The Quiet Picture

It’s so typical, the weekend when I would be free to go anywhere without worrying about work calling, I don’t have anywhere to go. I was hoping for some sunshine last evening but it never happened, so the day pretty much wasted away. It was an equally dull today, except for a little bit of sunshine which I actually didn’t need at all because I was out hunting mushrooms. It has rained a bit this week, so the mushrooms are popping up everywhere. The only problem was finding some photogenic individuals because nobody likes to look at rotten and maggot eaten ‘shrooms.

I haven’t done any mushroom shooting in recent years, not sure why. Perhaps for the same reason that I never pick mushrooms – I just can’t identify them. If I ate anything I’d pick, I’d probably kill myself or at least knock out some internal organs. Anyway, I hate having unidentified things in my catalogue. I want to know every flower I shoot, every mountain, every lake, everything. I guess I’m a bit obsessive about names… so I’m very curious right now about two orchids I found in the forest. I know they’re orchids for sure, even when they withered. I just don’t know which ones when I can’t see the blooms. The first one had leaves like a common spotted orchid (it’s very rare around here, instead we have plenty of their close relative heath spotted orchid) and the second one could be a frog orchid (also very rare here), but I’m just not sure. And now I have to wait in suspense until next summer to find out!

Today was going to be the rainiest day of the vacation but it didn’t bother me in the least because I can rain-proof both myself and the camera. And I knew exactly what I was going to shoot today, as well – waterfalls. There just isn’t any better motif for a rainy day than waterfalls. I love the exposed wet rocks surrounding the waterfall, you can do wonders with the polarising filter. Dry rocks on the other hand, it doesn’t matter how much you rotate the filter but they’ll still be dull.

A few years ago I visited a place called Silverfallet off Skärkdalen (a few km north from Flatruet) but I wasn’t impressed. I found the falls to be un-photogenic and all but forgot about them until this trip when I knew I would be having some rain and needed waterfalls to shoot. So today as I as hiking up along the falls… all I could think about was that I must’ve been having a bad day back then, because now I found them absolutely gorgeous! It’s a 2.5 km hike along a very wet and muddy trail (it’s like that even when it hasn’t been raining) until you get to the Öjönån creek, there’s a bridge across and then the trail follows the falls up to where they level out near the Öjön lake. It’s 1 km there – and it’s just one exciting fall after another during the whole distance. Some of them are harder to photograph than others, but considering how many of them there are, you still have plenty to shoot! So why would I ever have thought that this was not a good place? Well, it was early summer when I was there. Too much water – I don’t like it when the volume is high. You lose the definition and detail. And secondly, it was a sunny day. I can’t deal with waterfalls and sunlight.

There is quite a lot of marshland on the way to the falls. I’ve been here before to shoot orchids, but it’s always been early July. Now in late July I could see that this was an even better place for orchids that I had thought. Most of them had withered already of course, but the fragrant orchids were still colourful. Also found twayblade in bloom and some late blooming heath spotted orchids. And the withered ones… early marsh orchid ssp. cruenta. Lapland marsh orchid. And I even found a lesser twayblade! I was just simply amazed by the abundance of them. Two weeks ago, it must’ve looked amazing! Easily beats Hamrafjället and Mittåkläppen which are normally touted as the première flower locations. Of course it’s not all about orchids, but in my mind, I always start with orchids and the rest is bonus.

Silverfallet turned out to be ten times better than Tvärån that I did yesterday, with only half the trouble. Faster to get there and nicer to be there!

Since this was a relatively short hike, I did a small promenade in the evening. I followed the Mittån creek upstream, I knew there wouldn’t be any major falls but some whitewater anyway. I got to this place which I thought could be something…. I stood there for a long time, trying to figure out how to do it. I couldn’t think of anything so I continued walking and didn’t really find anything interesting along the way. On the way back, I was determined to try the spot anyway. I set up the tripod and camera and tried and tried… but I just couldn’t make it happen. Until suddenly this semi-abstract materialised in the viewfinder! Persistence paid off.

I’ve had another day to play with the Canon 100mm f2.8L IS macro, but the pictures are few and far apart – not sure why but I’m just not coming across any subjects I like. The picture of the very pale heath spotted orchid is getting close to the closest focusing distance of the lens, but it’s nothing that my 150mm macro couldn’t have done. The wood cranesbill though, it would’ve been tricky to pull off with the long macro. I was shooting straight down on it and there wasn’t a lot of light in the forest, so the shutter speed was 1/80 at f2.8 (ISO 100). In order to get the flowers the same size in the frame I would’ve had to stand up straight, go to a higher ISO to get a fast enough shutter speed so I could hope to get something sharp. I’m not sure if it would’ve been possible to set up the tripod in such a way that I could angle down the camera, while still being able to see through the viewfinder!

So that’s definitely one for the shorter IS lens, I think that this is the best wood cranesbill picture I have. Just because the flower grows everywhere doesn’t mean that I have lots of pictures of it!

But no, I’m still not even considering of trading the long macro for this shorter IS macro. Maybe it’s not possible to take exactly the same pictures with these lenses, but who needs that anyway? If it’s not possible to take some particular picture, then you just come up with another one and don’t dwell over the might-have-beens. You work with what you’ve got!

I was fortunate enough to get to borrow the new Canon 100mm f2.8 IS macro lens this weekend. I’ve always wanted a macro lens with IS and a few years ago I had the 100mm macro without IS, which I then traded for the 150mm macro. I’ve never regretted getting the longer focal length, but using a long and heavy macro lens requires good support, so the tripod or the beanbag has to go wherever the lens goes. Shooting with this setup is very rewarding, but there’s something to be said for spontaneity as well – enter image stabilisation.

So now I’ve been out with this lens, sans tripod, and I must say it really works. I won’t be reviewing the lens because there’s nothing to review, I mean it’s tack sharp (anything else would be shocking) and issues like vignetting or barrel distortion are never a problem with macro (I doubt this lens has either anyway). So the only thing that’s interesting for me is what I can do with 100mm and image stabilisation and that’s what I set out to find out.

Having had the 150mm lens for a few years now, I had my doubts about the depth of field of the 100mm lens. I like using diffused foregrounds when possible and I also like completely feature-less backgrounds. I struggled to get both when using the 100mm lens in the past, but now that I had it again, I started wondering if part of the problem back then was that I was just not very experienced as a macro photographer. Either I’m better at choosing my subjects now or I am handling the situation in a different way, but background control wasn’t nearly as difficult as I remember it was. But having the lens for such a short period, it’s not possible to test it in all situations and I reckon the background would come into play when shooting in tight spaces where the background is closer to the subject than in the above picture.

The IS of the lens is great. It’s the new generation IS which is so quiet that I had to check a couple of times that IS really was on because I’m used to the sounds of my 300mm and 24-105mm lenses. The picture of the moth was taken with a 1/40 shutter speed, it’s marginally soft but completely acceptable. It would’ve been impossible without a tripod using a non-IS 100mm or 150mm lens (impossible for me anyway, I know some people are better at hand holding the camera than I am). So if I want to take a similar picture with a non-IS lens, I would have to start setting up the tripod and hope that the moth is still there when I’m ready to take the shot. Shooting without a support setup is very liberating, the threshold of taking a picture is lower because sometimes I just simply think if a subject is worth setting up the tripod, instead of thinking if a picture is worth taking at all.

It’s been nice trying out this lens, but when I give it back I won’t miss it. It’s a great lens for the macro photographer on the move, but I’ve developed such a good relationship with my Sigma 150mm f2.8 macro that I can’t see myself ever parting with it. Yes I still definitely want a macro lens with IS, but I’m fairly sure that in the long run I would miss those additional 50mm if I traded the Sigma 150mm for the Canon 100mm IS. So now I’m just waiting for a long macro lens with stabilisation!

I drove to the lady’s slipper orchid place I visited last week. It’s a small location, basically just an island of trees that were left standing when the forest around was cut many years ago. It slopes a little and I always enter it from the “lower end” where most of the lesser butterfly orchids grow, and then walk up to the lady’s slippers.

The lesser butterfly orchids are taking their time in growing, they are still only buds but they should definitely start blooming next week. Then when I was walking up, I kept looking for the familiar yellow of the lady’s slippers. Problem was – no yellow. I was starting to have a really bad feeling about it, and my worst fears came true when I reached the orchids. The flowers had been cut, all of them! My heart just broke. And then I got angry. The stupidity of people! First of all, all wild orchids are protected in Sweden. Although we are fortunate in having a few locations with lady’s slippers in Loos, you can’t call it a common flower by any stretch of imagination. People who know where the lady’s slippers grow, know for sure that’s it’s an orchid. Whether they know that all orchids are protected is another matter, but if you have to drive a small forest road to reach a remote location which is an island of trees left standing after a clear-cut operation, you’ve gotta be a total moron not to figure out that this was done to protect something precious. And we can also assume that whoever picked the flowers, did it because they like them. Is that the right way of showing your appreciation? By killing them? By preventing them from spreading? By reducing their chances of survival in the future years?

I was really really upset. It sounds crazy to be so upset for some flowers, but I guess I just found out exactly how much I care about these flowers.

* * *

My mood didn’t improve until later when I was walking around in my local woods, checking the two spots of lesser butterfly orchids here. They haven’t opened either and I was ready to give up on this gloomy day, when something caught my eye – an early coralroot! This is the first early coralroot I’ve seen in my local forest, and it was growing in an open spot which gave me an opportunity to take a picture of it in its environment. Granted, not a good picture, but it gives an idea of the environment. And having done that, I changed my angle to get a diffused foreground and background which brings up the modest flower and leaves the rest to your imagination. Maybe this is a ketchup effect… until last Sunday I didn’t have any early coralroot pictures from Loos, and now I find them so close to home!

But still, those lady’s slippers. I just don’t understand how people think. Or do they think at all?

Yesterday was a total washout, it was pouring rain all day but I did actually go out with the camera. The film camera, that is – I had some frames left in the roll of Velvia, and the new greens were looking very lovely in the rain as the colours are always saturated under those conditions. Velvia + naturally saturated greens, will be interesting to see how the slides look like!

Today however, the rain was long gone. I needed to see what was happening with the lady slippers, but this year I will give the #1 lady slipper location a pass because I don’t want to wear out the delicate ground around the flowers. The place will be visited by a lot of people anyway because it’s probably the most famous lady slipper location around here, but the sad truth is that a photographer who sets down in one spot will wear out the ground more than a few people just walking through. I doesn’t matter how successful I am in avoiding any damage to the flowers, but the ground always ends up worse off for the deal. So that said, I drove to a location that I haven’t photographed at all yet. This new location is a host for lesser butterfly orchids as well and maybe some heath spotted orchids will show up later, but I haven’t seen other orchids here (unlike the #1 location where you can find five species).

The lesser butterfly orchids will bloom later than the lady slippers, so all I found was a few buds in roughly the same stage of development as the ones I have close to home. And then these lady slippers… I found them a bit strange. There were three flowers in what looked almost like over bloom, but they were somehow looking the wrong shape and size, a bit wrinkled even. And then there were about 15-20 buds in different stages of development, and a bunch of leaves only 10 cm high. It’s easy to spot the flowers and avoid stepping on them, but those small leaves had me moving around very carefully indeed so I wouldn’t trample them. Except that something had already been there and trampled on some of the plants, I doubt very much a human would’ve done it (I’m probably the first human here this year anyway) but I couldn’t quite figure out what animal it had been either. I will go back there next week of course, there should be many more lady slippers in bloom by then.

Happy with my discoveries so far (despite the wrinkly and trampled plants), I wanted to see if the early marsh orchids ssp. cruenta would show any buds yet. This is the other one of the two orchids that grows around Loos that I haven’t actually photographed here so I want to get those pictures this summer. I know it’s the same species regardless of where it’s photographed, but still, gotta get ‘em. Imagine how happy I was when I found one individual that was already in bloom!

The road to this location is in a poor condition so I parked my car when it still was good and walked the rest. On the way, I found a treat – early coralroot. It was totally unexpected, the early coralroot is not a rare orchid as such but it is very scattered so there’s no specific location for them like there is for most other orchids. They were too small though, but I was making plans to come back when I came across another early coralroot, and this one was already in bloom. Those two orchids I mentioned that I haven’t photographed around Loos yet… you know what the second one was? Early coralroot! I never thought I could get them both on the same day, especially when I didn’t even expect them to be flowering yet.

I’m happy. My Loos orchid collection is thus complete, now I just need to improve on them!

I think that summer just started for me. It’s green everywhere, the sunshine was warm today and I was attacked by swarms of mosquitoes in the forest. The day was so good that I’m not even complaining about the bites!

I drove back to the calypso orchids. There were in full bloom now, but I also found some buds. This time I counted 29 individuals and I also tried to keep track of the white vs coloured individuals and I guess it wasn’t quite fifty-fifty as I speculated last week. About one third of the flowers I found now were white. Sunny day as it was, I got a spotlight on one of the white ones while the background was shaded. Sometimes black backgrounds work and sometimes not, and in this case when the subject is white, it’s like an inverse silhouette!

Having done the macro, I tried a new thing – landscapes. Ok nothing new about it as such, but it certainly was the first time since the winter, apart from a few intimate landscapes here and there. I drove to one of the nice spots I found last year, this one north from Fågelsjö. It’s not an ideal location for the afternoon light because most of the photogenic scenery will be backlit, but the place is so good that there’s always something.

When I arrived, I was greeted by a family of canada goose. It’s also possible that they were urging on their young to swim faster to get away from me… anyhow, I soon found many more canada geese and I had my cup of coffee looking at the birds, they swam to a safe distance of about 50 metres and then they didn’t mind me anymore. Still too far for any meaningful photography, which didn’t matter because I didn’t have a long lens with me and even if I did, all the birds were backlit. So I could enjoy the coffee in peace and then concentrate on the landscapes, until a couple of the canada goose decide to swim right into my frame! They even quite generously stopped for a moment so I could get some pictures (granted, not much a bird picture but a fair environmental shot anyway) until they decided that I was really up to no good and they took off on wings.

Summer, no doubt about it!

I needed to check on the calypso orchid today. This is just the right time for them judging by the past 3 years, but it turned out that 2010 is a week behind. The very first thing I discovered when I got to the location was that it was wet – very wet. The water was streaming down the path at one point, I’ve never seen it this bad even if some water on the path is not unusual as such. But the calypso orchid wouldn’t be growing here if they didn’t like water, so I counted 20 individuals. However, only one or two of them were already in full bloom, and even that is probably a generous nomination. Give them some warm weather and I’m sure that they will look glorious in a week’s time, and there’s probably more of them, too. Considering how small some of the individuals were, there’s a good reason to believe that some hadn’t even popped above the ground yet.

I’ve heard that this location contains an unusually high number of white individuals. Every year there’s been quite a few of them, but I think that this year is exceptional for the colour variation. I didn’t keep exact numbers but it seemed like about half of the individuals I found were white.

The picture is playing a prank in my head, it looks like a big mouth with the tongue hanging out. I’m having a hard time seeing it as a rare and beautiful orchid now! Check my other calypso orchid posts to see what it should look like.

Very exciting day – looking for the ghost orchids (Epipogium aphyllum)! I really had been looking forward to seeing it, because these mysterious small pale orchids have become my favourites. Last year was spectacular for them so we didn’t dare to hope it would be equally good this year, but I think it turned out to be pretty close anyway. Last year we found a few groups with many orchids, this year the concentrations were much smaller but there were individuals scattered over a larger area, it was such a treat to be walking around the place and spot the flowers among the mosses and ferns. We checked out four ghost orchid locations in total, and found them in each – which wasn’t guaranteed at all, considering their nature. They can disappear for many years from a location and then suddenly pop up again when the conditions are right.

* * *

I have been itching to go back to the Svartån location we visited last week, so I did that tonight. The volume of water had gone down considerably, just as predicted. Now it was possible to follow the creek on the cliffs surrounding the water, instead of making detours in the forest. I followed the creek up to where it finally levelled off, the next time I think I will follow it downstream. This visit confirmed the feeling I got the last time, the place is full of opportunities and even after 2.5 hours I had still only just scratched the surface. It’s not just the waterfalls but everything around them as well. You can use a wideangle to cram in as much as possible or you can concentrate on a single detail, and come back some other time and do it all over again because it will have changed. Marvellous!

* * *

SVT Gävledala hade ett inslag om Hamra NP i måndags. De hade filmat vid Svartån, men jag kan inte avgöra om de filmat precis här eller hittat mer klipphällar annanstans längs Svartån… i så fall, var var det?

Some wise photographer once said that if your pictures are not good enough, then you’re not close enough. I wholeheartedly subscribe to that, so when it was time to photograph the creeping lady’s-tresses orchids (Goodyera repens), I focused as close as the macro lens allowed and now I finally have some pictures of this orchid that I’m reasonably happy with. The previous effort is from three years ago when I used the 300mm lens, which is too big a tool for small flower.

I found an individual which was growing a little bit bent, while another orchid was filling the background. Then I noticed that I could also focus in on the background orchid with the foreground individual partially hiding it. So this version is not as close as it gets, but least it’s a little bit different. Well, I haven’t seen a picture like this of a creeping lady’s-tresses orchid anyway!