The Quiet Picture

On Friday when I was skiing, I noticed that some others had been skiing the same trails. I was very surprised, because normally nobody skis these trails except me so I thought maybe some new people have moved into the village (as unlikely as it sounds). Then today when I was skiing, I met no less than three other skiers. That’s like… three more than I’ve ever met on these trails, all winters combined. It turned out that they were visiting relatives, so that explains that. We chatted a little bit and agreed that it’s a crying shame that the locals don’t take advantage of these fine trails, other than for snowmobiling, of course. They made a perfect analysis of the villagers’ mindset – “åker snöskoter, fiskar, grillar korv och blir feta” (ride snowmobiles, ice fish, grill sausages and get fat).

Since these visitors were going back home today, the trails will be my own again. Except for the snowmobiles and their sausage chomping riders.

The day had started overcast but by the time I came back, the clouds had started to dissipate. The sky cleared completely by moonrise so I had a go at it. I’m getting really annoyed that I can’t find any good spots for moonrise/moonset or sunrise/sunset within an easy walking distance from home, so doing anything like that on a short notice is almost impossible. There is no lack of good viewpoints, but good foregrounds are conspicuous in their absence. And to be honest, I haven’t found any good viewpoints without any signs of logging within a reasonable driving distance either, so I’m always in trouble with the full moon scenery. It has almost lead me to hoping it would be overcast weather every full moon so I don’t even have to search for a spot…

Spent the weekend at the cabin, and managed to waste most of it on putting together Ikea furniture. 8 hours on a wardrobe, and we were two people working on it! It would’ve been impossible alone. But… there was this one photo session that was worth the trip alone. Full moon rising just before sunset!

We did some scouting in the afternoon, but the first place wasn’t anything special. The second place was something I had figured out should work; I had been there before and felt that it has potential although of course I’ve never used the spot for a moonrise before.

We got to the spot a little bit too early. Moonrise was still about an hour away and to our disappointment, sunset was looking like a dud after a warm and sunny day. So that was a long wait ahead of us while the temperature was dropping, making the waiting all the more difficult. We welcomed any respite from the boredom and even I was happily shooting a distant reindeer with my short zoom, all the while knowing how hopeless it was. Then when I started feeling the cold bite through my clothes, I did some running up and down the plateau we were standing on. When I reached the lower end, I saw an opportunity towards the sunset so I gave up on waiting for the moon to appear from behind the mountain and set up shop at the new spot instead. I made sure that I still had a free view towards east (moonrise) so I would be able to switch shooting direction quickly. Just as I was trying to figure out what shutter speed to use to prevent blowing out the bright blob of the sun that was visible through the clouds, a glance behind my back told me that the moon was actually visible! I abandoned the sunset without hesitation and then realised that my lens was too short to properly compose the moon as it was rising above Blåstöten. But then, sometimes you’re lucky. To my absolute amazement, the sun came out and I found the dwarf birch glowing bright orange right in front of me! I should say that this is how I had planned it, but it really was just pure luck. With this foreground, it was easy to compose when I switched to vertical and zoomed to the max and I was glowing just as happy as the dwarf birch was glowing (unseasonally) orange. So imagine my disappointment when I discovered at home that I didn’t have enough DOF to keep both the foreground and background sharp… the mountain and the moon were soft. It almost broke my heart when I deleted these images.

But then I thought… are those images really beyond rescue? With some resizing and clever sharpening, I might be able to rescue something. With this in mind, when I was reviewing the failed images, I realised that they weren’t even as good as I had thought at first that they were. The sunlight hadn’t reached the mountain yet, I had been so concentrated on the foreground that I missed the light on the mountain. By the time the light did reach the mountain, I had switched camera orientation and zoomed out, which gave me a smaller moon and inferior composition but all-around sharpness as well.

So I’m thinking, what’s wrong with me when I miss something as elementary as checking DOF? If I don’t have the discipline by now to use my knowledge even when the situation is changing fast, then I will never have that discipline… I just have a lot of theories and more regrets. With that said, it was an awesome evening watching that moonrise. It was another awesome evening on Friday on Flatruet when we saw seven (7!) short-eared owls fly around us. And when it comes down to it, it’s these experiences that makes life interesting!

I had quite a day yesterday. In the morning I had the pleasure of having the squirrel as company and was quite happy about the resulting pictures, and then in the afternoon we did a skiing trip in Lofsdalen and in the evening I shot the perigee moon rising over the Hovärken mountain. I can’t imagine any better way of spending the day!

I didn’t get many pictures from the skiing trip, actually, but I don’t mind at all. When the light should’ve been at its best, the sun disappeared behind some thin clouds so the red glow never materialised. The only direction I cared about was east and initially the moon was hidden by some strips of clouds but higher up, it was all clear. Obviously, it was so dark by then that the only way of getting anything out of the pictures is to use HDR which in this case consisted of the light frame for the foreground, and a dark frame where I only needed to extract the moon and then try to make it look natural in the light frame. It’s surprisingly difficult, actually, and in those frames where I had clouds in front of the moon I almost gave up completely!

I had such a blast on Friday’s moonlight walk that I just had to do it again, even if the moon wasn’t quite full any more last night. I learned that the margins are very small when it comes to moonlight, and the moon phase is just one of the factors. There was a lot less light to go around last night, which meant that I had to make a lot of compromises with my exposures. When you’re shooting wide open and the longest shutter speed you can use is 20 secs (even that is too long, actually), the only thing left to change is the ISO and I really hate using a high ISO because the noise will be too evident in these low-light exposures.

So what had happened during just one day?

• Moon phase – 100% vs 97% full.
• Altitude of the moon – moonrise on Friday at 17:44, last night 19:28. When you’re out shooting at 22:00, it means that the moon is much lower in the sky.
• Clouds – it was clear skies on Friday, but now there was a little bit of high cloud which diffused the light.

This meant that I had no chance of taking pictures with such bright foregrounds as I did on Friday. At first I was a bit disappointed but looking at the pictures now, I think they worked out ok anyway. In a way they are more “natural” when the foreground doesn’t look like it’s the middle of the day. So maybe the light last night wasn’t any better or worse than on Friday – just different. But I can say one thing for sure, these late evening walks in the moonlight are just awesome, why didn’t I start doing them for a long time ago?

Thanks to the solar eruptions earlier this week, there was a fair chance of seeing some aurora. I was looking at the aurora forecast all evening yesterday but unfortunately it didn’t look like we would get any northern lights this far south. But since it was a full moon night and the snow cover was looking good, I decided to go for a walk anyway – if I didn’t see any aurora, I would still have all the stars and the moonlight on the snow. It was -20 degrees centigrade so I dressed up warmly, grabbed the snowshoes and set out. Walking through the snow, I was almost sweating under all the layers… even when I stopped to take some pictures, the cold didn’t bother me until I had been out for over an hour and spent more time on stopping and shooting than walking. But still, it was the camera battery that gave out first and I turned back home.

It is just amazing to be walking in the forest at night and not need a flashlight to see where you’re going. I’ve gotta do this again tonight!

My timing with changing the winter tyres was perfect. I did that on Tuesday and on Wednesday morning we had snow! It’s been so cold since then that it’s still white on the ground. The conditions just couldn’t get much better and I had my head full of ideas, with the snow, and ice on the lakes, and the sunshine, and most of all – full moon.

One thing I like about this time of the year is that the brooks haven’t frozen yet, while there is snow and a lining of ice. I reckoned that Svansjöbäcken would be good for that so that’s where I drove. It turned out that there is much more snow west from Voxnan than we have in Loos and it was pretty close that I couldn’t have driven the Ormsjö road which is not ploughed in the winter. My next car must have a better ground clearance!

It was kind of amazing to walk to the brook. I found myself going knee deep in the snow, it’s not really all snow of course but it’s the soft mossy ground with blueberry bush that makes you feet sink even in the summer. The big problem is that the ground is also very treacherous, because these mosses cover small crevices between the rocks. Add snow, and dangerous only begins to describe it. I realised that the brook wasn’t nearly as photogenic as I had hoped, so it just wasn’t worth the risk. I needed to find something with less bone breaking potential!

It’s been so cold that even Voxnan has an ice cover where the water is not moving too fast. I got a few pictures from Holmsjön, but as a whole this day was turning out to be a lot less productive than I had hoped for. But at least I had managed to kill some time so it was time to drive to Svartåmyran where I had planned to shoot the full moon rise.

When the Hamra National Park was extended to include the Svartåmyran bog, they also started to build a park entrance here, with a short duckboard trail and a watch tower. The project is not finished, but I heard that the watch tower is finally open and this was what I was betting on – get an overview of the bog in the foreground, with full moon rising in the background. Great plan with one major problem. They built the tower among trees… high as it was, I still had some pines blocking a clean view. I managed to find one angle without foreground obstacles, but it wasn’t nice. I waited for the moon and snapped a few frames, but it was far from ideal. Luckily I had done some scouting while waiting, so I climbed down from the tower and tried a ground view instead, and that’s when everything finally came together. As the moon was moving in the sky, I kept looking for new compositions with the frozen bog and pines in the foreground. My feet were cold but I was happy – I got what I came for!

Yesterday was full moon. Moonrise was just before sunset and there was a chance of clear skies – of course I had to try my luck with this first moon opportunity since last winter! The moon was rising in the east-south-east and after studying the map, I decided that my best chances were in Rullbo. My backup plan was simple; shoot from the bridge that crosses over Voxnan in Rullbo where the river widens into a lake and there are no big hills in the horizon. But I had two other sites which I hoped would work out, and I had reserved enough time to be able to check them both before moonrise. I was a little bit disappointed to find out that I couldn’t even get to my 1st choice location as the road was blocked by pile of sand and it would have been possible to drive around if I had had a 4WD so that dipping two wheels in the ditch wouldn’t have been an issue. Exactly what the pile of sand was doing there, I couldn’t quite figure out… but I turned back and drove to my 2nd choice location. That one turned out to be otherwise nice, but there wasn’t enough of open sky in the horizon so I wouldn’t have seen the moon until it was high up in the sky.

Which left me with the bridge in Rullbo, and it wasn’t actually half bad, there was this small island with some pines that I could use as a foreground. The only thing missing was the sunset light because the clouds were blocking it, but the important thing is that I had enough clear skies for the moonrise. Watching the moon appear behind the horizon is always an impressive sight!

It looked like I would be in luck – clear skies in the afternoon. Then at sunset, clouds in the west. Argh! No problems to see the moon and Venus, but with the clouds in the horizon, the orange gradient was conspicuous in its absence. When’s my next chance? Hmm… 4 weeks from now, actually. Except Venus will be gone. A quick check in the Sky Calendar reveals that Venus will be a tought subject next winter – it follows the sun too close, and it’s not nearly as bright as it has been this winter. Oh well, can’t win ‘em all. I guess I’ve said that before…

Yesterday was half overcast, but when I came home the sky was starting to clear and Venus and the crescent moon were shining brightly in south-west. Photographing the crescent is one of my ambitions, so I set out although it was a little bit too late – there was very little light left in the horizon. Just half an hour earlier would’ve made a world of difference! The cool thing about the crescent is that it looks more like a full moon here. The 6-sec exposure picked up the shaded part, you can even make out all the moon features in the full-res image. If I’m really lucky, I’ll have another chance today, even if the moon and Venus won’t be this nicely aligned today.

[This (very long) story starts on Saturday 7 February]

It’s full moon on Monday and the moonset/moonrise co-incides with sunrise/sunset. It can only mean one thing – I have a day off and I’m heading to the mountains. I’ve booked myself to the Messlingen hostel and it’s snowing, so it’s almost a repeat of my trip from last year. Although a year ago the skies cleared for the D-day, we’ll see if I can get lucky twice.

Saturday

On the way to Funäsdalen, there’s one photo-op just before Hede, I’ve driven past it too many times without stopping. Now I remedied that and took my pictures. When I started the car, I found out that the right rear wheel had locked. I got it running again after reversing a little, then forward and reverse a bit more. After a fuel stop in Funäsdalen it almost did it again, this time only with the warning lights though and the same trick fixed it again.

It was still only noon, so plenty of time for a hike. I had initially planned to do scouting, but the snowfall made it impossible, there’s just simply no views to look at in any direction. But I wasn’t discouraged, I can work with mountains and I can work with snowfall so I was bound to find something. And indeed I did, lovely mountain birches at the treeline, and then just when I was wondering if I would dare to hike to the peak of the Ramundberget mountain despite the weather, I saw an avalanche warning sign so I prompty turned back.

When I got back to the car at Walles, I got a nasty surprise – both wheels were stuck and there was no amount of coaxing I could do to get the wheels spinning. Crap. Then I had a real stroke of luck and a guy in an SUV came by, I explained the problem to him and he towed me to the road, where we hoped that the wheels would be jolted to action. Alas, no, but there was a fully equipped garage just a few metres away so the good samaritan pulled my car to it so we could give the wheels some TLC with a heat gun and a sledgehammer. I was ever so happy to get the car working again… but as I was driving down, the anti-spin and ABS lights came back on. I got down ok though, and then once again I had to do some reversing and forwarding to get it all working again.

At that point I just wanted to get to Messlingen. There would’ve been some daylight left, but I wasn’t feeling like stopping anywhere in case the wheels would strike again. The hostel turned out to be very cozy indeed and I was the only guest so I had the place to myself, a pleasant surprise after all those nasties I had today.

Sunday

The snowfall continued, so there was still no point to try to do any scouting. I took the snowmobile trail from Messlingen towards Storsjö, because it was the shortest way to get above the treeline. Once I had hiked all the way up there, a snowmobiler stopped and asked if I needed a lift. Very kind of him, but a bit too late…

After lunch, I wanted to drive down to Funäsdalen and check out a few places. Except, both wheels were well and firmly frozen again. I was disgusted. And I promise you, I did not have handbrake on overnight if that’s what you’re thinking! I got a hammer from the reception but it wasn’t enough to release the wheels (note to self: buy a sledgehammer). After some thinking, I decided that my best option was to call road rescue and have the car towed to a warm garage in Funäsdalen, it will have to thaw out completely because otherwise the problem will just repeat itself like it has done. When I spoke with the people at the reception, and then with the car rescue guy, I found out that I’m not alone with this problem. Apparently a certain type of brake is more prone to these problems so when there is so much snow getting into the wheels, melting and freezing, you just get problems.

I hate my car. Ok fine, I don’t really hate my car. But I sure don’t like it either.

Monday

First thing after breakfast, I called a taxi to take me to Funäsdalen to get my car. The rear wheels were bare now – I can actually see inside, wow! But when I pulled out, the infernal beeping started again warning me about something (no warning lights were on), I guess the car didn’t appreciate all the beating it received yesterday. With every beep, I was missing that sledgehammer more and more… but as I persisted on driving along, the beeping finally stopped. I got to the hardware store and bought myself an axe (in lieu of a sledgehammer).

I seemed to be on a string of bad luck, because the snowing continued. Momentarily in the morning it had seemed like it would clear, but nix. And not only falling snow, but there was also a heavy wind whipping the trees, blowing a whole lot of snow in the air. Sometimes I can be a real optimist though, so I took the snowcat from Bruksvallarna to Kariknallen. When we got on top, I wondered if this was just another one of my stupid decisions – the wind was horrible, impossible to face it because the snow was just like small needles. Thankfully for the most of the way down the wind was on my back, so it wasn’t that bad. Lousy for pictures though, you can imagine the visibility under these conditions.

But let’s be positive for a moment. I don’t have any regrets for missing all the scouting, because the moonrise wasn’t anything to photograph anyway. Too many clouds, even if the sky was finally starting to clear.

By the evening, the sky really was clear apart from a few clouds in the horizon all around. Photographing the night sky with mountains inthe foreground had been one of my goals, but I didn’t feel like driving to a location now. Firstly, the wind was still stiff and if I felt it here among the trees, then it would be really bad in the open places where I’d need to go. I drove through snow drifts today and it wasn’t fun. Secondly, I have to re-build my trust relationship with my car. The prospect of getting stuck in the middle of the night in the middle of nowhere was not appealing!

However, after I saw Orion and Sirius from my room window, I just had to do something so I set out on foot. Finding suitable spots was hard though and I had second thoughts about driving somewhere better, but in the end I just didn’t dare. I’ve had enough mishaps for this trip already.

Tuesday

Officially, I’m at work today. But since it hasn’t been exactly relaxing when half my mind has been occupied with whether or not the car will move, I figured that this was my last chance to get anything out of my mini-vacation (I did get an ok from my boss!). But when it rains, it pours – they called from work last night. Nothing I could do, I’m really sorry, but in the morning I was probably more stressed than I would’ve been without this holiday.

The good news? The car was fine. All four wheels spinning, I think it’s a great feature in a car. And it was also clear skies, so I had a chance to see the moonset. I watched it go down, and then waited for the sun to come up, and I was freezing for all the standing still… but I finally felt at peace again. Might be hell to pay at work tomorrow, but today was heaven.