The Quiet Picture

While most people are busy complaining about the weather, I’m busy photographing. A little bit of rain, overcast, almost no wind, and cool – I couldn’t really ask for more, it’s as perfect as it gets for flower photography. The biggest problem is that the prime flower season hasn’t started yet… but it’s not like we don’t have any flowers, so no worries.

The first order of the day was to see how the bird’s eye primroses (Primula farinosa) were doing. We have the privilege of having the only known location for these pink primroses in Hälsingland, so although not a rare flower as such, it’s certainly very special up here. The flower is on the decline because of modern farming methods, ideally it needs grazing animals like cows to keep the grasses under control but of course these days hardly anyone lets their cows out “in the wild”. So for the lack of cows, somebody decided mow the grass and this seems to have helped – the flower was growing in large numbers, certainly plenty more than last year anyway. I didn’t have any good bird’s eye primrose pictures so I was able to remedy that, although I’m still not entirely happy.

Later in the day I visited the lady’s slippers again. I wanted to improve the “baby slipper” picture from Thursday, and I think this one works better.

You’d think that two days doesn’t make much difference, and in the case of the slippers maybe it doesn’t… but I was surprised to see fragrant orchid buds coming up seemingly everywhere. So when I settled down to photograph the slippers, not only did I have to watch out for the twayblade that are easy to see thanks to the leaves, but now the fragile fragrant orchids were also forcing me to come up with weird positions so I would do as little damage as possible. It’s not easy I can tell you… no matter how careful I was, I always found some poor plant squashed under my boot. There is so much going on in this location that I could go there every day and always find something new to photograph, but this fear of destroying the orchids will keep me out. Maybe in 1-2 weeks when the fragrant orchids are in bloom…

Today is the national park day so I headed to the Hamra NP. I was hoping to find out more about the park but very early on in the guided walk it transpired that it was going to take a lot longer than I had patience for. I took the first opportunity to get ahead of the group and did the rest of the walk guiding myself while cursing at the light which was never quite right. Too much, too little or too diffused. Then I came across a view which certainly had potential, but just as I was setting up the tripod the sun disappeared behind clouds. So I waited. And waited. And waited. After over half an hour of waiting I decided that the view wasn’t that good anyway and left. So I do have patience after all, about half an hour’s worth to be exact.

Back at home I was wondering what to do. I was still bummed out about the morning, but then I saw that it was completely overcast again so I thought of the cowslip I tried to photograph yesterday (without much success) and I needed overcast weather for it. So I packed the gear again and hiked to the cowslip and set up my tripod just as the sun came out. I just can’t catch a break today?! Looking at the sky, I realised that the clouds had quite simply evaporated and I could forget about my overcast conditions. I decided that the pictures just weren’t happening today so I headed to Hembygdsgården for a cup of coffee instead. Feeling better just for sitting in the sun, I figured that the day wasn’t so bad after all.

The lily of the valley grows in carpet style abundance at the Hembygdsgården, so I wanted to check them out while I was there. It turned out that they hadn’t started to bloom yet, but the beautiful blue of the common dog violets was shining at its best. I don’t have any particularly good violet pictures, I don’t know why I’ve always found them so difficult to photograph… so imagine my surprise when I saw this lonely flower just begging to be photographed. And the light was right, at last!

My spirits thus uplifted, I headed home. When I was walking past a small park area, I noticed something yellow sticking out from the grass. A closer look – yes indeed it’s a cowslip. And not just any cowslip, but one with an orange tinge. I hardly ever see those! This time it didn’t matter what kind of light I was given, both sunlight and shade worked fine.

On the way home I kept thinking how the day had turned from a complete waste of time to a perfect day out. And it wasn’t over yet – I remembered the grape hyacinths on my neighbour’s lawn so I got down to get them also. Shaded works better for them but I had one sunlight idea, except by now… a bank of clouds had drifted in again. I waited for a couple of minutes and then decided that grape hyacinths are not my thing anyway. It didn’t matter – the violet and cowslip pictures had made my day already!