The Quiet Picture

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.

Full moon tomorrow but the weather might not co-operate, so I wanted to catch the moonset today as it coincides nicely with sunrise. Only problem was the solid bank of clouds in the north-west so I didn’t stand a chance. But since I was already out and about, I went for the sunrise instead and now I got seriously lucky – cold mist. By far the best sunrise I’ve photographed this winter and to think that I would’ve completely missed this orange mist had I not been out in search of the moon. You win some, you lose some.

When I got home, a surprise was waiting for me. I have seen very little of the squirrels so far, but now one of them had finally come for brunch. So I just swapped the zoom lens for 300mm and got some keepers even if the light wasn’t ideal. I hope I will soon see more birds as well… they are only making short visits so it’s no point even setting up the tripod.

In the afternoon I had high hopes of catching a nice sunset to go with the nice sunrise. Just a little bit of cloud that might provide additional colour, but the colour never really materialised. While I was waiting for something interesting to happen with the sunset, I glanced behind me and saw the moon rising (moonrise already at 13:30, but it takes a while to work its way high up in the sky). Now I was racing the time to find a good spot for the moon before the sky got too dark, and I got lucky – again. A row of spruces on the edge of a clearing so I could put the moon right above the treetops. The picture is a bit misleading, really – the moon was much much higher on the sky than it appears here, but who cares. I got my moon.

I had hoped for a moonset and sunset… but I got a sunrise and a moonrise instead. And you know what? There’s no way I could’ve done anything better even if my plans had played out perfectly!

* * *

The post title is a kind of a play on words, a private joke. You’ll need to watch Soapdish to get it…

Since I had a lot of bird activity at the feeder again, I decided to zoom with my feet and set up shop just over 3 metres from the feeder. This meant that I was out in the open and the great tits seemed to mind it, but the smaller birds and nuthatches kept happily feeding and I kept happily snapping. I missed a few ops when the darn shutter wouldn’t fire, but overall, I’m thrilled with the results. Of course I still needed to crop the images to fix the composition, but now I was getting over 8MP files instead of half the size as I did earlier. Now why didn’t I think of this years ago?

The most exciting visitor today was the crested tit though – and this time I got a picture! It didn’t come to the bird feeder but stayed where I had left food for the squirrels, it’s a more protected location that the bird feeder so I think the crested tits prefer the cover. Or then they’re just shy like the great tits.

But the prize for the most exciting picture goes to the willow tit taking off! I still can’t believe I actually got it… of course, I was only trying to take a picture of a bird sitting pretty on the branch, but these things happen in a fraction of a second so by the time I pressed the shutter, it had spread its wings. So it’s definitely a lucky shot, but on the other hand, I doubt even the pros nail these without some element of luck involved. It’s too quick to react when it happens, so you have to anticipate the action and leave the rest to the motordrive. Or like in my case, just simply fire the shutter at the wrong time!

The idea I mentioned yesterday was about the crescent moon. I knew it was going to be very low in the horizon so I had to pick my place very carefully – had to make sure that my location had a higher altitude that the landscape in front of me. At first I thought that I was going to miss the whole opportunity because of clouds, but luckily there was an opening in the south so the moon was visible. The result wasn’t the kind of crescent moon picture I dream about, that would require the moon higher in the sky and a nice colour gradient like those afterglow pictures from yesterday. Full moon is much easier than a crescent… but I’ll keep trying. Oh and in case you’re wondering where the crescent is in this picture, it’s low in the sky in the middle of the empty space on the left. It’s not easy to see it, not even for me and I know where it is, LOL!

I always make an effort to photograph the full moon every time the moonrise or moonset coincides with sunset or sunrise. I’m more of a landscape photographer than moonscape ditto, so I leave the moon closeups to the astronomy buffs and try to create landscape pictures with the moon in them instead, which requires some light on the landscape. Today’s moonrise was well before sunset though so I had hedged my bets on photographing the sunset, but when I got to my location (I didn’t have much choice with that since I was coming from work), I saw that the moon didn’t actually appear too high in sky from that point along the road. So I was torn between the sun and the moon, but it became quickly obvious that the sunset wouldn’t be nearly as nice as yesterday’s red clouds (as seen through the bus window), so I hurried up to find a place for framing the moon.

I bracketed with hopes of putting together an HDR in Photomatix. It turned out that Photomatix is hopeless with this subject matter, for one thing it doesn’t understand the concept of “reflection” but insists on making the reflection lighter than original and that’s a big no-no, and secondly it kept overexposing the moon no matter how I tried to adjust the sliders. Photoshop to the rescue, and this is how I did it:

Out of the dark, middle and light exposures, the dark exposure had the moon and its reflection, the middle one had the sky and the light one had the foreground. I copied the middle exposure on top of the light one and then selected the moon and its reflection from the dark exposure, copied them to the base and carefully erased around the moon until it fit seamlessly to the sky (you have to make sure to get rid of all the dark sky around the moon, and careful not to erase too much which will leave you with a bright ring instead). Then I started erasing the middle layer by using a large soft brush with low opacity to reveal the lighter background below. Again, important not to overdo it or the halos around the treetops would ruin the effect, also have to watch out for the reverse where the treetops are too dark in relation to the rest of the tree. The result is darker than my original RAWs would allow (it probably looks too dark on some screens, but is reasonably ok on my LCD), but it’s miles better than the Photomatix mess. I wasted an hour with Photomatix trying to fix it, and when I finally gave up it took only 10 minutes in Photoshop. A bit of a rush job, granted, so there’s room for improvement. Anyway, whether it’s done in Photomatix or Photoshop or wherever, you need some trick up your sleeve to put together a landscape photo without an overexposed full moon. Now you know my secret!

This is it – the day I have been waiting for!

My requirements for shooting the full moon are very specific. I’m not interested in the moon for the sake of itself, I mean when you’ve seen one moon frame-filler, you’ve seen them all. What can you say? “Nice composition”? Nope, that just doesn’t do it for me. I want the moon to be a part of a landscape, and it immediately raises the level of difficulty – expensive long glass is not the tool for that trade. My ideal moon landscape photo requires a moonset/moonrise that coincides with sunrise/sunset, so there’s nice light everywhere. Unfortunately, those opportunities are very rare. The moonset/moonrise times don’t always coincide with sunrise/sunset, and even when they do, there’s always the issue of weather. Not to mention the time of week. The full moon has a bad habit of happening while I’m sitting in the office!

So, that’s the preface to my actual story.

I left the cabin after 8am and drove to my selected moonset spot with a view towards Skarsfjället, Mittåkläppen and Stor-Axhögen. When I arrived, the moon was still high above Mittåkläppen but it was making its way down between the mountains, which forced me to create veeeery long panoramas. Yesterday morning the moon was setting right next to Stor-Axhögen, but like I mentioned earlier, the clouds spoiled the opportunity.

The biggest panorama I have is 20×175 cm (@ 300 dpi), this version is cropped short from the right so you make any sense out of it at all. The only way I’ll ever be able to admire the full size is if I have it printed in some specialist print shop!

After the moon had set, I had another skiing trip. I actually took the same trail I did yesterday, and now the mystery of the half prepared, uncharted trail was revealed to me – it’s not a snowmobile trail at all, but it’s used by the snowcat that brings up skiers from Funäsdalen! But I still don’t know why it had made a U-turn in the middle of nowhere, I guess they didn’t like the weather and turned back.

All I needed to do now was to drive to Flatruet and wait for moonrise/sunset. It was biting cold, I mean not the temperature as such (-10 degrees centigrade), but the wind that made it twice so. I didn’t care. The wind was blowing right through my supposedly windproof clothes, but I was finally witnessing – and photographing – the full moon rise on Flatruet and I was able to close that ugly chapter from three years ago when I had made a right old mess of a rare photographic opportunity. How lucky was I to have one of the finest days in January to fall on the full moon?

* * *

As it turns out, today was indeed my lucky day.

I had cruise control installed in my car last year. It’s not a very smart cruise control, so I’ve learned to disconnect it under some circumstances when I know it will just go crazy. So I was cruising along when I got close to one of those cruise-control-will-go-crazy stretches so I disconnected and the car started to slow down because I didn’t step on the gas right away. And right then – a moose crossed the road in front of me.

Where would I have been in relation to the moose had I not disconnected the cruise control and the car slowed down?

I thought I was unlucky yesterday to drop and break my GPS unit on the ski. Well, you win some and you lose some. I won.

Here’s a dilemma: It’s a beautiful winter day with sunshine. The full moon will rise in the afternoon. You have big blisters on your feet and can’t wear ski boots. Options: Snowshoe hike up to Funäsdalsberget for 360 degree views of the mountains. Problem: The moonrise isn’t until the afternoon so it will be a long wait on the mountain. And then you’d be hiking down when it’s getting dark, anyway. The second option: Snowshoe hike to Mittåkläppen, then drive to Ånnfjället and with a little luck, get the moon above the mountain for a nice photo. Problem: How long is the hike going to take, and are you sure that the moon will really appear behind the mountain (as opposed to next to it)? What are you going to do?

Drive to Ramundberget. To be honest, I’m not quite sure why I decided on this. I could’ve picked some other hikes, such that I hadn’t already done. But the lure of Skarsfjället and Mittåkläppen in the sunshine was too strong… so I opted for this one. Even if it meant hiking uphill for 2-3 km with blisters on my feet. But the winter boots are big enough to allow space for my feet, so the heels actually weren’t chafing. Only problem is that the extra space meant that my feet were moving inside the boots and I was developing blisters in my toes instead. Unbelievable. Once again, I was determined not to let this stop me, so I hiked on. And I got my mountains and snow and blue skies pictures but to be honest, I think the ones with a little bit of cloud and mist are more exciting. Nevermind.

When I came back to the slope leading to Ramund, I decided to try without the snowshoes. The extra weight was bogging me down and my legs were feeling the strain. But then I discovered to my surprise that it didn’t actually hurt as much walking without the snowshoes than it did with them, even if I’m still wearing the same boots. Go figure. Anyway, that was a pleasant surprise and I was able to rush down the hill in order to make it to Ånnfjället in time – the moon wasn’t going to wait for me.

When I got to the car, it felt like walking on needles. I can’t believe my feet have been hurting for three days now and I’ve been out and about regardless. Persistence or stupidity – or sisu? Pick one. Hmm… I think I just had an epiphany. I think sisu is persistence and stupidity.

I got to Ånnfjället well in time and I had to wait in the freezing cold for a good half an hour, and when I finally saw the moon, it was the worst case scenario – it was rising too far left from the mountain to make any image. I consoled myself by thinking that maybe my Plan A wouldn’t have been much better. Even if I had had a great view from Funäsdalsberget, the moonrise was an hour before sunset so it would’ve been a pale moon, lacking the oomph we normally associate with it. Even now at Ånnfjället, even if it was half an hour after moonrise until the moon was visible, the sky was still very bright.

I made a last effort and drove to the next viewpoint. I got a few shots of the moon, but nowhere near the images I had envisioned when I deliberately booked my holiday to coincide with the full moon. Once again, I had gambled and I had lost. Story of my life…

When I got past Ånnfjället again, I noticed that the mountains were not lit anymore. It has been a cloudless day but would you believe it, at sunset there was a small bank of clouds… in the west.