The Quiet Picture

Last night we got hit by a storm. I had trouble sleeping because the wind was screaming in the forest and I heard some cracking sounds which told me that trees were falling or breaking off. I was really nervous that a tree would fall on the house, but as far as I could see when I looked outside, the wind was blowing in a rough west-east direction which meant that the only part of the house at risk of a fallen tree is my neighbour’s flat (this house consists of two flats). I also check the weather forecast and it said the same thing, winds blowing from west or south-west. So I finally decided to put on earplugs to get some sleep anyway.

In the morning as soon as there was enough light, I looked out the window and saw that a tree had fallen outside the bedroom, almost touching the house. I went outside and found almost total destruction – well over half of the trees in that part of the forest had fallen or broken off. More so, the direction they had fallen was north-south, which means that they had all come down towards the house! I was happy about the earplugs… had I heard what’s going on, it would’ve frightened the living daylights out of me for sure. This forest closest to the house, they did some logging here a couple of years ago so the forest wasn’t very dense to start with, thus making it more vulnerable to the winds. And now it’s obviously even less dense and the few trees that are left standing are probably weaker than they were before. Which means that when the next storm arrives, there’s a big risk that more trees will fall even without a tornado. There is safety in numbers, but those numbers don’t exist any more.

When I walked around, I started getting a better picture of the night’s events. In some parts of the forest there were only a few trees fallen, but they were in the west-east direction, thus following the direction of the storm. But the areas which had suffered the worst damage were more in the north-south axis and I can even plot the path this tornado took through the forest and my house was right in the middle of it! So I’m counting myself lucky that no damage was done to the house. I just hope that my cabin fared as well, considering that the storm was even worse in that region. Maybe I should go and take a look next weekend… in my new car…

Considering the havoc from a photographer’s perspective, things are looking pretty bleak. If I thought yesterday that the snowcover was spoiled, then today you can hardly even see the snow from under all the debris. But maybe in some places which were spared from the hurricane, new snow can still rescue the landscape and give me something to shoot this winter. But this forest closest to me, which has given me so many pictures through the years, it’s gone. It’s just a wide open space now.

It was another cold night so frost and ice was guaranteed. I wanted to shoot some ice bubbles and formations, kinda like those I shot last year. So I drove to the same lake as last year, but I found that all ice is not created equal. For one thing, there wasn’t as much ice on the shore as last time. And the little ice I did find was totally uninteresting so I decided to check out a smaller lake, because I knew that the small ones have full ice cover by now. Well, I still struck out on the ice patterns, but I found something else. The shaded part of the shoreline was still covered with frost while the frost on the other side had melted during the sunny periods (half overcast today), creating this nice contrast. White pine here, green pines over there. Although the picture I posted on Google+ illustrates it better than this one, but I don’t want to post the same picture in both places…

Time to explore the local forest again. I remember there should be a spot with a lot of ferns not very far from home, previously when I’ve walked past I was looking for other plants but I was almost sure I would find some ferns there. I hadn’t gone more than 20-30 m from the house when I came across a lesser butterfly orchid! I’ve walked this way countless of times but never saw a butterfly orchid. Now that I know it’s there, I can even see it from my living room window! It was in a good position at that, so of course I had to take some pictures. Then I checked out my regular lesser butterfly orchid spot and again had to stop and take more pictures. Not far from that, I came across a freakishly big heath spotted orchid. Maybe it’s not big in height, but the flower cluster was as tight as I’ve ever seen.

Still on my way to the fern spot, I finally decided to take some pictures of the bird’s foot trefoil. Every year I think about taking pictures of this wonderfully yellow flower, but every year I don’t – I mean, it’s growing everywhere, I’ll take the next opportunity, right?

Finally I reached the humid fern spot and found all the mosquitoes as well. Been wondering where they were when I was able to do all the shooting so far without the pesky devils. Anyway, my bug spray was working so I just tried to ignore them and concentrate on the ferns. It turns out that the compact camera is my best ID aid. I can take quick shots from above and below and then overall for later study, so I don’t have to rip off any plants and carry home. The macro lens is less convenient for that, and using a 150mm lens for an overall shot of a meter high plant would be too much of a challenge anyway!

I have to say, the ferns are fascinating. There’s a whole lot of geometry in them with regular and repeating patterns. Maybe it gets a bit boring after a while to take similar compositions with minute differences between species, but they are an absolute treasure for studying the plants afterwards. There’s so much to them that I didn’t see on the spot, but that’s one of those things you learn to look at when you keep at it for a while. An exciting new world!

On the way home, I passed by the skiing track. I had heard that the storm a few weeks ago had felled a lot of trees here and indeed it was a sad sight. Some trees had fallen on the power line, so I’m wondering if they have enough money to fix it. Not that it’s really a problem for me, I didn’t need the illumination last winter at all. Instead, I was a bit irritated when someone had turned the lights on, because they stopped me from shooting the aurora!

When you drive to Lillhärdal from Loos, you have to go north to Sveg first. I’ve often looked at the map and wondered if it would be possible to choose a more straight route, but that straight route means taking some awfully small roads. The proof is in the pudding… We tested it yesterday. After every crossroads the road got smaller until finally we were driving on a dirt road that would’ve been great fun in a 4×4. But as it was, I had to do scouting on foot to see if it was at all possible to proceed by car and with some skilled driving (not me) we got past the worst part. This route saves almost 20 km, but costs twice the time and I won’t be driving these roads again until I have a 4×4!

On the way back we chose a southern route which doesn’t save any mileage but the roads were better. We got to see a lot of new scenery and there was this one lake in particular which made an impression on me. A lot of small islands and an interesting shoreline with a lot of exciting features, it will be a photographer’s paradise on a calm summer evening! Actually, I think almost any ice-free season is fine, as long as it’s calm.

Another interesting thing yesterday was all the small tarns covered with ice, and some of the with a dusting of snow to boot. I kept telling myself that the light was wrong or this or that was wrong so I didn’t stop to photograph them. And then when the light was finally right, all the tarns were gone! If you had asked me to find a road without a lot of lakes lining it, I wouldn’t have been able to name one – until yesterday!

So this morning I was determined to get some icy pictures. Problem is that it wasn’t a very cold night, so the ice is melting. Some small consolation that the weather will inevitably turn colder soon… it’s just that this period of time when you can still see through the ice is quite short. When it gets cold enough for the ice, it gets cold enough for the snow to cover it, too.

And then I found another tarn today which turned out to be good. Just like the tarn I wrote about last week, this one also has a lot of small turf islands. It is situated in a “bowl” which protects it from wind but probably also makes it difficult to photograph in sunlight because it will be shaded. I’ll be back there, another time another light.

And then finally, a weekend wouldn’t be complete without a bird! I had a feeling that the birds would tolerate me without any disguises at all. Quite right – the only bird I wasn’t fooling was a jay, but they weren’t fooled when I was wearing camo, either. As long as I’m quiet and don’t make any sudden moves, the small birds don’t mind me at all!

We had a long trip to the Orsa-Finnmark today. The weather was anything but photogenic, overcast and very windy so the grand view we had from our first stop at Finnberget was wasted. Since my only picture from the place is not a very good, I won’t post it but I couldn’t resist using the name in the post title (“A Finn on Finnberget”)! Finnberget is situated on top of a mountain at 638m in the western-most reaches of the Gävleborg county.

From Finnberget we drove south via Tjäderåsen and then turned west towards the Ämåsjön lake. And this road was a real discovery! The road goes very high, almost at 600m so the landscape takes on some sub-alpine features. There are big areas of marshland surrounded by forest covered hills and the really special thing here is that the hills really are covered by forest instead of ruined by logging. So this is definitely a road I will be driving again, but under better conditions so it’s possible to take pictures.

Then we followed the Ämån river south-east. There’s a couple of waterfalls along the way, the first one was a disappointment (just like Storstupet and Helvetesfallet I visited a couple of years ago, they are further downstream) but the second one was marginally better. But still, the most interesting part of the falls was the path there. I usually don’t shoot wideangles in the forest because I’m just not able to bring any order into chaos, but this half-fallen tree provided enough of a focal point for me to compose around it. And for this picture, it was the right weather!

Instead of following the river all the way to E45, we swung north towards Vässinjärvi because we also wanted to take a look at Korpmäck (Korpimäki). It’s about 20m higher than Stora [big] Korpimäki we visited a couple of weeks ago, so I’m just wondering, shouldn’t it be called Större [bigger] Korpimäki? (LOL) On the map it looks like it would be possible to get some pictures of the mountain with marshland or a tarn in the foreground, and this time reality turned out be as I imagined it. Except, not in this weather of course.

So now I have two new places I have to visit some other time in better conditions. And I’m fairly sure that there will be a lot more to shoot that these two places, I just need to get the timing right!

I’m a member of the Ljusdal camera club (Ljusdals fotoklubb) and every year they make two excursions. For this spring excursion, it was my turn to be the guide. I decided to show them some of the nice places I found last year along the Voxnan river, so we started from Holmsjön and then made our way back and stopped at the Skalhålet ravine. I’ve only been there once and it was raining then, which made it difficult to move around on the lichen covered cliffs (very very slippery when wet). So I didn’t get any pictures that time, and I didn’t actually get many pictures this time either. But I got a picture, so at least I now have some documentation of the place. It’s just not very photogenic, but interesting enough to see. We don’t have a lot of ravines around here.

I had planned the excursion so that the last stop would be the Svansjöbäcken brook. Very simple reason – I figured that nobody will want to do the difficult hike down along the brook so everyone can leave when they want to, while I can stay as long as I want to! The weather was overcast and this was actually the first time I’ve been there in completely overcast weather. Otherwise it’s a difficult place during the day, because everything will be backlit. Normally you want to shoot running water looking upstream, and this means that you’ll have the sun on your face unless you get there early in the morning or late in the evening. The cliffs and forest surrounding the brook are also photogenic but somewhat difficult in sunny weather, so I could finally take some forest pictures today.

I think it was a good day out, I hope that the other club members enjoyed it! Although I must say they left a bit quickly from Svansjöbäcken… I think I should’ve warned them about the terrain, I didn’t think how difficult it will be for someone who is not used to it!

I talked about the Moose Lake hike a while back. Another favourite hike I have is north-west to the Kvarnsjön lake, then south to Ryggskog and home via Gäddtjärnen. I used to do it a lot when I was still skiing, but not so much now that I’m snowshoeing because it’s a tad long for that. But when you’re on foot, it’s possible to take the road from Ryggskog back to Loos so it was easy to make the decision today to do this hike.

Photographically this route is not quite as good as the Moose Lake, but yesterday I went to Älgsjön and had very little to show for it, so today all I wanted was to have a nice hike and maybe take a few snapshots along the way. And the hike certainly started well, I got a real kick out of the wide open spaces and the new snow. It was snowing and there was almost no contrast at all, so the trail is barely visible in the picture.

When I got to Kvarnsjön, I had a look at the Storryggsån brook that runs into the lake from the west. During milder winters this brook is almost always open, but now it’s been covered with ice since December. I found a great opportunity for a panorama though, and there aren’t a lot of places around Loos that would work as a panorama quite as well as this. It was still snowing but the sun was starting to come out, which provided an interesting light on the landscape. I found a few other opportunities as well, but they would have required digging my way through the deep snow. I had already done one 50m detour and my legs were screaming for oxygen afterwards, I’m really not cut out for hiking knee deep… but following my own tracks back was easy. I can see the benefit of snowshoeing in a group – people can take turns in doing to the hard work. Anyway, I missed those other opportunities I speculated about because my legs were still shaking from the first effort and I had to leave some energy for the hike to Ryggskog.

The trail from Kvarnsjön to Ryggskog is not used a lot. I can’t remember if I’ve ever seen a snowmobile here, but they do drive the route occasionally because the tracks are there. Except now of course, nobody’s done the trail since the snowfall started this week, so I had to pulse through the new snow. It’s uphill almost all the way to Ryggskog, but I love the forest that this trail runs through. It’s a fairly dense forest, mostly pines but a good dose of spruces as well (which is the norm around here). Because of the closeness of the trees, you’ll often see snow here when it’s already fallen down from the trees everywhere else. I haven’t found a way to photograph it so I could do it justice, but as an experience to hike through this forest it’s just simply wonderful. For me it’s a mile of pure winter bliss! And today it felt like it was better than normal… I don’t know if I was stopping so frequently to catch my breath or to enjoy the sight and silence!

The weather forecast kept saying that last night would be completely overcast. The full moon and stars in the sky disagreed though and after all the snowfall earlier this week, the conditions were just perfect to try some night photography.

As I was peering up through the tree crowns I noticed that the sky wasn’t quite as clear as it had seemed at first – there was some very light cloud that dimmed the stars a little bit. It wasn’t necessarily a bad thing, I like the effect of the clouds especially when they are blurred by the long shutter speed.

I wish we could have more nights like this. That feeling when you’re in a quiet snowcovered forest and the moon is shining bright enough so you don’t need a flashlight to see where you’re going… awesome!

I was really looking forward to enjoying the winter landscape today as well. Yesterday they were still saying that it would be around -15°C today but it was -22°C in the morning and now the forecast is around -20 degrees the whole day. Not sure if I enjoy the winter landscape quite that much… I hope the temperatures will rise a little bit in the afternoon because it kills me to miss the scenery as it is at the moment!

Late in the season, I’m still exploring new places. We were following the same river that we visited last week, and it meant discovering more remnants of log driving activity in these waters. The rock walls that line up the riverbank in some places is an obvious sign of log driving, but then there are other things that are starting to disappear from sight, like the wooden channels from the late 19th century that are now overgrown, or the duckboards which are half rotten so you have to be careful where you step because the plank can break under your foot when you least expect it. A fresh dusting of snow on the old planks doesn’t help…

Photographically a tough day, but this late in the season it almost doesn’t matter what the weather is, it’s tough any which way. So the day was better used for scouting, and we did find some very promising places that are definitely worth a visit in the summer. Just need a bit more colour and water, and it’s keepers all the way!

The forecast said that it would rain all day and some of it heavy, so I gave up the idea of dragging around the big camera. Instead, I manufactured a rainjacket for the G10, couldn’t go out without any camera at all…

We had good day out searching for flowers. I learned two new places for lady’s slippers, one of them quite different from my “regular” slipper spot so I think I’ll do my lady’s slipper photography there next year. The place was also home for some butterfly orchids, will take another week before they are in bloom so I’ve booked a visit there next weekend.

Another flower I have to photograph next weekend is the wild rosemary (Rhododendron tomentosum). The flowers we saw today were still mostly budding.

And there’s all those orchids in my favourite place that should be in full bloom – next week. Sounds like I’ll be busy, but it’s the kind of busy that I like!