The Quiet Picture

After the huge disappointment last year when I found someone had cut all the lady’s slipper orchids in one location, I decided I have to do something. I can’t stand watch there every day, so I ended up creating a sign where I pointed out (in a gentle manner, no accusations!) that all orchid species are protected. I offered one of my pictures as a print as a trade-off for anyone who had planned to pick the orchids this year as well.

I put up the sign a couple of weeks ago and today I visited the location to see how the orchids are doing. My sign was still up and so were the orchids! Although to be honest, I don’t think anyone has been there at all, even to look at them. The local folks normally check another location, which is exactly why I’m now visiting this place instead because I don’t want to add to the wear and tear. I started to wonder if these people who pick lady’s slippers have possible also selected another location… but I can’t check them all.

So in this location anyway, the orchids were safe. It turned out that they are early this year, they are already starting to be over bloom and there were no buds at all. They were not as numerous as some other years and I noticed something interesting. I’m almost sure that they are smaller this year than they normally are. I noticed this with the calypso orchids as well, they were definitely smaller than normal. So I’m wondering what could be causing it. Maybe the really warm period in the spring which made them spurt too far ahead considering the season… The next orchid in bloom will be the lesser butterfly orchid, I saw a couple of individuals today which had just started to open up. So let’s see if those will be smaller than normal as well.

I also found some creeping lady’s-tresses orchids in early stages of bloom. But it is such a small orchid anyway that it’s impossible to say if it’s bigger or smaller than normal.

Exciting times anyway – I need to adjust my head to think that this really is summer now, because the flowers are popping up everywhere!

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!

While most people are busy complaining about the weather, I’m busy photographing. A little bit of rain, overcast, almost no wind, and cool – I couldn’t really ask for more, it’s as perfect as it gets for flower photography. The biggest problem is that the prime flower season hasn’t started yet… but it’s not like we don’t have any flowers, so no worries.

The first order of the day was to see how the bird’s eye primroses (Primula farinosa) were doing. We have the privilege of having the only known location for these pink primroses in Hälsingland, so although not a rare flower as such, it’s certainly very special up here. The flower is on the decline because of modern farming methods, ideally it needs grazing animals like cows to keep the grasses under control but of course these days hardly anyone lets their cows out “in the wild”. So for the lack of cows, somebody decided mow the grass and this seems to have helped – the flower was growing in large numbers, certainly plenty more than last year anyway. I didn’t have any good bird’s eye primrose pictures so I was able to remedy that, although I’m still not entirely happy.

Later in the day I visited the lady’s slippers again. I wanted to improve the “baby slipper” picture from Thursday, and I think this one works better.

You’d think that two days doesn’t make much difference, and in the case of the slippers maybe it doesn’t… but I was surprised to see fragrant orchid buds coming up seemingly everywhere. So when I settled down to photograph the slippers, not only did I have to watch out for the twayblade that are easy to see thanks to the leaves, but now the fragile fragrant orchids were also forcing me to come up with weird positions so I would do as little damage as possible. It’s not easy I can tell you… no matter how careful I was, I always found some poor plant squashed under my boot. There is so much going on in this location that I could go there every day and always find something new to photograph, but this fear of destroying the orchids will keep me out. Maybe in 1-2 weeks when the fragrant orchids are in bloom…

Not wanting to miss the lady’s slippers (Cypripedium calceolus) like two years ago, we checked out the status on Saturday. And were astonished to find out buds already! So they are in full bloom this week, which makes them record early (or actually, about as early as two years ago when I missed them…). Some years they’ll be blooming as late as midsummer, normally you’d perhaps find them at their peak a week before midsummer.

Tonight seemed like a perfect time to photograph them, it has been raining today and the wind has finally calmed down. So I  got on location and yes indeed many were in bloom already, but also many of them hadn’t gotten further than sprouting some leaves. I think this is the most amazing thing about lady’s slippers this year, there are so incredibly many of them. They were everywhere in this particular location, growing in greater numbers than before in the old spots, but also expanding their range by coming up in new spots.

And then there were the twayblade (Listera ovata). It’s very easy to recognise by its leaves already in this early stage and it was also everywhere – mostly growing on the paths that zigzag this location (the lady’s slippers draw a crowd every summer) so I unfortunately trampled a few before I realised what was going on and had a good look at the ground at every step.

The heath spotted orchids are growing tall, in a few days the first of those will open up.

Considering how generously the calypso orchid was blooming, and now all these other orchids coming up… The question that burns my mind is that is this location particularly strong this year, or have the conditions been such that orchids are early (and plentiful) everywhere in this region?

Last year I completely missed the lady’s slipper orchids (Cypripedium calceolus), and so did everyone else – they bloomed earlier than anyone had anticipated. Last week I had a look at one place where they grow, and saw nothing but leaves so I figured that maybe I could see some buds now. Except, this other place where they grow, the lady’s slippers were full in bloom, and some of them were already showing signs of being over! Glad I had my camera with me, because there was no time to waste, these flowers peak very quickly.

Another thing that amazed me was how many of them there were. I can’t remember seeing this many before… I was also seeing a lot of twayblade (Listera ovata) buds and more bogbeans (Menyanthes trifoliata) than I’ve ever seen before.

Before I was completely done with my photo session, it started raining. I didn’t have the Stormjacket with me to protect the camera, so I had to pack up whether I was ready or not. It wasn’t raining too bad though, so I ventured out further to a nearby small lake. I’ve never been to the lake before, and I was stunned – it was absolutely beautiful! The first calm sunny evening and I’ll be there with the camera.

I was smiling happy on my way back to the car, hardly noticed the rain. Those orchids… and the lake. Amazing. Amazing!

It has been a really windy day. I tried some flower photography and I succeeded surprisingly well, helped by the relatively protected site and then just simply waiting for a lull in the wind. But it is also possible to use wind to your advantage and produce motion blur on purpose. I even experimented with second curtain flash but I guess the built-in flash is not made for the job. I think I will stick with natural light photography… I’m only posting this to illustrate how bad I am with the flash. LOL!

This gave me an idea though, so at editing stage I took one of the worst motion blur images plus a sharp, un-flashed image, then cut the sharp flower and layered it on top of the blurred one, applied multiply on the flower layer and now it looks a bit better… well, marginally. Just don’t look too close, I did a quick job with the selection and didn’t bother to tidy it up:

Playing with the flash is only fun so long and I was tired of the wind as well. Buildings and rocks were just about the only things that didn’t move in the wind, so I headed to the hembygdsgården and set up shop in front of my favourite building there – with wind blown ferns in the foreground. Out came the polarizer again and I stopped down to get an exposure of 1 second to produce motion blur in the ferns. I’m glad to say that this approach worked a whole lot better than my flash experiments! When I was editing the images, I decided to try the Orton technique to enhance the effect and I must say that I like it. As long as the weather continues windy like this, I will be doing more experiments – digitally!

Cypripedium calceolus

• English: Lady’s slipper
• Swedish: Guckusko
• Finnish: Tikankontti

I discovered orchids last year. I’ve photographed them before, but never thought they were anything more than any other flowers I shot. But after I discovered the lady’s slipper, I became hooked on orchids – I looked for them all summer last year, and will do so this year as well. The lady’s slipper is a rare flower but the Los region is a bit of an orchid hotspot, but still, you need to know where to look. And so it was that I discovered the lady’s slippers thanks to a tip from a friendly bypasser. I was shooting flowers in Furuberget, when a woman walked by and asked if have already been to photograph the lady’s slippers. Say what?! She was kind enough to give me instructions where to find them, and sure enough, there they were. I don’t think I have ever been as much in awe of a flower as I was when I saw them for the first time. Sure I’ve seen pictures… but to see a flower like this, growing wild, was an experience like no other.Last week I went to check what the flowering status is. I saw a few buds and lots of leaves, so I figured that this weekend would be just right. I was not entirely correct. Some of the flowers were already past they sell by date but I also found plenty that were in their prime. The mosquitos and gnats were out in force but I was safe from them in my rain trousers (had to wear them because the lady’s slippers grow in wet places) and my Bugshirt. The downside: I was sweating buckets in the warm sunshine. But I’ll rather take that than the bites, and I’m talking serious bites here. The mosquito concert around me was deafening and I’m surprised I didn’t get flying insects in more than just a few frames! No pain no gain as they say, and the lady’s slippers are worth every bit of trouble you have to go through just to see them. To photograph them is a privilege.

* * *

Image specs: ISO 200, f5.6, 1/320, Canon 300mm f4L