The Quiet Picture

Today’s hike was to the Ösjöstugan cabin and then over to the peaks of Ösjövålen and Osjökläppen. It’s a long-ish hike so I wanted to make it a bit easier by taking the ski lift up from Ramundberget up to the plateau, which meant that it was fairly level hiking to the Ösjön cabins. After that, the trail goes up and when I got to the pass, I had Ösjökläppen on my left and Ösjövålen on the right. Both are low peaks so I didn’t have to put much effort on reaching them from the pass, as you can see from the picture (both peaks are there and the pass in the middle, and you can just barely see the cabins as well, the trail is pointing the way).

Ösjökläppen turned out to be interesting. There was this barren streak going down the mountain, just about the only plant growing in the streak was the alpine catchfly (Lychnis alpina). But then, there were loads of them. Never seen anything like it. A bit higher up I came across some rock piles and holes that were filled with water now. And then it hit me – copper. The alpine catchfly loves copper, which means that there is a very high concentration of copper here. No other plants survive. But outside this barren streak, it was life as normal.

If the plant life was normal, I found it very strange how many fallen reindeer antlers I was seeing. You’d think that there are antlers everywhere in the mountains, but it’s not at all like that. It’s quite rare that you see any and on this hike, I found 11 and they were all on these two mountains, within a distance of about 1.5-2 km. That’s probably more fallen antlers than I have ever seen before, all put together!

On the way back I stopped at the Ösjöstugan cabin. I had read about a natural well close to the cabin and I must say it’s the most special well I’ve ever seen. I’ve seen natural wells before, but I haven’t actually seen how the water flows up. But here, the water was just bubbling up (without creating any bubbles but I don’t know how to otherwise describe it) and the water was absolutely clear. I drank it and it didn’t taste like anything. I mean, there was really no taste in the water! Pure as it gets.

All that remained was the hike back to the car. When I was going down the hill to Ramundberget and my car, I was glad I had taken the lift up. The hike was over 16 km and although I wasn’t tired as such, I was still hoping that the evening would be cloudy so I didn’t have to drag myself out to shoot the light. It’s almost time for sunset now as I’m typing this… and it looks like rain!

I finally had some holidays, if three busy days can be counted as such. But they were busy in the good way so I don’t mind! My sister came for a visit and there’s really nothing I want to show her around home so we headed to the mountains.

On Thursday we hiked up to the Kariknallen café above Bruksvallen for the obligatory waffle (yes, regular readers will have noticed my affection for the waffles) and then continued up to the Beritkläppen peak. The views were great just as you’d expect, but I was out of luck with the weather. A perfect weather for hiking is not a perfect weather for photography, but to be honest it didn’t really matter! It was just so nice to spend some time with my sister again.

Since my sister is interested in history and culture, I figured that she’d really enjoy a visit to Röros. I was right – the only disappointment was that the famous church of theirs was closed for renovation. But she got quickly over it as we were wandering around and admiring the old buildings. On the way back to Sweden I wanted to stop at Brekken and find a waterfall that I heard of a few years ago. It has taken me a long time to figure out exactly where the waterfall is and how to get there and now I finally got to see the place – and it was gorgeous. I’m telling you, it’s a real stunner! The light was a problem once again but imagine this same scene in autumn colours and soft light. I have a week’s vacation in September and I’ll be coming back here, no doubt about it!

Since this trip wasn’t about photography, I only had the 24-105mm zoom lens with me because I didn’t think I’d do any flowers this time. But when I came across these jacob’s ladder (Polemonium caeruleum) flowers in Mittådalen, it was a relief to see that the zoom lens was sufficient. It’s the first time I’ve seen the flower in the wild but that beautiful blue colour caught my eye immediately!

On Saturday it was already time to turn home. Our last hike was in the Rogen nature reserve. The lakes in Rogen are amazing, just check it out on a map and you’ll understand what I mean. I wanted to see if it was possible to get an aerial view from one of the surrounding peaks so we got up on the Handskinnsvålen fell off Käringsjön. While the landscape was amazing to see, the view over the lakes didn’t quite live up to my expectations but once again I didn’t mind. It was a great hike and who cares about the über-dull light when there’s wolf lichen to be admired? Rogen is one of the few remaining strongholds for this rare lichen.

All that remained then was the way home (we got to see a herd of hundreds of reindeer to my sister’s delight). But I’ll just say this… my sister ain’t no photographer. It turned out that her memory card was filled with pictures from the past year and the only way she could snap any new pictures was by going over the old ones and deleting something else. Which is not an ideal way to photograph any animate subjects such as the reindeer!

Had a busy day yesterday. Busy in a good way – one day trip to the mountains, I was in desperate need of a break. The last time I had any vacation was September! Of course, we can debate how relaxing it is to drive hundreds of km in a day and hike up and down two mountains… but I’ll much rather have a tired body than a tired brain.

Anyway, I started with Stor-Mittåkläppen. There’s a special flower I knew might be growing there, it’s the glacier buttercup (Ranunculus glacialis), however I had no confirmed reports about it but I had to start from somewhere. This flower likes the tough conditions next to snowfields and there’s one on Mittåkläppen that doesn’t melt until later in the summer. When I got to the foot of the mountain, I saw a herd of reindeer gracing above and below the snowfield. There were a couple of hikers ahead of me and the reindeer didn’t like them (reindeer are not wild animals as such, just extremely shy of people) and ran off, so all I had to do was to avoid the reindeer droppings on my way up to the snow. Very soon after I arrived at the snowfield, I found some leaves which I thought would be the glacier buttercup. To be honest, I’m still not 100% if I’m right, I’ve compared my picture with four different sources and sometimes the leaves match and sometimes not. But it’s gotta be a buttercup of some sort, not that it helps. In any case, it wasn’t flowering yet so the question is if I can go back there in about two weeks to confirm the species. Oh well, it took me 4-5 efforts to find the alpine chamorchis so I can’t expect to find the glacier buttercup so quickly!

It was a warm day and initially it was overcast so it didn’t look promising for photography. When I arrived at the peak of the mountain, the sky had cleared enough for the sun to shine and it got hot. Wind normally brings some relief and today the wind was heavy, but it was the warmest wind I’ve ever experienced on a mountaintop. Strange experience. But at least it kept the mosquitoes at bay!

When I came back from the mountain, I had a waffle at Djupdalsvallen. They are so incredibly good there, there’s probably a few thousand calories in one but who cares! I really recommend it, not just for the waffle but the whole experience of hiking up this special mountain and then having a coffee in the beautiful surroundings.

By now it was mid-afternoon. I drove to Messlingen to check out the Mittån delta where the creek runs into the lake Messlingen. It should be a botanically interesting place but I would disagree, I reckon you’d need to be interested in grasses and half-grasses to find anything exciting there. So after walking around for a while, I took the trail up towards Kappruskaftet because I wanted to see if I could get a view down to the Anådalen valley from there. I didn’t find the view of the valley (or maybe I didn’t walk far enough) but the landscape was otherwise interesting. Kappruskaftet isn’t high enough for alpine tundra even if it looks like at first. So it’s a bit strange seeing all these big old pines there, some of them growing all alone on the borders of the big marshland.

When I got back to the car, it was past 7pm and all I’ve had to eat all day was one small sandwhich, energy bar and a waffle. I calculated that I had hiked about 15 km up and down mountains, so I was hungry – I was halfway home when I finally could stop eating, LOL!

I came home after 11pm and it seems like the day had been even warmer here because it was still 21 degrees. But today it will be raining, which is just as well – I think I will do nothing today. Watching a movie sounds like the kind of activity I want to take on!

I’ve had another day to play with the Canon 100mm f2.8L IS macro, but the pictures are few and far apart – not sure why but I’m just not coming across any subjects I like. The picture of the very pale heath spotted orchid is getting close to the closest focusing distance of the lens, but it’s nothing that my 150mm macro couldn’t have done. The wood cranesbill though, it would’ve been tricky to pull off with the long macro. I was shooting straight down on it and there wasn’t a lot of light in the forest, so the shutter speed was 1/80 at f2.8 (ISO 100). In order to get the flowers the same size in the frame I would’ve had to stand up straight, go to a higher ISO to get a fast enough shutter speed so I could hope to get something sharp. I’m not sure if it would’ve been possible to set up the tripod in such a way that I could angle down the camera, while still being able to see through the viewfinder!

So that’s definitely one for the shorter IS lens, I think that this is the best wood cranesbill picture I have. Just because the flower grows everywhere doesn’t mean that I have lots of pictures of it!

But no, I’m still not even considering of trading the long macro for this shorter IS macro. Maybe it’s not possible to take exactly the same pictures with these lenses, but who needs that anyway? If it’s not possible to take some particular picture, then you just come up with another one and don’t dwell over the might-have-beens. You work with what you’ve got!

I was fortunate enough to get to borrow the new Canon 100mm f2.8 IS macro lens this weekend. I’ve always wanted a macro lens with IS and a few years ago I had the 100mm macro without IS, which I then traded for the 150mm macro. I’ve never regretted getting the longer focal length, but using a long and heavy macro lens requires good support, so the tripod or the beanbag has to go wherever the lens goes. Shooting with this setup is very rewarding, but there’s something to be said for spontaneity as well – enter image stabilisation.

So now I’ve been out with this lens, sans tripod, and I must say it really works. I won’t be reviewing the lens because there’s nothing to review, I mean it’s tack sharp (anything else would be shocking) and issues like vignetting or barrel distortion are never a problem with macro (I doubt this lens has either anyway). So the only thing that’s interesting for me is what I can do with 100mm and image stabilisation and that’s what I set out to find out.

Having had the 150mm lens for a few years now, I had my doubts about the depth of field of the 100mm lens. I like using diffused foregrounds when possible and I also like completely feature-less backgrounds. I struggled to get both when using the 100mm lens in the past, but now that I had it again, I started wondering if part of the problem back then was that I was just not very experienced as a macro photographer. Either I’m better at choosing my subjects now or I am handling the situation in a different way, but background control wasn’t nearly as difficult as I remember it was. But having the lens for such a short period, it’s not possible to test it in all situations and I reckon the background would come into play when shooting in tight spaces where the background is closer to the subject than in the above picture.

The IS of the lens is great. It’s the new generation IS which is so quiet that I had to check a couple of times that IS really was on because I’m used to the sounds of my 300mm and 24-105mm lenses. The picture of the moth was taken with a 1/40 shutter speed, it’s marginally soft but completely acceptable. It would’ve been impossible without a tripod using a non-IS 100mm or 150mm lens (impossible for me anyway, I know some people are better at hand holding the camera than I am). So if I want to take a similar picture with a non-IS lens, I would have to start setting up the tripod and hope that the moth is still there when I’m ready to take the shot. Shooting without a support setup is very liberating, the threshold of taking a picture is lower because sometimes I just simply think if a subject is worth setting up the tripod, instead of thinking if a picture is worth taking at all.

It’s been nice trying out this lens, but when I give it back I won’t miss it. It’s a great lens for the macro photographer on the move, but I’ve developed such a good relationship with my Sigma 150mm f2.8 macro that I can’t see myself ever parting with it. Yes I still definitely want a macro lens with IS, but I’m fairly sure that in the long run I would miss those additional 50mm if I traded the Sigma 150mm for the Canon 100mm IS. So now I’m just waiting for a long macro lens with stabilisation!

I drove to the lady’s slipper orchid place I visited last week. It’s a small location, basically just an island of trees that were left standing when the forest around was cut many years ago. It slopes a little and I always enter it from the “lower end” where most of the lesser butterfly orchids grow, and then walk up to the lady’s slippers.

The lesser butterfly orchids are taking their time in growing, they are still only buds but they should definitely start blooming next week. Then when I was walking up, I kept looking for the familiar yellow of the lady’s slippers. Problem was – no yellow. I was starting to have a really bad feeling about it, and my worst fears came true when I reached the orchids. The flowers had been cut, all of them! My heart just broke. And then I got angry. The stupidity of people! First of all, all wild orchids are protected in Sweden. Although we are fortunate in having a few locations with lady’s slippers in Loos, you can’t call it a common flower by any stretch of imagination. People who know where the lady’s slippers grow, know for sure that’s it’s an orchid. Whether they know that all orchids are protected is another matter, but if you have to drive a small forest road to reach a remote location which is an island of trees left standing after a clear-cut operation, you’ve gotta be a total moron not to figure out that this was done to protect something precious. And we can also assume that whoever picked the flowers, did it because they like them. Is that the right way of showing your appreciation? By killing them? By preventing them from spreading? By reducing their chances of survival in the future years?

I was really really upset. It sounds crazy to be so upset for some flowers, but I guess I just found out exactly how much I care about these flowers.

* * *

My mood didn’t improve until later when I was walking around in my local woods, checking the two spots of lesser butterfly orchids here. They haven’t opened either and I was ready to give up on this gloomy day, when something caught my eye – an early coralroot! This is the first early coralroot I’ve seen in my local forest, and it was growing in an open spot which gave me an opportunity to take a picture of it in its environment. Granted, not a good picture, but it gives an idea of the environment. And having done that, I changed my angle to get a diffused foreground and background which brings up the modest flower and leaves the rest to your imagination. Maybe this is a ketchup effect… until last Sunday I didn’t have any early coralroot pictures from Loos, and now I find them so close to home!

But still, those lady’s slippers. I just don’t understand how people think. Or do they think at all?

Yesterday was a total washout, it was pouring rain all day but I did actually go out with the camera. The film camera, that is – I had some frames left in the roll of Velvia, and the new greens were looking very lovely in the rain as the colours are always saturated under those conditions. Velvia + naturally saturated greens, will be interesting to see how the slides look like!

Today however, the rain was long gone. I needed to see what was happening with the lady slippers, but this year I will give the #1 lady slipper location a pass because I don’t want to wear out the delicate ground around the flowers. The place will be visited by a lot of people anyway because it’s probably the most famous lady slipper location around here, but the sad truth is that a photographer who sets down in one spot will wear out the ground more than a few people just walking through. I doesn’t matter how successful I am in avoiding any damage to the flowers, but the ground always ends up worse off for the deal. So that said, I drove to a location that I haven’t photographed at all yet. This new location is a host for lesser butterfly orchids as well and maybe some heath spotted orchids will show up later, but I haven’t seen other orchids here (unlike the #1 location where you can find five species).

The lesser butterfly orchids will bloom later than the lady slippers, so all I found was a few buds in roughly the same stage of development as the ones I have close to home. And then these lady slippers… I found them a bit strange. There were three flowers in what looked almost like over bloom, but they were somehow looking the wrong shape and size, a bit wrinkled even. And then there were about 15-20 buds in different stages of development, and a bunch of leaves only 10 cm high. It’s easy to spot the flowers and avoid stepping on them, but those small leaves had me moving around very carefully indeed so I wouldn’t trample them. Except that something had already been there and trampled on some of the plants, I doubt very much a human would’ve done it (I’m probably the first human here this year anyway) but I couldn’t quite figure out what animal it had been either. I will go back there next week of course, there should be many more lady slippers in bloom by then.

Happy with my discoveries so far (despite the wrinkly and trampled plants), I wanted to see if the early marsh orchids ssp. cruenta would show any buds yet. This is the other one of the two orchids that grows around Loos that I haven’t actually photographed here so I want to get those pictures this summer. I know it’s the same species regardless of where it’s photographed, but still, gotta get ‘em. Imagine how happy I was when I found one individual that was already in bloom!

The road to this location is in a poor condition so I parked my car when it still was good and walked the rest. On the way, I found a treat – early coralroot. It was totally unexpected, the early coralroot is not a rare orchid as such but it is very scattered so there’s no specific location for them like there is for most other orchids. They were too small though, but I was making plans to come back when I came across another early coralroot, and this one was already in bloom. Those two orchids I mentioned that I haven’t photographed around Loos yet… you know what the second one was? Early coralroot! I never thought I could get them both on the same day, especially when I didn’t even expect them to be flowering yet.

I’m happy. My Loos orchid collection is thus complete, now I just need to improve on them!

I think that summer just started for me. It’s green everywhere, the sunshine was warm today and I was attacked by swarms of mosquitoes in the forest. The day was so good that I’m not even complaining about the bites!

I drove back to the calypso orchids. There were in full bloom now, but I also found some buds. This time I counted 29 individuals and I also tried to keep track of the white vs coloured individuals and I guess it wasn’t quite fifty-fifty as I speculated last week. About one third of the flowers I found now were white. Sunny day as it was, I got a spotlight on one of the white ones while the background was shaded. Sometimes black backgrounds work and sometimes not, and in this case when the subject is white, it’s like an inverse silhouette!

Having done the macro, I tried a new thing – landscapes. Ok nothing new about it as such, but it certainly was the first time since the winter, apart from a few intimate landscapes here and there. I drove to one of the nice spots I found last year, this one north from Fågelsjö. It’s not an ideal location for the afternoon light because most of the photogenic scenery will be backlit, but the place is so good that there’s always something.

When I arrived, I was greeted by a family of canada goose. It’s also possible that they were urging on their young to swim faster to get away from me… anyhow, I soon found many more canada geese and I had my cup of coffee looking at the birds, they swam to a safe distance of about 50 metres and then they didn’t mind me anymore. Still too far for any meaningful photography, which didn’t matter because I didn’t have a long lens with me and even if I did, all the birds were backlit. So I could enjoy the coffee in peace and then concentrate on the landscapes, until a couple of the canada goose decide to swim right into my frame! They even quite generously stopped for a moment so I could get some pictures (granted, not much a bird picture but a fair environmental shot anyway) until they decided that I was really up to no good and they took off on wings.

Summer, no doubt about it!

I needed to check on the calypso orchid today. This is just the right time for them judging by the past 3 years, but it turned out that 2010 is a week behind. The very first thing I discovered when I got to the location was that it was wet – very wet. The water was streaming down the path at one point, I’ve never seen it this bad even if some water on the path is not unusual as such. But the calypso orchid wouldn’t be growing here if they didn’t like water, so I counted 20 individuals. However, only one or two of them were already in full bloom, and even that is probably a generous nomination. Give them some warm weather and I’m sure that they will look glorious in a week’s time, and there’s probably more of them, too. Considering how small some of the individuals were, there’s a good reason to believe that some hadn’t even popped above the ground yet.

I’ve heard that this location contains an unusually high number of white individuals. Every year there’s been quite a few of them, but I think that this year is exceptional for the colour variation. I didn’t keep exact numbers but it seemed like about half of the individuals I found were white.

The picture is playing a prank in my head, it looks like a big mouth with the tongue hanging out. I’m having a hard time seeing it as a rare and beautiful orchid now! Check my other calypso orchid posts to see what it should look like.

We made one more effort to find the pale pasque flowers in bloom. We found more leaves, but no blooms and now we’re sure that there won’t be any flowers this year, either. We should’ve seen at least some indication of a stem or a bud or something, but there really wasn’t anything like that. Something bad has happened in this location… from hundreds of individuals 15 years ago to just a handful now.

But one rarity that is a thriving is the bird’s eye primrose. The season is a bit early for them, there were some already in bloom but most of the plants only had tiny buds.

Later in the afternoon the rain came in but didn’t stay for long so I grabbed the camera and searched for some water drops in the forest. I’m sure there were many more but the ones that I was interested in were attached to the wood sorrel… complete with OOF grasses that follow the shape of the flowers. I think I’m done with the wood sorrel this year, gotta find something else tomorrow!