The Quiet Picture

After a few days of rest at home, I’m back in Funäsdalen. I started by taking the northern road to Ljungdalen, I knew the new road was finished so I was curious to see it and it was also nice to be driving it westward, can’t remember if I’ve ever done it before… normally when I take this route, I’m on my way home. Anyway, I can definitely recommend the road, maybe it’s nothing out of the ordinary but it’s worth the detour at least once. You start seeing the mountains nice and early, with a few really photogenic spots along the way.

In Ljungdalen, I headed straight to Torkilstöten. The snowfields are getting smaller and I was absolutely sure that the mountain avens would be blooming now a week later, and yes indeed they are. I was happy! After that, I checked out a couple of places for lapland marsh orchids and early marsh orchids ssp. cruenta. I knew these places to be good especially for the lapland marsh orchid and oh boy was there ever so much of them… And as always, when I took a closer look at some orchids which looked a bit unusual, I started wondering which species it really was. A light version of a lapland marsh orchid? A darker version of heath spotted orchid? Or something in between? By the time I got down to photograph the early marsh orchid ssp. cruenta, I was totally confused. You can be dead cert you’re looking at a cruenta when the leaves are spotted or completely dark on both sides. But if you just look at the flowers – like I did through the viewfinder – I couldn’t really tell the difference from some individuals of lapland marsh orchids. Which I knew must be lapland marsh orchids because the colour was right, and spots only on the upper side of the leaves… dactylorhiza is by far the most difficult orchid genus to make sense of!

Or as the Swedes would say it, Humleblomster och en humla.

I was just setting up the rig when this bumblebee showed up. Knowing that it will not wait for me to finish setting up things, I fired the shutter and hoped that I got the exposure, sharpness and composition. Exposure, yes. Sharpness – good enough, but not pin sharp. Composition – yikes. All over the place, so I had to do some creative cropping in Lightroom to rescue what I could. So not a real keeper by any means, but I just didn’t have the heart to delete it. It was my first picture of the day, a serendipity at 9:01 on a warm Sunday morning. Life is good.

When I was aching for the 300mm lens, it was not only for the smooth backgrounds but also for the smooth foregrounds. An experienced photographer can quickly pick the subjects and backgrounds. I can pick them, slowly. But then you have this thing about foreground, and now suddenly you have three things to worry about: subject, background, and foreground. What makes the foreground such a complicated affair is two things – too close. That is (besides an unintentional phonetic pun) the foreground is too close to the subject, or it’s too close to the camera. Too close the subject, and the foreground will show as distracting detail. Too close to the camera, and the foreground either obstructs the whole subject, and then when you lift the camera to get a clear view of the subject, the foreground fade is so subtle that you hardly notice it at the bottom of the frame. And let’s not even start talking about the colours, highlights and shadows… you’ll find that the background is indeed a breeze to sort out, but the foreground will give you a headache every time. I’ve had the 300mm lens for 2 years now, and I don’t have a single picture which I would specifically remember for it’s awesome foreground.

Both the FG and BG are just excellent – but where’s the subject?

Subject is showing clearly and BG works, but what are those blobs at the bottom?

Sometimes, just sometimes, you get lucky and you’ll find something that you can use to frame your subject. I was lucky.

Ice poppy (Papaver croceum) with Canon 300mm f4L + 31mm ext. tube

I am normally a very un-analytical person. Things just are the way they are, analysing them always makes me depressed because there’s so much I can’t change and I don’t need the headache. Put this in a small scale and I think I have figured out why I want to take the kind of photographs I take. I have a nasty streak of control freak in me, so it’s natural that I try to control everything I can, and equally natural that I dislike everything that I have no control over. It was none too early that I learned to live with that instead of getting stressed about the world around me. Photography by default gives me a chance to control – I can choose what I shoot, when I shoot, how I shoot. In a chaotic world I have a need to bring order, I do this by compositionally eliminating everything in the image until all that remains is just the one thing I wanted to show. Maybe the result is boring… and I’m not all too happy to say this, but maybe that is an accurate reflection of me. It is entirely possible that I am a boring person.

Hello, my name is Minna and I am boring.

There, admitting the problem is the first step to recover from it. Although I’m not sure if this is the kind of problem I want to fix. I like my pictures – boring is my style. Maybe in time as I develop as a photographer, my pictures will get a bit more exciting. But this is where I am right now.

Ask any budding nature photographer why they like photography, and sooner or later they will say that they want to show things to other people, such things that people don’t normally think about. Pick a detail, show it to someone and hear them gasp, “wow I never saw that”! I was like that, until I noticed that every photographer said the same thing. That cut me down to size… so much for my unique ability. In fact, every day I see images from other photogs which make me go “wow I never saw that”! I’m not discouraged however, in the end it’s not the reactions that keep me going on, it’s what photography gives me – the opportunity to control. I go so far as to isolate my subjects by excluding all distractions (for many others they seem to be essential elements though) but the result I get is why I wanted to take the picture in the first place. If other people don’t like it, I just have to live with it, even if deep down it eats me a little to know that the picture is a reflection of me and by rejecting the picture, they are rejecting a part of me. That’s what it comes down to, doesn’t it? For any artist, any form of art… the creation is always a part of you, you just need to grow elephant skin to face the rejection with a smile, and build a self confidence equivalent of Mount Everest to believe that what you are doing is the right thing to do, to hell with anyone who doesn’t agree!

Peace.