The Quiet Picture

Sometimes four seasons isn’t enough. When the sun breaks out from its winter hibernation and you feel it warm on your face while the landscape is still covered with snow, that’s what we call the fifth season. It’s that time of the year when you can go skiing wearing a t-shirt and when the sunglasses is a must or you go snowblind. Early February is still winter, but the thing is that I had a fifth season feeling when I was snowshoeing today. My clothes were too warm and I was missing my shades! To top it off, I heard the birdsong that I always associate with the spring winter.

As for the snowshoe hike, it was nice as always, but I’m really struggling with the pictures. I hoped that the fish-eye would inspire me, but nix. I blame the landscape though; even with all the snow we got this week, the trees are looking a bit scabby and in the end it didn’t matter which lens I had with me. Or maybe a little bit – I wouldn’t have been able to take this picture of a pine when the wind picked up the snow from the branches and blew it towards me. Serendipitous perhaps, but isn’t that what it’s about – being at the right place at the right time?

The weather forecast kept saying that last night would be completely overcast. The full moon and stars in the sky disagreed though and after all the snowfall earlier this week, the conditions were just perfect to try some night photography.

As I was peering up through the tree crowns I noticed that the sky wasn’t quite as clear as it had seemed at first – there was some very light cloud that dimmed the stars a little bit. It wasn’t necessarily a bad thing, I like the effect of the clouds especially when they are blurred by the long shutter speed.

I wish we could have more nights like this. That feeling when you’re in a quiet snowcovered forest and the moon is shining bright enough so you don’t need a flashlight to see where you’re going… awesome!

I was really looking forward to enjoying the winter landscape today as well. Yesterday they were still saying that it would be around -15°C today but it was -22°C in the morning and now the forecast is around -20 degrees the whole day. Not sure if I enjoy the winter landscape quite that much… I hope the temperatures will rise a little bit in the afternoon because it kills me to miss the scenery as it is at the moment!

I got back my roll of Velvia 100 this week. I was very excited to see that the greens were still as intense as I remembered them, the colours really pop. Unfortunately I was not able to reproduce the pop when I scanned them, but I’ll always have my light table!

The roll goes back to late June, so there are some nice summer memories in it. Like this forget-me-not I found in the forest on Hamrafjället, which I visited on the morning of my trip to Röros. I only took this one picture and I’m well chuffed to see that I nailed the focus – there was some wind so I had to wait for an opportunity to press the shutter. With digital, I’d probably have snapped 5-10 frames under the same circumstances. But it’s nice to see that I have the patience to wait for the right moment!

One thing I was curious about was to see how I can work with the 15mm fisheye on full frame – I can barely work with it on a crop sensor. But I reckon in a way it’s easier because the fisheye effect really comes to life when all 15mm can be used effectively. I like the fisheye illusion how the curved horizon imitates the curvature of the earth. The planet in miniature!

The light was really fleeting, the kind that disappears by the time you’ve picked up the camera from the bag. But in this case I was lucky to get it back for two seconds so I could take the picture.

This is from the same day and same marsh as the previous slide. It had just rained quite heavily but then suddenly the sun burst out. The colours were amazing, the mosses were glowing with reds and yellows and I was all excited about capturing it all. In the picture it seems like there is a lot of blue sky, but there were clouds all around and just seconds after taking this picture the clouds moved in front of the sun we heard the rumble of thunder. It started raining again and I lost the opportunity, but at least I have this frame. The Sigma 15mm fisheye handles flare really well – I haven’t cloned any flare from this picture, but I did straighten the horizon a little bit (the fisheye effect made it curve a little bit because the horizon is not in the middle of the frame).

I have totally failed with reproducing the greens here, but I like the scene; there’s something about dead trees that always draw my eye. It was just a matter of trying to compose to bring some order in the chaos.

The last time I mentioned that I have a slight tendency to under-expose. I think I found the reason for it – it only happens with particular scenes, those with a lot of blue sky or running water. I seem worry about overexposing the sky or the water, so I don’t compensate as much for the shadows as I should. But now that I’m aware of exactly what is throwing me off, I know to watch out for it. Looking at the pictures, I’m not at risk of burning out the sky or the water even if dial in another 2/3 stops. I’ve loaded Velvia 50 in the camera and the plan is to find running water today and blue skies tomorrow…

The weather has been very much overcast lately so I haven’t had a chance to try out my star 15 theory until tonight. Full moon is on Friday but there’s plenty enough light to go around already, I hardly needed my flashlight in the snow covered forest. It made composition easier as well because it was actually possible to see through the viewfinder, the only thing I was left wanting was a swivelling LCD because now I had to keep kneeling under the camera to look at the display… but that’s nothing. I had such a great time, the thermometre said 12 degrees below but I was warm and cosy as I kept walking around and pointing my camera up to the sky!

I found out that photographing Cassiopeia is easy enough. At this time of the evening, Cassiopeia is straight above your head so I was literally pointing the camera straight up for a bull’s eye composition. Unfortunately, there aren’t any other constellations of interest high up in the sky – Auriga, Cygnus, Gemini and Orion and even the Big Dipper are lower at this time of the year/evening. Photographing towards the horizon turned out to be a lot harder than straight up between the tree crowns. In a way though, I think it helps to have a fish-eye lens which exaggerates the convergence of the trees, so it becomes a feature in itself rather than an irritation.

The only thing left now is Orion, it had already risen when I was taking these pictures, but I just couldn’t find a suitable composition for it. So my beloved Orion will just have to wait for another evening…

When I started to photograph the night sky, I read that I should use a wideangle lens, high ISO, big aperture and bulb setting with remote. Unless of course I wanted to photograph the rings of Saturn or the Andromeda galaxy, in which case I needed a telescope, but I’m not an astronomer so I stick to the basics. It all sounds simple enough but it seems like there are as many settings to use as there are people giving advice. So in the end, the best way to learn is to not listen to the advice and make your own mistakes and it seems like every time I point my camera at the stars, it’s a new mistake (and a lesson)!

My interest in astronomy is pretty much limited to the stars visible with naked eye. I’ve never felt the need to invest in a telescope, but I frequently study star maps and try to learn the names of the constellations and stars. So when I photograph the night sky, I normally want to have a recognisable constellation in it. Star trail pictures can be really cool and I’ve done some of those, but in the end I found that I’m much happier with small dots of light instead of streaks and I want to top off the picture with a silhouette of something (trees are best).

So what I’ve learned is that you have to keep the exposure at max 15 sec in order for the stars to appear as dots. There’s ever so little streaking even then, but it’s only visible in the full scale original. And if you want real star trails, then you need a minimum of 15 minutes or otherwise those streaks will have an appearance of camera shake because they are too short to come across as genuine trails. That’s my star 15 rule – you know, sunny 16, moon 11 and now star 15!

Once you’ve decided which effect you want, there are other decisions to be made. Let’s say that I want to photograph the stars as dots and I’ve set the camera to 15 seconds. Now I have to decide how many stars I want to record (or how dark I want the sky to be). A wide open aperture is almost a must, so the only thing left to adjust is the ISO speed. ISO 200 is a starting point, it will give you the bright stars but you’ll probably end up going higher to get some of the fainter stars as well and more definition in the foreground (=better silhouette). You’ll want at least a little bit of moonlight to lighten up the sky, otherwise the sky will be just as black as your foreground which makes the foreground a moot point.

But let’s say that I want the star trail effect. ISO 100 is doable and you can stop down, anything to get a longer exposure. However, there’s a risk that the trails will be very faint with these settings because there just simply isn’t enough light hitting the sensor. With a long enough exposure you can bring out detail in the foreground, but those trails are stubbornly faint even for the brightest stars. I’m guessing it’s because the brightness of a star is kind of an absolute? The star will keep moving along during the exposure so it will not “collect” light the same way the foreground and sky does, thus you end up with faint streaks and only for the bright stars while the foreground and sky look correctly exposed. Just compare the long exposure on the left to the first picture which is much darker overall, but the stars are much brighter in comparison to the trails.

So for the star trails, the solution is to photograph on a dark night with maybe a moon crescent to lighten the sky ever so little. Then you can bump up the ISO and stop down without a risk of your foreground and sky becoming unnaturally light, all the while gaining enough sensitivity in the sensor to catch decent trails for even the faintest stars.

What did I say about learning by mistake? The next opportunity is in early December when the first quarter moon is up in the sky in the evening. Just no clouds and no wind…

Time to concentrate on other flowers than just orchids all the time. The logical place for flowers of all sorts is the Hamrafjället mountain, so I took the trail to the meadows and then up to the peak. This is early in the season and many familiar flowers like the fragrant orchid and moor-king are still in the bud stage, I didn’t see any open individuals yet.

Thus abandoning flowers for the day, I drove the toll road up to the Svansjökläppen mountain to spend the evening there. That’s the last time I will take this road… it was bumpy and steep and I felt very sorry for the car (but it held fine!). The road goes way above the treeline, and the very last part of the road was still blocked by snow. Regardless, there now was less than 200 vertical meters to cover to get to the peak, so it was considerably shorter than your normal ascent. The views were great, of course, although the scenery to the south was not at all what I had expected – it was rocky and barren, whereas I’m mostly used to seeing meadows and moors in this region.

I was in a hurry to get some sleep last night so I will write down the full experience now. I’m new at aurora photography (and night photography in general) so I have to take some notes to learn.

But before I get to the nuts and bolts of the event, I just have to say this – it was awesome! It was just me, my camera, the northern lights and an owl howling in the neighbourhood. Well worth the sleep deprivation!

1. Composition

I used a hot shoe bubble level to level the camera and pointed it in the general direction of the northern lights. Take a picture, check the LCD and then adjust camera position, repeat process until the desired composition is reached. It worked out so well that I didn’t even need to crop the pictures in post-processing.

How in the world they did this with film I’ll never know!

I wasn’t spoiled with foreground options. We have forest everywhere (even if de-forestation is one my favourite complaints) so there aren’t many open views within a walking distance, especially those towards north and without light pollution. I was standing on a forest clearing with these lonely trees scattered around, so it was just a matter of picking out the most suitable tree to provide a silhouette against the lights. Considering how dark the pictures are, it’s safe to say that the aurora alone wouldn’t lift the photo. Even so, it’s a close call – there’s an awful lot of “dark matter” in the frame.

I’m also glad that the Sigma 15mm f2.8 fisheye is earning its keep now. It seemed like a good idea at the time, but I found very little use for it last summer – I just can’t handle wideangles, fisheye or straight. But now with the auroras, I would have found myself in a spot of bother with the 24-105mm f4. Calling it a wideangle on the 1.6 crop factor sensor would be very generous!

2. Exposure

I had done my homework on what settings to use when photographing auroras. I didn’t have any help from the moon last night though, so my starting point of ISO 400 and 10 sec, lens wide open seemed a bit too dark and I lost some of the faint peripheral auroral light with that. I stepped up to ISO 500 and 15 sec, but when the aurora started moving (most of the time it just seemed to glow and not “dance” as you normally see in the northern light images), I went back down to 10 sec to catch the detail.

ISO 500, f2.8, 10 sec

Moonlight would really help, I hate the noise of ISO 500. Not that the noise was pretty at ISO 400 either. The digital noise is a bit too patterned as compared to film, making it twice as undesirable.

I checked fotosidan to see if other people have posted pictures from last night, and the aurora pictures in general. I was interested to see that they had used considerably longer exposures – in many cases over a minute. That helps to get the ISO down (and the lens can be stopped down as well), but the downside is that with longer exposures, you start getting star trails and that’s not good. The small trails can’t be seen in the web images, but they are most definitely there in the full size image. 15 sec will prevent trailing in the northern sky like in these images, so if I need more light, it will have to come from boosting the ISO rather than making longer exposures.

3. Focus

I started with the lens focused on infinity. I wasn’t sure what that would do with my foreground trees, so I tried with different focus settings – focus just shy of the infinity mark, on the mark, and little beyond. The 40D preview picture isn’t very sharp because it uses the low res JPG, but it is possible to compare different pictures so I used these different focus settings in consecutive frames and then compared them to one another, and was able to determine that the focus setting just shy of the infinity mark was best. When I got the pictures on the computer, I was happy to see that it had indeed been the correct decision!

4. Light

Being a night photography newbie, I keep discovering new things every time I try. For example, these long exposures can catch light that my eye doesn’t see.

I don’t know if it’s some digital idiosyncrasy or if the auroral light really was like that, but my eye was only seeing varying strengths of green, while the picture shows some other hues.

ISO 500, f2.8, 15 sec

The sensor also caught some light pollution in the north (left of the birch in the above image), although I wasn’t able to see it. I reckon it must be KÃ¥rböle. To ENE, there was a visible glow of light (lower right edge in the image), maybe Ramsjö or even Ã…nge (100 km as the crow flies). And now that I’ve been staring the full res images, I can see that there is actually just the faintest of orange glows across almost the whole horizon below the green lights, and I’ve no idea where it comes from.

Now I’m just waiting for the next opportunity to see and shoot the auroras before the season is over!

This is peak time of the year for auroral activity. It was a clear night and the aurora forecast confirmed the high activity, so I packed the camera and set out to the closest spot with an open view towards north. I finally got some half decent pictures of the northern lights! I tried it last year, but the results were poor at best.

Sigma 15mm f2.8 @ f2.8, ISO 500 @ 10 sec (cloned out a radio mast light)

The bright star on the right is Vega, with Cygnus in full view between Vega and the birch.

I was out for a couple of hours, gave up when the light seemed to be fading and my fingers and toes were starting to freeze. I was home just before 11pm. As a sign of my lack of dedication to my hobby – this is as late as I ever have been on a photographic outing. Usually I’m in bed by this time… speaking of which, it’s definitely time. Gotta work tomorrow!

Sometimes I wonder if I’m a little bit agoraphobic. I don’t really have a genuine fear of open spaces but I have noticed that I have a genuine tendency to prefer enclosed spaces – I’m not talking small closets, but wide closed spaces like forests or small lakes. Places like sea shores or big lakes – anything where all you see is a straight horizon – make me a bit uneasy. I just think that it’s unnatural, that’s all. I was born and raised by a lake where the opposing shore with all its forests was always visible. Maybe there’s a kind of security I unconsciously seek, just need to see the other side. Standing by the sea and looking out at the horizon requires faith to believe in the opposing shore but the only thing I seem to believe is what I see.

So it’s easy to explain why I love Sweden so much. There are small forest lakes a-plenty, not to mention the forests themselves. Maybe that’s why I almost take it personally when I see clear-cut forests – my security blanket is gone!My version of agoraphobia is often reflected in my photographs as well. The cynical view – and I never shy away from that – is that I’m just not very good with wideangle lenses so I take my landscapes with longer focal lengths to hide the fact. But the Freudian view is that I have no reason to learn to use wideangle lenses because the wide landscape just simply doesn’t appeal to me, period. I do take the occasional wide shot, but looking at my album, my best work is undoubtedly with the enclosed, intimate scenics. For a while back I toyed with the idea of bying the Sigma 15mm f2.8 diagonal fish-eye lens to help me out of my photographic slump, but now that I got my Canon 300mm f4L, I can’t see any reason to play with extreme wideangles anymore. The telephoto lens has opened up a new world for me where close-ups are possible like never before. Now I feel that I don’t need to re-invent myself anymore – the other side is right here.

The seaside image was taken in 2003 with Canon EOS 5, Tokina 20-35mm f2.8 lens @ wide end. I sold the lens last year.
The forest lake image was taken on Sunday with Canon 20D, 17-85mm @ 76mm (35mm equivalent 122mm). I’m keeping the lens.