The Quiet Picture

Once again, I found myself at Svartån. But this time it was morning and I had a chance to shoot the creek upstream. Streaming water is always better when viewing it upstreams, except at the moment of course there’s not a lot of water left in the creek. I’ll take the beautiful morning sun and red cliffs instead!

From Svartån, I drove the freshly paved road from Rullbo to Fågelsjö. It was a real joy, they’ve been working on this for the past two years and there were times when I avoided the road because it was so hard on the car to drive. But no such problems now, getting to Fågelsjö has never been this fast!

There’s a couple of places I’ve been looking on the map for a while now, and today was a perfect opportunity to check them in real life. The first one was even better than I expected – I’ll be definitely coming back here, there are lots of photo opportunities but my timing wasn’t the best possible. But I got some keepers anyway, which is all the better because the second spot turned out to be inaccessible – the road was closed.

The biggest disappointment of the day was that I didn’t bring a thermos and some cakes with me. I can’t imagine a better place to enjoy a cup of coffee than those warm rocks on the shores of the Fågelsjö lake… next time I’ll have more than just the camera in the bag!

A couple of photographer friends came for a visit, I had promised to show them my new favourite location at Svartån. I think I may have raised the exceptions a little bit but judging by the number of pictures being taken, nobody was disappointed in any case! Since it hasn’t been raining in the last week, the water level had receded again so it was now possible to jump around on the cliffs and rocks to find new angles that I couldn’t access in my last two visits. The weather co-operated with us, initially it was sunshine but then it turned overcast (we even got rained on – I think I counted at least four drops, lol) so it was possible to use long shutter speeds to blur out the water.

The sun came out when we had reached the top of the rapids, so we drove to another location to see if we could get any sunset opportunities. The first place offered a few sunlit frames, but there was a bank of clouds in the horizon and the sun soon disappeared behind it. We checked out another small tarn anyway which in some other light should be nice, but late evening in overcast weather is not it so we wrapped up the day. A bit of an anticlimax maybe, but I don’t think anyone was particularly disappointed!

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 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.

I had big plans for the weekend, but I had to revise them already when I woke up – the cold night had turned the wet roads into icy roads, so I had no business driving around with summer tires. I waited until the sun was high enough to thaw out the worst and then got out to discover new places. I don’t know why but there are still some forest roads around Loos that I haven’t checked yet, and it’s definitely my loss because this road turned out to be one sweet photographic experience. It’s just perfect in the morning light and I didn’t have to kick myself too much for not going out as early as I had planned because the low sun wouldn’t have reached the scenery anyway (forests and hills in the way). The downside was that there was thin high cloud again so while the sun was shining, it also wasn’t. The sky cleared towards noon but the light wasn’t the same anymore.

At the Össjön lake I found these old boats, some completely broken and rotting away and others still in one piece but probably not sea-worthy (lake-worthy?) anymore, and the place was complete with a boathouse with a caved-in roof. All you needed to do was to avoid the colourful new(er) boats in the composition and it was photographic eldorado right there! It worked fine at this time of the day, but it would look even better at bit earlier in the morning.

I didn’t find any opportunity to test the new ND filter, but I was able to put the leveling base and ICE through their paces. I took a 3-image panorama with the polariser mounted on the lens and important detail in the foreground. Foreground is normally almost impossible to stitch manually unless you’ve found the nodal point of the lens, which I can’t even try because the 24-105mm lens doesn’t have a lens collar and I don’t have a specialist panorama head. ICE did another perfect job though and the result is an image that could’ve been taken with a wideangle lens, but my 38mm (24mm x 1.6) wasn’t enough for the scene so I decided to try stitching it together. A very useful experiment, and a very useful technique!

Such a productive day and it would’ve been even better if I had had the light early on. Driving along with beautiful things all around, stop and look, take some pictures, move on to the next one…

I’ve mentioned quite a few times that I don’t like wideangle lenses because they are a compositional nightmare for me. I do however like wide views – panoramas. A stitched panorama shows so much more than a panorama crop of a picture taken with an extreme wideangle lens.

The biggest problem with creating panoramas is to create a seamless join between the frames. The left edge of the first frame is never a 100% match of the right edge of the second frame, so if you’re creating your panorama manually, it becomes very time consuming to manipulate the pictures in order to hide the seam. I’ve tried a few panorama programs in the past but nothing worked to my satisfaction (or the program was so complicated to use that I gave up) so I’ve been doing my stitching the hard way, which is not only tedious but also very time consuming.

So I decided to take some measures to improve the situation. Firstly, I ordered the Acratech Leveling Base which will enable me to level the ballhead, because a perfectly level platform is the foundation of a good panorama (I just got the thing so hopefully I can say something about it after this weekend). And then I also wanted to give stitching software another chance, especially after I heard that Photoshop CS3 is very good at it so I felt that I was just making things too hard for myself by stitching manually. Unfortunately, PS is not an investment I can justify in any way, so I looked for specialist stitching software instead and I started with Canon PhotoStitch which came with the camera. I gave up after the first panorama – total crap. PhotoStitch is best used uninstalled. I browsed some photo forums to find out what software other photogs used, and saw someone recommend Microsoft’s ICE (Image Composite Editor) which apparently is just as good as Photoshop. And the price is right – it’s free.

I loaded up my panorama frames and waited for ICE to do its thing. I was amazed – I couldn’t tell where the seams were, even when I knew where they were! I have now been throwing panoramas at it for two nights in a row (I had lots of unstitched images in my catalogue), everything from 2 to 13 frames, and it seems to deliver perfect results most of the time. There are two things which seem to be an issue sometimes, one of them makes sense but the other one is a bit of a mystery.

Firstly, although all the detail in the image is seamlessly joined, ICE doesn’t always seem to be able to compensate for uneven light from one frame to another. By this I mean that if one side of the frame is slightly darker than the other (it is so slight that you don’t even know about it until you start stitching), then in stitching you will notice this when the lightness of the picture changes at the seam. ICE allows you to export the panorama in e.g. Photoshop format with layers, so for critical work, you can use adjustment layers to fix the issue. You can see an example of this problem in the panorama below – there’s a sharp change in levels a little bit right from the middle, and then about 2/5 from the right there’s a wide strip with some lighter levels. It’s good enough for me because I won’t use this image for anything other than keeping in my catalogue (and using it as an example here), but if were to e.g. print it then I would take some time in an editor to sort out the levels.

Secondly, sometimes ICE leaves out a frame in the stitch for no apparent reason at all. Initially I thought it’s doing it because there wasn’t enough overlap between the frames, but then it happened again when there was definitely enough overlap. I re-loaded the frames but it did the same thing again. The really strange thing is that ICE knew exactly what size of slice was missing in the panorama, so it left a gap which was a perfect fit to fill in Photoshop without moving any of the layers done by ICE. Weird. This happened e.g. with the above panorama.

Other than these bugs, it really doesn’t get any easier. Launch the software, select the pictures, read some news while you wait (it doesn’t take very long anyway), select the crop and how you want to save it and that’s it. I never thought I’d say this but… well done Microsoft!

The only problem I have now is what will I do when I go over to Macs next year like I’m planning to? I somehow doubt that Microsoft will make a Mac-compatible ICE!

Or, Sigma 150mm 1:2.8 APO Macro DG HSM EX, to be exact.

It’s fair to say that I have really put the Sigma 150mm macro lens through its paces this summer. It has been my main tool since the flower season started and it has constantly produced outstanding results (well, technically speaking anyway – the artistic issues are created behind the camera). I’ve mentioned my reasoning behind getting this lens, but just to re-iterate: I needed a 1:1 macro like my old 100mm lens, and I needed the background/foreground control of the 300mm tele that I’ve used as a close-up lens (with an extension tube). I was tired of always having to choose which lens to take with me, and the weight and super-thin DOF of the 300mm made it a bit awkward tool at times, while the background/foreground control was a breeze with the big gun but no joy with the 100mm lens. Having decided that a long macro would fit the bill, I only needed to decide between 150mm and 180mm. In the end, I opted to give up those 30mm in favour for a larger aperture (f2.8 vs f3.5) and a bit lighter construction, and it was the correct decision – I haven’t missed the extra mm’s at any point.

This lens is nicknamed “Bugzilla” on the web. It’s because many photographers favour it for insect photography, I’m however mainly interested in flowers so the review might be slanted towards that subject matter. Also keep in mind that I have been using the lens on a Canon 40D body with an APS-C size sensor.

Sharpness

The Sigma 150mm macro is incredibly sharp, right on par with the Canon 100mm macro I used to have. Almost all macro work is done with manual focus, and thanks to the large aperture of f2.8 this lens produces a bright image in the viewfinder, making it easy to focus in all but the worst of conditions. Used together with an angle-finder, correct focus is almost unmissable thanks to the magnification of the angle-finder. And let’s face it, the angle-finder is an essential tool in macro photography, I don’t know how I ever managed without it (oh now I remember – I used to have headaches from all the awkward positions I had to twist my head).

The sample image is a crop from a full-size image, straight out of the 40D except for WB adjustment and RAW conversion. Please note that I do not use any sharpening in camera, so there is a whole lot to be gained in post-processing. ISO 200, f3.2.

The sharpness starts at maximum aperture of 2.8 so I don’t hesitate to open up if the situation calls for it. Normally I step down to f4 though, but it’s only for adding just a touch of DOF rather than any sharpness considerations. I haven’t done any testing to find the sweet spot, because as far as I’m concerned, it’s all sweet!

Ease of use

The lens is almost too heavy to be hand-held, and I’ve only used it without support when I’ve used it as a tele and the shutter speed has been fast enough. I was aware of this before I got the lens so I do not count it against it, I’m just stating a fact. In a way it’s also a good thing, because it forces me to always use the tripod for close-ups and that will slow down the process of taking a picture, which I need – I have a bad habit of rushing things, even if I’ve told myself time after time to slow down.

I’ve also found it to be a good lens for stitched panoramas, I used it with good results last winter when I was photographing the full moon in the mountains. I also use it to pick landscape details, even if 150mm on a crop factor camera is a bit on the long side. But then again, I got it for close-up work so anything else is a bonus.

Auto-focus

The lens is equipped with a focus limiter with three settings – minimum to 52cm focus distance, 52cm to infinity and entire range. Initially when started using this lens for close-ups, I found the ranges a bit awkwardly set but since manual focus is the best way of focusing, the limiter is hardly ever needed. I have set it on 52cm to infinity for those odd landscape pictures I take with AF. I don’t have complaints about the AF, it’s possible that I might call it a bit slow but it really isn’t an issue with what all the manual focusing I do.

Conclusion

In conclusion, I would have to say that there is no such thing as a perfect lens, but this is as close to perfect for me as it gets. Sigma really out-did themselves and I will have to take back all the bad words I said about them a couple of years ago. The lens is also very good value for money, with the glare guard and lens collar included in the box. If you’re in the market for a long macro, you can’t go wrong with the Sigma 150mm f2.8 EX!

Sample images

For more samples, click the sigma 150mm category to view all my posts with images taken with this lens. You can also check out the Flowers and Orchids galleries on minnak.net to see and compare pictures I’ve taken with the Sigma and the two other lenses mentioned in this review (Canon 100mm f2.8 and Canon 300mm f4L).