The Quiet Picture

I did a quick trip to the mountains yesterday, had to check the cabin site because they’re almost finished with the groundwork now (more about that in another post). Since I didn’t have much choice in the date, I was lucky to have somewhat reasonable weather so I could do some photography while I was there.

And the photography started before I even got to the mountains. Road 84 follows the Ljusnan river and there’s a few spots along the way which are quite photogenic in the right conditions, and nothing beats the lay-by just before Hede. I’ve driven past a few times without stopping although the scene was looking incredibly good, so now I’ve made it a habit to slow down before the lay-by in case it’s a worthy opportunity… and this time it was. The river is normally open during the winter, so there’s plenty of potential especially in cold weather.

When I was finished at the cabin site, I still had a few hours of daylight at my disposal so I put on the snowshoes and followed a snow mobile trail. It hasn’t been snowing lately in the mountains either, so the snow was old and had crystallised in the cold weather. By crystallising I mean that the top layer of the snow had frozen and these crystal structures were sticking up… the phenomenon itself is not unfamiliar to me, it happens every winter, but what stunned me was the sheer size of these crystals. They were formed like birch leaves and were easily the size of them, so I started calling them ice leaves. The wind was picking up and the “leaves” were falling at every gust of the wind, you could hear the faint tinkle when they hit the ground. Amazing thing!

One of my favourite mountains is Ånnfjället, it has a very characteristic profile that looks good from any angle. It’s also visible from much of the road between Mittådalen and Funäsdalen, so it was the obvious choice to concentrate on during my short trip. The setting sun was fading behind the clouds, but there was just enough light to provide some contrast for the clouds of snow that the wind was whipping up on the mountain. I was hoping for the sun to come out for a glorious sunset, but that didn’t happen so I gave up and drove to Funäsdalen to get a good cup of coffee and drive home.

* * *

It has taken me half a day to process the HDRs (all of them from that lay-by in Hede). I didn’t use a tripod (lazy, lazy and more lazy) so I relied on quick shutter speeds and IS to keep the picture reasonably steady for processing. But it turned out that none of my four different HDR programs were able to align the pictures correctly (even if they were off by only a few pixels) so I had to manually align everything and then run them through the different programs to see which one gave me the best result, because I wasn’t happy with anything I was getting out of them. In the end I settled with LR/Enfuse or otherwise I would still be processing them. The worst part is that I needed to process every series of shots to be able to determine which ones were worth keeping, and when I finally had the results I threw away half of the work I put into them. Oh well, what are Sundays for anyway?

I’ve finally finished processing the pictures from my trip. Some of them worked out better than I expected, and some turned out to be not as good as I had hoped for. An acceptable average! The pictures in this blog post are not related to the text, other than that everything is related to my vacation trip.

As a Finn living in Sweden, it’s inevitable to make comparisons between the countries. As it’s been 15 years since I moved from Finland, a lot has changed and in many ways the country is not the same as the one I remember. So now when I visit, I can look at Finland with the eyes of a tourist and some of the things I’ve seen are quite surprising. The following “comparison” is very subjective and based on a limited sample (northern Sweden, central/eastern Finland), and even if I keep saying that this or that is better in the other, please do not count the votes in either direction. All in all, I’m happy to be a Finn and I’m happy to live in Sweden so I wouldn’t seriously complain about either!

• Roads are better in Finland. Much better. Much, much better! *
• There are more people in Finland. In Sweden you can drive 50km with hardly any signs of human activity. Apart from the road, obviously. In Finland you always see something, if nothing else then speed cameras (see the point below).
• There are more speed cameras in Finland (a lot more – I didn’t see any from Gäddede to Haparanda, but in Finland I lost the count of them by Oulu).
• There is more birch forest in Finland.
• Finland is flat. I was relieved to reach the inner country because the flatlands in near the coast were driving me crazy. It’s unnatural not to have any hills.
• There are more lakes in Sweden. Finland is supposed to be “the land of thousand lakes” but there was very little water in sight. The roadside scenery in Sweden on the other hand is dotted with lakes, creeks and wetlands.
• Commercial (pop) radio is better in Finland. My car radio picked up Radio Nova before Haparanda and never had to re-tune during the trip. Is there a law in Sweden that forbids commercial radio to broadcast outside urban areas? I’d be fooled to think so because the signal fades as soon as you leave any major city.
• There are more bypass roads in Finland. You hardly ever need to drive through a town or a village. Until you come to Savonlinna, of course!

* * *

* Swedish roads. I imagine a Vägverket boss say something like this:

“Hi Sven, we need to patch up the Loos road. Why don’t you take this coin and toss it to see which holes to fix? And Sven, take care to do a sloppy job at it so we can go there next year and patch the same holes all over again.”

Now, it’s possible that the work order isn’t exactly like that. But the result sure is! I can understand that they don’t have the money to fix the whole road, but instead of fixing all of it badly, why not use the little money they have to fix one part of the road well? And then next year, fix the next hole. And then next. Instead of coming there every year and fill a hole there and a hole here and not even bother to even out the tarmac for a smooth surface. So the car jolts over the new tarmac edges instead of the hole that used to be there. Same difference, just money wasted.

The same thing applies for a lot of other roads. The Loos road is small, but I know a lot of highways which are only marginally better than the Loos road.

I needed to make some preparations for my cabin in Messlingen and that was just the perfect excuse to take out a day to do some photography in the mountains as well. I checked three different weather forecasts and they all said different things, it could be anything from rain to sunshine and in between but changing weather can also bring with it some wonderful light so it wasn’t all bad.

The first photo op came up at the Väster-Storbäcken brook near Mittådalen. I always make sure to check it out when I drive past but it’s been years since I’ve stopped to photograph it. I was wondering if I could do anything I hadn’t already done here, but it was easy in the end – on with the ND64 and polariser and I was able to get down to 20 secs to get that silky smooth water. Add a small stitched panorama and I was happy!

I had a plan for the day but a lot depended on the weather of course. We had barely started when the rain came, but it was only a local shower and we could see in the west that the sky was getting brighter. Which was just as well, because I had planned to drive west anyway to Mittåkläppen and Djupdalsvallen (any excuse for a waffle). When we got there, the promise of rain was still in the air so we had our waffles and waited for it to clear. After a while it did look better, so we set out on foot and as if by magic, the sun started to break out when we got to the ridge! It was absolutely fabulous with the afternoon sunshine and dramatic sky, which got us into a photography frenzy because the light could disappear at any moment so we’d better make full use of it. I can’t claim that I spent a lot of time contemplating over my compositions but this was such a gorgeous place that it didn’t really matter, it was looking good in almost any direction. The intensive clicking of shutters stopped abrubtly though when we heard something that sounded very much like thunder, accompanied by a big dark cloud. The top of an open ridge is not a place where you want to be when the lightnings start striking, so we packed up quickly and made our way back into the relative safety of the forest and hoped to reach the car before the raining started. It turned out though that it wasn’t as bad as it had looked at first, so a few drops of rain is all we got and a few pictures along the way as well, because we couldn’t resist stopping when we came across an opportunity, darks clouds or not!

There’s a nice little tarn next to the Mittåkläppen road with great views towards Skarsfjället. In the right light and calm weather it would be a great place, but this time we only really got one out of  two – it was calm, but the sun didn’t want to show itself again. Very dramatic skies though, a worthy subject in itself.

Since it looked like the cloud cover was lighter in the east, we decided to drive back to the Ånnfjället view instead of waiting and hoping for the light to happen at Mittåkläppen. Chasing the light this way is a bit risky – you can’t really ever be sure that the light is still there when you are but this was a calculated risk on my part. The weather fronts often get stuck in the mountains between the Norwegian and Swedish border, so further in the east your chances improve for good weather. Well, that’s my theory anyway and stick to it, because the light was indeed still there when we got to our spot! Frantically I unpacked the camera and set up the tripod, all the while hoping that the light would last a few more seconds so I could get at least one frame. The light did last, a whopping 20 minutes that gave me the best pictures of the day!

This is the first time I’ve visited the mountains in August. I was surprised to see the signs of autumn everywhere, this is quite clearly a time of transformation when the summer ends and the autumn begins. With the weather as it was today, it all made for a few memorable minutes of magic light that proved beyond any doubt that changing weather is a photographer’s best friend!

I had more waterfalls in store today. I drove to Ramundberget and took the lift up the mountain (the aching leg was a perfect excuse) and then walked around a bit, checked out a lovely view across and along the valley. I wasn’t interested in going any further, the leg was not killing me but I’m not masochistic enough to enjoy it either. So I found my way to the stream that falls down from the Kvarnsjön lake. The waterfall was a disappointment – kinda like the Lillrånden waterfall earlier, this one also falls in a ravine so at best you can only get glimpses of it. I found only one photographic spot, but it was a sunny day and the scene was backlit so I could forget all about it. Ironically, the best view you get to the falls is from the road – far away, but at least you see the whole thing.

So I was hoping that my next waterfall was going to be better. Something I had come across on a Fotosidan forum, I couldn’t find any pictures of the actual fall so I didn’t have any expectations, I just assumed that it would be small-ish. The Sångbäckfallet (Song Creek Fall – nice!) is close to Klövsjö, it’s easy to find (when you know that the parking is opposite to the road towards Storhågna) and the hike there is only 400m. The very last bit to the foot of the fall is steep though, the kinda steep where you’ll happily grab hold of anything to keep you from tumbling down. Once you’re down there, getting a clean view of the falls is difficult but it doesn’t really matter because there are really nice photo ops both downstream and upstream from the falls. The waterfall was bigger than I expected, but size doens’t matter, it’s what’s around the actual waterfall that makes or breaks the place for me. And Sångbäckfallet is definitely among my favourites!

Now I’m looking forward to spending a day in front of the computer, sorting through 3.3 GB of pictures. I kinda like my aching foot… it’s not so bad, but it’s enough to give me an excuse to rest!

The reason why my summer vacation is split like this is that I wanted to find the alpine chamorchis (Chamorchis alpina). I think I still made a mistake, it felt like this week would be too early for it, but I had to try anyway. If I can’t find it now, I can take a weekend in August to come back for another try (does that sound obsessed?).

I knew that the orchid was very small, so I was getting a bit daunted by my task… Torkilstöten may not be big, but everything is relative. So I hiked up to the pass and starting searching. Very soon I came across a small thing growing next to a small-white orchid and I stopped to take a closer look at this what I thought was an unusually stunted, withered small-white orchid. Except it wasn’t stunted, it wasn’t withered, and it sure wasn’t a small-white orchid! Can you believe it, I had found my alpine chamorchis!!! After letting out a cry of joy, I got down to photograph it. Not so easy because the wind was really hard, it kept moving even this tiniest of orchids. I knew I wasn’t getting any good pictures but you know I really couldn’t have cared less.

Close to this first alpine chamorchis that I saw was another, even smaller – this was definitely early season for them. So that was two individuals and when I looked around me at the mountain landscape, I was wondering if I could find any more. It is certainly hard to spot it if it grows among anything green, this one I found was growing in a “bald” spot so it caught my eye just enough to be curious to take another look. I continued my way towards the peak of Torkilstöten, now that I didn’t have the pressure of finding any orchids I just wanted to see the view from the top; this is as close as you can get to Helags by car and then it’s just the short hike up. The clouds had cleared a bit so I took a series of pictures for a panorama stitch. I wasn’t sure if it was going to work though, the wind was really hard so I suspected that it would cause enough vibration in the rig to blur the shots. But wind is not all bad. No bugs!

When I started my way down, almost immediately I saw something…. alpine chamorchis? Oh yes it is! This time I took a shot with my bubble level next to it, to give an idea of the size. And close by, yet another orchid. So the grand total of alpine chamorchis I found today was four. But still… I can’t believe I found it at all. I’m telling you, it’s small, the tiniest orchid I’ve ever seen.

When I was walking down, I was becoming increasingly aware that my left foot was hurting. The leg had felt a bit stiff this morning but the morning’s short hike seems to have aggravated it. But as long as I can walk, no worries! All this worrying I did about the car… and then I injured myself, LOL!

Time to wrap up this holiday, but I had plenty in store for today. First, I drove to Ramundberget and hiked the 3 km to Klinken. The black vanilla orchid (Gymnanedia nigra, or Nigritella nigra) should be in bloom and I was very curious to see how it was doing this year, last year I had only found four individuals. It was certainly more than four this year – I counted 29! Maybe I counted 2-4 of them twice, maybe I covered a slightly bigger area than last year, maybe they were blooming earlier this year… but whatever way you look at it, the vanilla orchid had multiplied in numbers. What have I said about 2009 being a good orchid year?

After Klinken, I drove to Rockvallen. For two reasons, first, to have a waffle at Knallen, and second, take a look around the marshland because this is normally a good place for orchids and other flowers. For the hike up to Knallen I decided to travel light and left the camera bag in the car, only had the G10 with me. It was such a liberation to be walking without that heavy pack on my back! All my photo excursions would be so much nicer if I could shave off a few kilos from the bag. But it means leaving behind the camera and tripod, which doesn’t make much of a photo excursion… Anyway, I took the shortcut to the Knallen cabin which means that the trail was a bit steep in the end, but the view was magnificent so I was only too happy to stop for a breather so I could take in the sights as well. The hike up there is well worth it, not just for the waffles but really just for the view. 360 degrees of mountains, it’s hard to beat – I can really recommend it if you’re ever around Bruksvallarna!

The marshland starts right from the parking lot, so when I got back down I swapped my hiking boots for wellingtons and G10 for the heavy gear and started zigzagging around the marsh. At a risk of repeating myself, there were plenty of orchids – mostly early marsh orchid ssp. cruenta and fragrant orchids, but also heath spotted and lapland marsh orchids. Seemed like it was a bit early in the season though, I didn’t see much else in bloom yet… or it could also be that I was so blinded by the orchids that I didn’t have eyes for anything else. I have another week of holiday in the middle of July so I will visit Rockvallen again, it’s hard to beat it for ease of access anyway so you don’t have to kill your feet to find the flowers!

I had ambitions about hiking to the Rödfjället mountain, but the primary goal was the potential flower locations along the Svanån creek north-west from Rödfjället. I didn’t take the main trail up to the mountain and sure enough, I soon lost the unmarked trail I was following, but luckily I was already high enough to see the Svanåkläppen peak so I could just aim to the left of it and be safe. I think I ended up making a few detours anyway but I got where I wanted to go so nevermind. Gotta watch out for those reindeer paths… they start from nowhere and end up just the same way.

Following the creek was easier said than done, the marshland was too wet and I had to take a lot of height to get past. So I didn’t get many flowers, but I did find a nice little waterfall just where the creek starts from the Svansjön lake. Since this hike had taken me to the opposite direction of the Rödfjället mountain, I decided to give it a pass and just hiked back down to the car.

This left me with most of the afternoon to waste. I opted to do some sightseeing by car and took the small road that follows the northern side of the Lossen lake. I found a few nice spots, but the most exciting encounter by far was this small tarn with two red-throated loons! I have never seen this bird before, but I’ve always wanted to, being a big loon fan. I was left missing the 300mm I had at home so I took some macro pictures instead (you know, the best gear you have is the gear you have with you), now that I look at the pictures I wonder if the AF on the 150mm is all good… I got an awful lot of back-focused pictures but I swear I kept focusing on the bird, even if I recomposed after that. There’s been a few other occasions I’ve doubted the AF, but since I use MF about 95% of time, the AF hasn’t been a big enough issue to bother to check it.

When I got back, I still had the whole evening to waste. I was thinking about doing some small excursion, but in the end… this is my holiday! Why should I press myself into filling every hour of the day with some action? So even if sitting in front of the tv is something I can do at home, then that’s exactly what I will do now. I’ll be at work on Monday, there’ll be enough of “must” then.

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!

I left relatively early to catch the morning sun in a panoramic spot I discovered the other day. It was windier than anticipated though, but I took the pictures anyway because the scenery is a little bit unusual – the only place along this road between Funäsdalen and Ljungdalen where you can see the Sylarna mountains. I only know of one other road in this region where they can be seen (and I didn’t actually even realise that until later today when I drove past).

And then to Mittåkläppen. Since I’ve now given up on flower photography because the season is too early for them, I wanted to concentrate on scenery instead. There are a lot of mountain pastures around Mittåkläppen, so I picked a trail which leads past a few of them. It’s important to be there before noon, because the “backside” of the Mittåkläppen mountain becomes shaded around noon and I didn’t want that for my pictures. The only shade I had to worry now was the clouds and at one point I waited for an hour for the clouds to disappear. It really tried my patience… I mean, it was sunny all the way to the freakin’ Helags in the distance, but just not where my camera was aimed!

Having done my hike, I rewarded myself with a waffle at Djupdalsvallen. It’s their first day of the season, but the waffle was as good as ever! Walking around the place, I saw these marsh marigold in full bloom and the scene was just begging to be photographed. I waited until late afternoon and in order to pull off the composition, I needed something wider than the 24mm on my zoom lens (plus crop factor, of course). So I tried stitching, I wasn’t sure if it would work because I was so close to the flowers, but ICE didn’t have any problems with it!

I also did some scouting. Found a nice place, or rather, I finally stopped at this nice place I’ve driven past countless times… a small tarn with a great view towards to Skarsfjället. But it was too windy to make use of it today, in fact, it was too windy to make use of any of the ideas I had, because all of them had water in them! And then there was also a bank of clouds coming up from the west, which means that all the views towards Mittåkläppen were washed out. I decided that I’ve done enough for the day, with these clouds coming up the evening light won’t happen either.

Going home tomorrow, the butterfly orchids will be open by now… and then back to the mountains later in the week again.

Time to concentrate on the main thing – flowers. Considering the slow progress of all flowers in Loos, I figured there was a risk that I wouldn’t find anything interesting (read: orchids) in the mountains. And I was right, the best I could find all day was some lapland marsh orchids which were in the first stages of opening. I also visited Torkilstöten, which is a reknowned floral hotspot, but summer is always late there. Today, the coltsfoot were blooming at their best… and the mountain avens were barely even budding. Plenty of snow, though.

The mosquitos are turning out to be a real nuisance. This is why I’d prefer cooler weather – it’s easy to wear protective clothing, but in this heat, it’s only a choice between bad or worse. Grin and bear. The option is to stay at home and do nothing.

The afternoon hike took me to a lake in Anådalen, on the map it seemed like the lake would be a nice foreground to some mountains. Alas, it wasn’t at all like I had imagined, but now I know. One to check off the list. I did find something else nice though, ironically, just a few hundred meters from the road…

During my late evening session, I suddenly came across a pair of cranes, walking around in a marsh. It would be just perfect as a foreground for the mountain, so I took out the camera… and found that it was stuck on aperture 16. No matter what I did, take out the battery, memory card and lens, it refused to budge. The wheel itself was ok, I was able to use it to change other settings. But not aperture. Dang! The cranes are getting further and further away while I’m trying to figure it out… then it hits me. In the previous session I had assigned the focus point selection to the wheel, because I couldn’t make the joystick select the middle point. And by doing this, I seemed to have disabled the wheel for aperture, a very useful function – not! – who on earth needs that? At this point, I finally realised what had happened. It must’ve started as an accident – the focus point selection custom function was reset so that I couldn’t use the joystick to select the point like I’m used to. But I couldn’t remember which option it was in the menu, so I had to do some testing, but the testing was spoiled by a brain fart. I had forgotten that in order to select the centre point, you just press the joystick. And because I had been in desperate need of the centre point, I had gone for the next best thing which was the wheel, without realising the consequences. By the time I had all of this sorted out, with correct exposure settings and focus point, the cranes had moved away almost too far but it was still worth trying. Click… and huh? I still had mirror lock-up on!!

What did I learn from this? That accidents and brain farts will happen!

First the G10 and now the 40D… my EOS 3 is not giving me any trouble, I’m loving film at the moment…