The Quiet Picture

I was supposed to get Ikea deliver my furniture today, but they called me in the morning to say that the car is broken so they will have to postpone it for tomorrow. My cabin is cursed, for sure. So I had to come up with a plan B, and quick. No vacation is complete without a trip abroad, right? So I drove to Norway.

My first stop after the Norwegian border was just before Brekken to have a look at the Ryfossen waterfalls that I discovered last year and thought were fabulous. The weather was overcast, so it was ideal for waterfalls. But last year when I was there, I was with my sister and I was only half concentrated on finding the best details. Now that I was fully concentrated, I didn’t think it was as good as I thought it had been and I only really found one detail I was happy with. I got the impression that the water level was quite high though and it looked like it would be possible to jump across with just a little less water in the stream, so maybe there will be more ops then.

I continued my journey to the Syldammen dam. It’s a bit funny driving the last bit to Syldammen which is on the Swedish side of the border, because for a moment the road curves in and out of the countries. So in order to reach something in Sweden, I had to drive to Norway and then in Sweden, back to Norway, and once again back to Sweden. No customs to drive through, though!

The reason I drove to Syldammen was to find the glacier buttercup. I had a description that there would be hundreds of them just 200 meters downstream from the dam. What the description didn’t say was which side of the river, but with only a couple of hundreds of meters, I’ll easily do both. So I started from the near side, and very soon had a couple of birds of prey circle above my head, screaming an alarm. I saw that on the opposite side of the river, there was a steep cliff so I assumed that the birds had a nest there. So I moved further away from the shoreline, I didn’t see any possible location for the glacier buttercup anyway. Since I didn’t have a GPS with me and SportsTracker doesn’t start tracking without a connection, I couldn’t really say how far I had gone but surely it was more than 200 meters. With no buttercups of any kind, I turned back and made sure to walk even further away from the assumed bird nest (but still the birds sounded their alert above my head). But this was a problem – if they reacted like this to me when I was on the opposite side, what would they do when I was approaching the cliff from the same side? So I decided to try it and turn back as soon as the birds got agitated. Said and done, I probably got just as far as 200 meters but no buttercups here either.

Now what? Had I completely misunderstood the description? While I was walking on the far side, I had spotted a patch of snow behind a group of buildings. So what if the “dammbyggnad” (literally, dam building) referred to these buildings and not the actual dam? And glacier buttercups love the late patches of snow. So I felt good about that, I figured it must be it. Except… no glacier buttercups, nothing that even hinted at their existence. With nothing better to do, I decided to climb up on the nearest peak (not high!) and while doing it, I got those birds of prey on my case again. Either the birds hate me or then there are two pairs of them but I was seriously doubting about my nest theory now. Maybe I could walk further on that other side of the river anyway… but it felt hopeless, I figured my best chance of finding them had been this patch of snow. All I wanted now was to drive back, I had some blue sky already and metre by metre the clouds were creeping up on Sylarna so maybe I could see the peak from some nice viewpoint along the road.

No new furniture, no glacier buttercup and no mountaintop on the way. Still, it was a good day. Weird, huh?

It’s been a windy day but I was determined to do some flower photography today, perfect time to test my new wind box. But my first target was the marsh marigold in a spot which is surrounded by forest and thus less susceptible to the gusts, so I left the windbox in the car (it would be too small for the tall flowers anyway). I didn’t have any ideas what to do with the flowers so I just walked around, waiting for something to catch my eye. The marsh marigold always blooms late in this somewhat shaded spot, so there were still a lot of buds around and in the end it’s the buds that inspired me.

The problem with the marsh marigold is that the leaves are almost always bug-eaten and even when you find some which are nice, you have to deal with a lot of glare. So I put on the polariser which I almost never use with flowers (it kills so much light that I can’t afford it when there’s a slightest bit of wind) and it actually worked pretty well to cut the glare. But then as I was working on different compositions, the sky became covered with clouds so I had to lose the filter in order to keep my shutter speeds at reasonable levels. I’ve posted the second picture to illustrate the grey sheen of glare, it’s a matter of opinion if it distracts or not.

It seemed like it just kept getting darker. I had a few other ideas what to shoot, but I felt my inspiration disappear along with the light. I normally prefer overcast weather for shooting flowers, but I guess the wind was too much for me, windbox or not. But the good thing about a hobby is that you can also choose not to do it, so I turned back home, no regrets!

I had a plan for the day:

1. Wood anemone
2. Lunch
3. Check the pasque flowers
4. Bake bread
5. Cycling
6. Watch ice hockey and eats lots of ice cream

1. The wood anemone in my favourite spot were stuck in about the same stage where they were last weekend. It has been a cold week, it even snowed one day, and the wood anemone appear not to have appreciated it. So had a closer look at the buds and found that the way the leaves were curving around the bud was just about as cute as a flower can get (I mean, how often do you use the word “cute” to describe a flower?) so spent a long while shooting them. I found that I’m probably getting too old for macro photography because oh boy how my knees and back were complaining about the session…

2. It filled my stomach, that’s all I can say about the lunch.

3. I found one pasque flower plant (leaves, no flower), the same one I found last year. I think they’ve died out in this place, but I will check it next year again of course.

4. The bread takes a long time in the oven, so I had time for

5. cycling. I pedalled to Älgsjön, but I took the road which leads to the eastern end of the lake. I’ve never taken this road, so I was surprised to find out that it rises quite high and because the forest has been logged, there’s a great view down to the lake. Will have to come back some calm morning to try to shoot it.

6. So far, Canada beat Norway and Denmark beat Germany. Waiting for Finland to beat Slovakia, please…

P.S. There’s another version of the wood anemone bud on my Facebook page.

We drove to Gröntjärn today, the idea was to shoot pale pasque flowers. I was sure they would be in bloom or at least budding because the spring is slightly early this year. The weather wasn’t too good, overcast and cold (there were snowflakes in the air at one point), but the pale pasque flowers are nice even if they’re not open. So I was prepared for all this, but I was not prepared for not finding any pale pasque flowers at all! I couldn’t believe it, I was standing right where I’ve been shooting them in the years past, but now there was nothing. After some searching I finally found one plant, with just tiny leaves. This is like a deja-vu from last year when we looked for the flower in a place where they were abundant 15 years but almost all gone now. So I’m totally mystified by what has happened. However, now that I’ve had some time to to think about this, I remembered reading last year that the pasque flower can skip blooming some years and then pop up again when the conditions are right. I just always assumed that they are a sure thing at Gröntjärn… And what’s wrong with the conditions this year if they’re only resting and haven’t completely died?

Since there was too much wind to make anything out of the lake itself, we drove on to Hornberget. I’ve been on top the mountain once before, that was in 2001 – the 6th of May 2001 to be exact, I wrote in the guest book which was still in the small cabin on top. The oldest entries in the guest book are from 1995 and there’s plenty of empty pages left in it, so there’s not much traffic up here. Which is a shame, really, because the view is fabulous! You can walk to the cliff’s edge and look right down at the tree tops and the occasional falcon flying below you. There’s a 200m vertical difference from the car park to the top and I reckon the cliff drops straight down at least a 100m, if more. That’s an impressive cliff in this region!

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 was very much expecting to see a lot of new flowers today. But you don’t always get what you expect, so I had to settle with the wood anemone alone. Last weekend when I checked my favourite wood anemone spot, the plants were very small with just very tiny buds. But the warm weather has worked miracles on them and not only did I find them in full bloom, I had a sneaky suspicion that they might actually be a little bit past the peak. Either way, they’ve grown with leaps and bounds in only a week. So that got me thinking about the pale pasque flowers. Maybe they’re growing faster than expected, also? So I drove to the location and headed directly to the plant I had discovered earlier. No flower. Nothing. Zip. Nada. Just the same leaves, exactly like I had found them. I had a look around and found one more set of leaves, so that’s now a total two pale pasque flowers in this location. Either the past 15 years have been really hard on the flowers here (there were hundreds of plants back then), or the season is still very early for them. I hope for the latter!

Back at home, I had a look at what’s happening around the house. I found that the lily of the valley leaves are growing tall with a few buds also. But the best moment of the whole day came when I checked the spot where I found lesser butterfly orchids. I hoped to find some small leaves, and I did – and I also found some buds! They are of course very small at the moment, only about 5cm tall, but I was just so happy to see them. I counted 21 individuals in total, but it’s possible that there will be more because it’s not so easy to find all the small leaves and maybe some of them haven’t even started growing yet. Earlier today I was feeling a little bit jealous when I was thinking about all the flowers that are already in bloom in Ljusdal, we’re probably a week behind. I’m not jealous anymore, I’ll happily give away that week for all the orchids we (will) have here!

Imagine a sparse pine forest. Imagine the forest floor as it typically is in these forests – covered with lichens and mosses and heather and blueberry/cowberry/crowberry brush and juniper bushes. Now imagine the leaves of a pale pasque flower. And imagine that there is just one pale pasque flower individual in all of this forest.

What would you imagine are the odds at finding this one indvidual?

Not very high I would say, but I found it!

I only know of two locations with the pale pasque flower, the favourite being Gröntjärn. Since I moved to Loos however, Gröntjärn is very far away so I was wondering if it grows anywhere closer to Loos. I spoke with my flower guide and sure enough, there is a location north from Rullbo. He was there in the mid-90′s and found hundreds of plants, out of which about 250 produced blooms.

Problem is that 15 years is a long time in nature. Trees grow and forests are cut down, so finding the exact same spot you visited many many years ago is not all that easy. Last week we tried but found nothing. We concluded that it’s too early anyway so now we tried again. It turned out that one week is also too long to remember the exact same spot… because we drove past the place we searched last week! But this time my guide had found the old notes he had written down back then, and he said that the flowers were growing among juniper bushes. The place we searched last week had no juniper at all, so now that we were trying to remember where we had parked last week we were also looking into the forest to see any areas with juniper. And we found it, so searching for the pale pasque flower became a bit easier because now we were confident that we were in the right place. But it’s still a lot of area to cover. Until suddenly, there they were… pale pasque flower leaves!

I figured that searching for plants is a combination of skill and luck. You need luck to happen to walk past just the right spot, and skill to understand what you see. I’m starting to think that maybe I’ve learned something during all these excursions I’ve made with my flower guide. Learning to photograph is learning to see. And learning to find flowers is also about developing a vision that is tuned in to the plants. Very often it comes down to looking at the green pattern in front of you and seeing the deviation in that pattern.

I mentioned that back when my guide had last visited the place, there were hundreds of individuals. And now we only found one (normally when you find one, it’s much easier to find more because you know exactly what you’re looking for). But my guide had noted down one more interesting detail – the time. He had been there close to midsummer, and still found some inviduals in bloom. This is very late, compared to Gröntjärn where I’ve always seen them during the first half of May. But it’s also a different climate. There are places around Loos which almost remind of a alpine environment, so it’s hardly surprising that we have some plants here you normally see in the mountains. With this in mind, we concluded that it’s just way too early for them at the moment, so we will come back in two weeks in hopes of finding more individuals. Because this is a the right place, we are 100% sure about that. We just need to find it again…

This is a fairly typical situation for us when we’re searching for flowers. My guide has a memory (sometimes good, sometimes vague – it can be decades since he’s last visited some of these places) of the location and then we just walk up and down the area until we find what we’re looking for. Most of the time when we don’t find it, it’s because the timing is off so we come back a week or two later and there it is. So far we’ve actually found everything we’ve looked for which is a pretty good record!

Just when you thought you’d seen the last hepatica picture! Well I thought I’d taken my last hepatica picture (for the year) until I saw a bunch of them, radiating their colour from under the branches of a spruce. The flowers were big and the colour was very strong, not a pale flower in the bunch unlike the hepatica behind my garage which all seem to be small and pale (some of to the point of being white). But what really attracted me about these hepatica was the way they were growing between the brances of the spruce. A great opportunity to show some environment of the flower, it’s not what I normally do because it’s very difficult to create a simple composition when you include some background in it. And me, I like simple compositions! What helped me with these pictures was the patchy light so I could let some parts of the picture be generously underexposed to reduce the distractions.

Another thing I was able to do that hasn’t really worked for me before was to include the leaf in the composition. Granted, I had to do a lot of coaxing to get this flower positioned the way it is because the flowers are normally much taller than the leaves, but I got the idea for it when I saw another flower resting on the leaf so I just needed to set up a more photogenic pair. No flowers were harmed in the process!

I like hiking light. Dragging a whole lot of photography gear is just not my thing, because I want to enjoy the hike as well. So I have a big dilemma when I have to choose the gear for mountain hikes because I want to be able shoot both flowers and landscapes. And since the 150mm macro is not much of a landscape lens, I needed a way to transform the 24-105mm zoom into a macro. Answer: extension tubes. Since I’ve never tried this combo, I had no idea if it really works or not but the proof is in the pudding so today I tested it on some wood anemone buds I found. The idea is not to compare the 150mm macro to the zoom with extension tube, but just to see if the zoom kit can be used for flower close-ups at all. It turned out it works fine! Problem solved, I now have my light-weight photography kit for the long day hikes. The irony is that two of the components in the kit are the oldest pieces of photography equipment I have, the monopod which I got in the very beginning when I started with photography (except I’ve switched the ballhead) and the extension tube set which also dates back in the early days before I got a dedicated macro lens.

At this time of the year I do the same walk every weekend, kind of an inventory round to see when the flowers will start popping up. The wood anemone above was shot at hembygdsgården because there’s still about 20cm of snow in my favourite wood anemone spot. Another flower that’s about to bloom is the daphne, I have high hopes of seeing some flowers next weekend because the buds are getting quite big in my favourite daphne spot. I didn’t expect to see any open daphne flowers so imagine my surprise when I came across these pink beauties with their amazing scent when I was inspecting the Svartån waterfalls today. There was too much water in the creek to inspire me (small creeks work better for me when there’s little water in them) so finding the daphne was perfect. But regardless of the amount of water, it was great to be out there. The wind was horribly cold and completely negated the warm sunshine, it was even snowing at one point, but it didn’t stop me from sitting down and enjoying a cup of coffee (or two) and be happy about the changing season!

Every day there’s more crocuses coming up under my kitchen window. Today I had five of them in bloom, but I can see three new buds already. It’s too bad that my crocus patch is shaded in the evening so the only chance I have of seeing them open is during the weekend, so I was happy about the sunny morning today because it gave me the opportunity that I was waiting for!

I checked out the hepatica again to see if any of the buds I saw yesterday would be open already, and a couple of them were. So the hepatica are now officially in bloom, which is roughly the same time as last year.

I came to realise that it’s worth taking the same pictures of the same flowers year after year, after all. I decided a couple of years ago that I wouldn’t do it but the budding botanist (pun intended) in me appreciates the documentary value of the pictures. It works if you write down when this or that flower was in bloom, but it’s much better to have a picture of it in the catalogue!