The Quiet Picture

I’ve never been to the mountains at this time of the year, so it was quite exciting to see what they look like. But then I heard that this is a rather unusual spring, the snow has melted very early (it has been warm over there as well) so I guess I can’t draw any conclusions as yet.

The day was glorious, blue skies and sunshine. [rant] Which was just well, because my cabin is a big dark thundercloud weighing on my head (and heart). It hurts, it really hurts. If anyone knows a reliable carpenter, I’ll be all ears – that darn thing has to get finished asap, if my contractor can’t do it then I bloody well take care of it myself! [/rant]

We took the scenic road back home and the same place which gave us those nice “in the cloud” pictures three weeks ago provided a great opportunity once again. This time with sunrays filtering through clouds, I had to use HDR to make any sense of it and the pictures need some more processing, I just quickly put them through LR/Enfuse to get a preview. I’m just not inspired to work on them at the moment, the cabin is killing both my creativity and my will to live. Ok, creativity anyway. But if you’re a carpenter or know one and can finish my cabin (it’s probably just a day’s job anyway), I’ll be much happier!

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?

Claes Grundsten is one of the best photographers in Sweden. He is a specialist in mountain photography and has authored or co-authored many books related to mountains and hiking. And since mountains are close to my heart also, Claes Grundsten is naturally one of my favourite Swedish photographers.

Having read many of his books and admired the imagery, I was excited to see that he has also published a book about flowers and mountains, “Blommor och berg”. It’s a coffee table book with nothing but pictures, no text at all apart from the intro. The idea of the book is to show the contrast in the mountains – small alpine flowers vs big mountains, colourful flowers vs black’n'white mountains. The book is divided in two, the first half is dedicated to the flowers and the second half contains the mountains.

You’d think that this book would be perfect for me, considering that I love mountains and flowers and alpine flowers above all. But it is true that you can’t judge the book by its cover – quite literally, in this case. Because it turned out that the cover picture was by far the best picture in the whole book.

It’s incredibly dangerous to say that “I can do better than that” because I’m just a rank amateur and Claes Grundsten is an established and respected professional. I’m used to thinking “I wish I could be as good” when I read his books. But page after page the feeling got stronger, these pictures were not holding up to the standard I expected and I couldn’t decide if it was because I was missing the point or if the pictures were quite simply not very good. By the time I had finished the flower section however, I was convinced that something was wrong.

Of course I can’t show any of the pictures here for copyright reasons, but I can try to explain. Take the black vanilla orchid for example. It’s a tough subject actually, very difficult to compose when it’s really just a ball on a stick. His solution is to use a backlit flower (which is nice in itself) and blue sky in the background. Also nice. But then… he has included the whole stem which means that the flower itself is very small in the frame and there’s an awful lot of empty background which is made worse by the crop which leaves the flower almost touching the frame on top! The same crop/composition problem is evident in many other pictures, as well. Like the common valerian; not just for the crop, but the flower is positioned on the left side of the frame and it’s leaning out! That’s such a big no-no that I can’t even imagine why it was done like that.

Maybe the problem is the shape of the book, it’s almost square which is not suitable for vertical pictures at all. Instead of using 2:3 ratio, his solution has been to crop them to 4:5, a useless format for tall flowers.

And when there’s finally a picture where the crop/format is ok, then the flower isn’t in focus. I mean I love using shallow DOF but the key to make successful shallow DOF pictures is to put the sharpness in just the right part. In the purple saxifrage picture, it’s in all the wrong places and there’s absolutely nothing for the eye to rest on. Had I taken this picture, it would’ve been axed in the first review round in Lightroom.

These are such beginner’s mistakes that I’m in total disbelief.

And then I got to the black’n'white mountain section. Back in the days before colour film was invented, everybody shot black and white for every subject. There was no other option, so it was the standard. When the colour films were introduced and got better, colour photography became the standard and black and white nature photography got marginalised. But you can still find subjects in nature that actually look better in b’n'w than colour, for example if you have a lot of texture in the picture, so I’m not anti-b’n'w as such.

I know that this is a matter of taste, but I claim that not every photograph is suitable for a b’n'w conversion. A landscape picture that looks great in colour does not necessarily look great in black and white, I don’t care what it looked like in the old days when b’n'w was the norm. We’re talking about today, we’re talking about a book that is only a few years old, created in the era of digital photography, the era of digital colour photography. You just can’t take any odd landscape picture and convert it to black and white and publish it in a book under the premise of “contrast”. It doesn’t work, sorry but it really doesn’t.

I’m sorry for this trashing, but the disappointment was huge because my expectations were sky high, thanks to the previous work I’ve seen from Claes Grundsten. It only leaves me with a question, why Mr. Grundsten? Please tell me it was because of a cash flow problem, because anything else is either cheating or a serious error in judgement. If you intended “Blommor och berg” as an artistic statement, then it’s a gross misrepresentation of your skills. I still think you’re one of the best photographers in Sweden, because even the best photographers are allowed to make mistakes. However, the right place for those mistakes is the recycle bin, not a book!

* * *

But I must say that something good came out of it, too. The format of the book is simple so it’s easy to put together a book like this in any self-publishing software. All you need is the pictures, and when it come to flowers, I know I have those pictures. At first I had considered of buying this book (thankfully I didn’t but borrowed it from the library) because I wanted a coffee table book for the coffee table in my cabin (-to-be).  Now I realise that I can create the book myself. It won’t sell any copies because I don’t have a name, but I don’t want to spend the money on someone who’s abusing their’s!

I hate to keep repeating myself but I seem to be coming no closer to end of my photographic slump. Spring is definitely on the way now, we’ve been having some warm days and the snow has started melting but it’s also been very windy and the snow is covered with wind blown debris. Maybe someone can take landscape pictures under these conditions, but not me. Seems like it’s April already, just with more snow. And I don’t like April.

Anyway, despite the conditions, I actually had a few ideas. I drove to Fågelsjö, equipped with both digital and film cameras, that’s how inspired I was! The afternoon sun was looking very nice and warm on the old buildings at Hembygdsgården. Emphasis on the word “look” – the wind was heavy and cold and I felt the inspiration sink along with my body temperature. But there was this one building in particular which looks gorgeous in the warm light so I set up the tripod and film camera and composed my picture and pressed the shutter and … nothing. How could this happen again?? My worst nightmare, press the shutter button and nothing happens. A closer inspection of the camera revealed that it’s probably a battery problem. The display is flashing “bc”, the manual says it can be the battery but it could also be a connection issue, with the lens or pretty much anything else. I tried another lens but it didn’t help, so either it’s the battery or then the camera is kaput. It’s not worth sending it to service in any case, so I hope I get away with the price of a new 2CR5.

Good thing I had both cameras with me then. I took the picture with digital instead and took off in search for more pictures. And found nothing. Nothing! I followed the snowmobile trail for a while but it was pointless. My plan was to wait for the sunset but I didn’t feel like standing around in Fågelsjö for an hour in the bitingly cold wind, so I decided to drive back home via Hamra, the road should take me to some viewpoints in case the sunset would be nice. And of course it wasn’t anything special now that I had a chance to shoot it. It’s been nice just about every evening this week, as I’ve seen from the bus window… but not today.

I promise I won’t complain in my next post! I probably won’t post anything until May…

Musings on photo editing, part 2

Part 1

My question is, is a photograph a representation of reality, or is it the photographer’s interpretation of what they think reality should be?

When the picture is edited to no longer reflect the reality, I’m not sure if I want to call them photographs anymore… seems like they’ve gone beyond a photograph, in the traditional sense of the word (read: analogue). The dictionary definition of the word “photograph” is pretty all-encompassing though, because the word means “drawing with light”. Photography is a form of art, so a photo must be a work of art, and a heavily edited photo is… not a photo? But a work of art in any case. And such, neither wrong or right. And whatever I personally feel about photo manipulation, I am not going to condemn anyone else for doing it. To each their own! My only problem is when somebody presents a photo to me as a reflection of reality, when in fact the photo is edited to longer represent reality.

The beauty, as always, is in the eye of the beholder. If you’re ready to accept a heavily manipulated picture as a photograph, then that’s what is – even if it ends up on Photoshop Disasters. But as all the pictures on the PS Disasters blog witness, a photograph does tell a big fat lie sometimes. The laws of physics are bent and the human anatomy likewise.

Maybe the issue is really about linguistics. Could we have a word for a non-edited image (where no physical elements are changed) and another word for a “photoshopped” image? Both are photographs at the moment, whether you call it an image or a picture it’s all just semantics. But I’m talking about the difference in content!

So this brings me back to the new tools in CS5, which is actually what gave me the spark for these musings in the first place. While the content-aware fill tool is very cool indeed, you can hardly call the result a representation of reality. The ease and extent of removing elements in the photo is almost scary. Don’t like the factory in the background? No probs, remove it. That’s looking at the world through a pink filter: everything you find wrong with it will be fixed.

My challenge lies in finding that rose-tinted reality in the world around me so I can portray it with my camera. The challenge is not about changing the reality to fit my ideal of it.

Same difference I guess.

Musings on photo editing, part 1

Remember when they used to say that a photo never lies?

Well, they may have been a bit too blue-eyed even in the old days of analogue. There was a lot more going in the darkroom than simple film development. But by and large, a photo didn’t lie. Those darkroom wizards aside, the majority of photographers (pros and home snappers alike) settled with reality as it was, warts and all.

Then came computers. Then came digital cameras. And now, Adobe is prepping Photoshop CS5 with some really cool new tools that takes manipulation to whole new heights and it’s not like the photo editing tools have been bad so far either.

Regular readers of this blog (yes, I mean both of you) know that I have a very conservative stance on a photo manipulation. I just simply prefer to make my images in the camera, that’s all – it’s a personal challenge, but it’s not an absolute and I’m prepared to venture out if the occasion calls. Dust spec removal, levels adjustment, saturation etc have always been part of my toolbox and I don’t consider those any more manipulation than choosing the composion, aperture and shutter speed in the camera. Manipulation to me is when you start adding or removing things in the picture – physical things like buildings, radio masts, trees etc.

It seems like I’m getting a bit more relaxed about my attitude towards editing (manipulating) my pictures, so I guess it’s just a matter of giving it time. I try to keep Lightroom as my one-stop shop for photo processing and the clone/heal heal tool has its restrictions. In any case, I’m gradually doing more retouching in my pictures, beyond Lightroom. Nothing drastic, but removing occasional stray branches or grass blades is not the moral dilemma it used to be. White lies… bending the truth a little bit?

* * *

An un-edited version of the above picture is here. And yes, it’s a zoo animal, another thing that requires disclosure. Just take a look at what happened with the winner of the Wildlife Photographer of the Year. A stunning picture whether it’s a tame wolf or not, but if it is tame… then I would sure like to know it. The end result doesn’t count if you’re not honest about it!

Photography is a great way to reset your thoughts.

When I set out for a walk, I had a lot of negative thoughts in my head. The problem is with my neighbour/landlord who is apparently not able to grasp the concept of “yours and mine”. Meaning that when I pay my rent, I pay for more than just my flat – I pay for the garage and I pay for the piece of lawn between my flat and the garage. Which means that while I’m not the owner of the space, I have the right to use it – except now it’s him using it. His trailer has been almost permanently parked behind my garage since the summer, and when I half jokingly asked him if he’d like to rent the space from me, he said that he didn’t have room for it on his side (true – he’s got too much junk for the little space he has) and he’d remove it. But not only did he not remove it, but yesterday when I drove my car in the garage (I’ve been keeping it outside) I found that he had mounted a shelf and stored some planks on it. In my garage!!!! Without as much as a word to ask if he could do it, can you believe it?

So anyway, I was saying that photography is good. I tried to force myself to think happy thoughts as I was walking, but I always kept coming back to the same thing. Then I finally reached my destination, a small brook that I found last week. What a relief it was to set up the tripod and start composing the pictures, because every last little brain cell of mine was concentrated on photography. Happy thoughts, happy thoughts – quite naturally!

And then I was done with the pictures and started walking back home, and I was mad again. I’m paying too much rent and considering that I’m getting even less for my money than I should, the rent is intolerable. It’s a bad timing to move now because I really should save my money for the cabin, but my option is be angry every day when I see the trailer. I see it when I go to work, I see it when I come home, I see it from my kitchen window, I see it from my living room window, I can see it just by turning my head as I’m typing this now. And the shelf in the garage, I can’t believe he had the nerve. I can feel my blood pressure rising.

Too bad I can’t photograph 24/7.

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.

A couple of weeks ago Canon announced a whole pile of new products, including a Powershot G11 and S90. There was no SLR in the announcements but I guess they wanted to release it separately so people would pay more attention – so enter EOS 7D! It’s a follow-up to 50D (and here I was thinking it would be called 60D, duh) which means that it’s the camera that I would potentially upgrade to (my plan is to hop over every second release). So I pored over the specifications but the first thing I saw put me off immediately – 18 MP. 18?! For a sensor that is only marginally larger than on my 40D. Forget it. That’s almost as crazy as 15 MP on the G10, and Canon seems to have realised that and jumped off the megapixel race and reduced the pixel count to 10 MP in the G11. So one would hope that they would’ve been equally smart with the 7D, but apparently they plan to cater to an un-educated audience who think that more pixels is better.

So I’m disappointed to say the least. But as I continued reading the specs, I was kind of relieved to find nothing of any interest to me. HD Video is there, of course, but for the life of me I can’t think of any reason why I would want it. Just something extra I’ll be paying for, no thanks. It’s probably too much to hope for a non-video alternative in the future.

However, it’s not all that bleak. The new camera has weather sealing! Yes, after years of waiting, it’s finally there. But during all those years of waiting I’ve learned to photograph in inclement weather without weather sealing and I’ve never had a problem, so ironically, I don’t really need the sealing now.

And the best news of all – since the 7D is definitely not for me, I can save my money for something useful. Like a MacBook Pro!

* * *

DP Review has a hands-on preview of 7D.

Time for a rant.

I bought a pair of wellingtons in May, the expensive sort with good ankle support so I could use the wellies instead of hiking boots on my excursions (which often take me to bogs and other wet places). Very early on I noticed that there’s a hole in the tip of the right boot, I have no idea if it was there already when I bought them because if it’s something I did, then I’ve managed to kick something really hard because a splinter had burrowed itself all the way through the thick rubber of the toe part. I applied some superglue to it to seal the hole.

This one hole I could live with, it was easy enough to patch. But today as I was walking on a bog, I noticed that my ankles were getting wet. I had a closer look and found that all the four seams around the ankle were more or less broken! It’s the part of the boot which gets bent the most when you walk and especially when you bend down (which I have to do, being a flower photographer).

Total crap. Photographer or not, I haven’t subjected these boots to anything they shouldn’t be designed for. Bending your ankles is a fairly normal activity, I would say!

For now on, I will buy cheap rubber boots. If one summer is all they’re going to last, they will still match this expensive pair that failed on me after two months of use. The price tag is obviously no guarantee for quality anyway! Which is true for a lot of things these days, unfortunately. Manufacturers cut corners any way they can, relying on the stupidity of the consumers. And I’m one of them, duh on me.

Oh well. Let’s see if duct tape can seal the holes enough so I could at least use the wellies the rest of the season. Cheap boots next year.

* * *

Edit 2009-08-30: I took the broken boots to Ljusdals Motor and they replaced them, no questions asked – absolutely no issue about the missing receipt either! Excellent service, let’s just hope that the new boots hold a bit better.