’ve never seen a rowing boat anchored offshore anyway. When the wind picks up, I wonder if I’ll ever see that boat again!

There’s one thing I keep saying to myself, but not always living it – which is that if you see a photographic opportunity, you’d better make the most of it because that opportunity won’t come back, ever again. There are so many variables in nature that the same place will never look exactly the same, sometimes the changes are barely noticeable but they are there nonetheless. Thus it was that when I was standing the shore of the Fågelsjö lake on what was a sunny and calm morning, it wasn’t quite as sunny and it wasn’t quite as calm as it was last Saturday when I had visited the place for the first time. So I quickly left and went for my plan B, which was to check out a new place a few km north from Fågelsjö.

I found a shallow lake with rocks in all sizes lining up the shores. The lake is dammed and I don’t know what it had looked like before the dams, and to be honest I don’t really care either because it only comes down to one thing – photogenic or not? And this place is indeed photogenic, many times over! Morning is just the perfect time to be there, but when a place is this good, it’s normally good in any light. So I was walking around, seeing opportunities everywhere and I discovered that it really is possible to have too much of a good thing. After a while I was so overwhelmed that I just simply gave up, knowing that I’ve only scratched the surface.

I sat down for a cup of coffee and as I was eating my cookie, I noticed an opportunity I couldn’t resist. The funny thing is that I didn’t even bother to stand up – I just traded the coffee cup for the camera and took the picture sitting down on the spot. Sometimes it’s that easy.

I couldn’t let go of a good thing, so I drove back to Össjön to take a closer look at the old boats. The wind had picked up from yesterday and there certainly wasn’t any lack of light, so I had a perfect opportunity to try the new ND filter. Stacked with a polariser, I still maxed out at 8 sec but it was just enough for the effect so the filter proved useful – the ND8 would’ve left me short of a few secs.

BTW, the new ND filter is B+W’s Neutral Density 1.8, which is 6 stops. If Hoya made a 6-stop ND, it would be called ND64 – the ND8 is 3 stops.

When I came back home, I saw that my bird feeder was very popular. Time to see if the birds would tolerate me out in the open, because the way I’ve set up the feeder I have no place to hide. I counted on the birds to keep feeding as long as I don’t make any noise or sudden moves, and the gamble paid off – it works! I must confess that the bird images are heavily cropped, for example this one is cropped from horizontal to vertical so I’m losing a lot of real estate, but I don’t care – I’m so bad with moving subjects that I’ll happily back down on my normal target of “making the picture in the camera”. My main concern is to get a sharp eye in the picture and today’s birds had that, so I probably just doubled up my all time critically sharp bird pictures! Anyway, cropping serves another purpose as well – I get a bigger bird in relation to the frame. Even at 4-5 metres distance, using a 300mm lens (times 1.6), it’s a very small bird. Not gonna take any frame fillers for sure, so I’ll just keep concentrating on getting that sharp eye and a catchlight!

I had big plans for the weekend, but I had to revise them already when I woke up – the cold night had turned the wet roads into icy roads, so I had no business driving around with summer tires. I waited until the sun was high enough to thaw out the worst and then got out to discover new places. I don’t know why but there are still some forest roads around Loos that I haven’t checked yet, and it’s definitely my loss because this road turned out to be one sweet photographic experience. It’s just perfect in the morning light and I didn’t have to kick myself too much for not going out as early as I had planned because the low sun wouldn’t have reached the scenery anyway (forests and hills in the way). The downside was that there was thin high cloud again so while the sun was shining, it also wasn’t. The sky cleared towards noon but the light wasn’t the same anymore.

At the Össjön lake I found these old boats, some completely broken and rotting away and others still in one piece but probably not sea-worthy (lake-worthy?) anymore, and the place was complete with a boathouse with a caved-in roof. All you needed to do was to avoid the colourful new(er) boats in the composition and it was photographic eldorado right there! It worked fine at this time of the day, but it would look even better at bit earlier in the morning.

I didn’t find any opportunity to test the new ND filter, but I was able to put the leveling base and ICE through their paces. I took a 3-image panorama with the polariser mounted on the lens and important detail in the foreground. Foreground is normally almost impossible to stitch manually unless you’ve found the nodal point of the lens, which I can’t even try because the 24-105mm lens doesn’t have a lens collar and I don’t have a specialist panorama head. ICE did another perfect job though and the result is an image that could’ve been taken with a wideangle lens, but my 38mm (24mm x 1.6) wasn’t enough for the scene so I decided to try stitching it together. A very useful experiment, and a very useful technique!

Such a productive day and it would’ve been even better if I had had the light early on. Driving along with beautiful things all around, stop and look, take some pictures, move on to the next one…

*sigh*

So, I went driving for a bit, went cycling for a bit, did hoovering for a bit, washed the dishes for a bit, read a book quite a lot, idled around for a bit, and took some lousy pictures for a bit. …What a forgettable day.Next!