The Quiet Picture

In the past few weeks I’ve been thinking that maybe I don’t like winter as much as I used to. Or rather, I still like winter, but I also really really want it to be summer so I could go hiking, I have all these big plans already.

But then it started snowing. A lot. And I can’t even think about summer any more, I was just so happy to be walking around in this winter wonderland and marvel at the snow covered landscape! So that’s the problem I’ve had in the past few weeks, it’s not the longing for the summer but it’s the longing for the snow.

It would’ve been a total lunar eclipse today and I was ready to jump in the car and drive to my designated spot at the first sight of a crack in the clouds. But it only started snowing again so it was pointless to drive out, not that I’m terribly disappointed anyway – I’m too happy about the snow to care about missed opportunities!

So it’s finally here, the snow. Looks like it’s only temporary though, so I made sure to enjoy it today. When the snowflakes were falling big as mittens, I was all smiles. Then it started raining instead, and I was slightly less happy and desperate to get some pictures before it all would be gone already. But then it started snowing again and… oh well. I came back home and realised it was colder up here than down where I was, so there’s more snow on the ground. So much for my plan to find new scenery for my “first snow” pictures, instead of walking the same old routes in the village that I’ve done in previous years.

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As mentioned yesterday, I did a hike up the Svartån creek. I took the new trail for the expanded national park, something I’ve been meaning to do all year but never got around to. Glad I did it now, because I was pleasantly surprised. Svartån close to Voxnan is hard to photograph because there’s a lot of vegetation at the water’s edge, but I found out that it gets better upstream. Basically, once you reach the bridge, the landscape around the creek starts look like my favourite spot further upstream, meaning that it’s a lot of cliffs and rocks and pine forest. I found a whole bunch of photo opportunities that will require better conditions and a bigger lens; I had the Canon 24-105mm in the bag but considering the season, it wasn’t worth switching lenses. I must come back here in the summer and/or autumn, it was good enough to endure the mosquitoes!

I’ve never done a hike in the mountains in October before, so it was exiting to see what the day had in store. It turned out that it was all good – the first snow had fallen in the tundra and apart from the occasional snowfall that flew past in the heavy wind, it was a sunny day which allowed us to see the landscape in all its glory. The colours were muted under the thin layer of snow and all the features of the landscape were highlighted, giving it a very graphical quality that you normally don’t see.

We hiked up to the Lill-Skarven fell because there’s a road that takes almost up to the tree line, thus sparing us from wasting time and effort on climbing up the boring part through the forest. Once you’re up there, it’s easy going until you’re at the foot of the mountain but it’s not such a bad climb anyway. It was cold though, so much so that the water in the tube leading out from the water bladder in my backpack was frozen! The October weather is nothing to toy with, the wind was biting through my supposedly wind proof clothing but by the afternoon the sun was sufficiently warm to melt the snow on the ground and the ice in the water tube. But the slight discomfort aside, it was an amazing hike. There’s nothing like the first snow in the mountains!

I’m trying to fight off a cold and it seems like I’m doing a good job at it, because I’m not getting very sick… but I’m not fully fit either so something is going on. Normally I stay indoors when I have a least suspicion of having a cold, but yesterday was an exception. We had agreed to drive to the mountains so I just packed up some painkillers and hoped for the best. And to my pleasant surprise, it was fine. In fact, it seems like doing something like that just helped me feel better!

But anyway, the trip. I was rather naively thinking that we would get sunshine, blue skies and white mountains but we got clouds, heavy wind and snowmelt instead. Oh well. The weather is obviously always a game of luck, but I didn’t expect to see so many black blotches on the mountains. I’ve done many April mountain trips and now that I checked my old pictures, it proves that I wasn’t completely wrong in expecting those white mountains (just check out the pictures from my April trip last year!). But if the weather is a game of luck from day to day, then the seasons aren’t the same from year to year either.

If the clouds hadn’t been bad enough during the day, they just got worse in the evening. In fact, when we drove through Slagavallen which is at about 850m altitude, we found ourselves inside the cloud. So just when it was at its worst, it was at its best – the best pictures of the day, right at the end of it!

Sometimes when I’m on an excursion, I come back with pictures which share a common theme. It can be the subject matter or the style of photography, but you can see this thread quite clearly. The weather plays a big role on what kind of pictures I end up with, but other than that I haven’t considered myself to have a pre-conceived idea of what to do, with a few exceptions here and there (like the moonlight pictures earlier!). But when I looked at today’s crop of pictures, I started to wonder if the idea is there in the back of my mind anyway. I try to go out with an open mind so I can grab any opportunity that I come across, but I probably gravitate towards the kind of pictures I subconsciously decided I would do. It was very evident today, I took quite a lot of pictures (considering that the conditions weren’t the best possible), but when I saw them on the screen I ruthlessly deleted most of them and remaining pictures all follow the same theme – tree trunks in snow. Very simple, borderline abstract, and perfectly suited for the day. Subconscious pre-conception, adaptation to the conditions, or co-incidence? Not that it really matters… only the pictures do!

I had such a blast on Friday’s moonlight walk that I just had to do it again, even if the moon wasn’t quite full any more last night. I learned that the margins are very small when it comes to moonlight, and the moon phase is just one of the factors. There was a lot less light to go around last night, which meant that I had to make a lot of compromises with my exposures. When you’re shooting wide open and the longest shutter speed you can use is 20 secs (even that is too long, actually), the only thing left to change is the ISO and I really hate using a high ISO because the noise will be too evident in these low-light exposures.

So what had happened during just one day?

• Moon phase – 100% vs 97% full.
• Altitude of the moon – moonrise on Friday at 17:44, last night 19:28. When you’re out shooting at 22:00, it means that the moon is much lower in the sky.
• Clouds – it was clear skies on Friday, but now there was a little bit of high cloud which diffused the light.

This meant that I had no chance of taking pictures with such bright foregrounds as I did on Friday. At first I was a bit disappointed but looking at the pictures now, I think they worked out ok anyway. In a way they are more “natural” when the foreground doesn’t look like it’s the middle of the day. So maybe the light last night wasn’t any better or worse than on Friday – just different. But I can say one thing for sure, these late evening walks in the moonlight are just awesome, why didn’t I start doing them for a long time ago?

Thanks to the solar eruptions earlier this week, there was a fair chance of seeing some aurora. I was looking at the aurora forecast all evening yesterday but unfortunately it didn’t look like we would get any northern lights this far south. But since it was a full moon night and the snow cover was looking good, I decided to go for a walk anyway – if I didn’t see any aurora, I would still have all the stars and the moonlight on the snow. It was -20 degrees centigrade so I dressed up warmly, grabbed the snowshoes and set out. Walking through the snow, I was almost sweating under all the layers… even when I stopped to take some pictures, the cold didn’t bother me until I had been out for over an hour and spent more time on stopping and shooting than walking. But still, it was the camera battery that gave out first and I turned back home.

It is just amazing to be walking in the forest at night and not need a flashlight to see where you’re going. I’ve gotta do this again tonight!

My winter photography depends on the weather much more than other seasons. While it doesn’t matter if it’s sunshine or snowfall, the wind plays a big role and it’s not just for the current day. What I mean is that the forest is ugly after the wind strips the snow from the trees and until there is new snow to decorate the trees again, the scenery will continue to look less than photogenic. This means that a weekend can be very low on photography even when there’s nothing wrong with the current weather. Yesterday it was sunshine and today it was overcast with snowfall in the afternoon, both conditions work fine with me but the landscape just doesn’t inspire at all. But it seems like snowfall is better than sunshine and I actually managed to get a few frames today, nothing special of course but under the circumstances, I’m happy to get anything.

So the weekend was more about skiing instead. My goal was to do 30 km this weekend and unbelievably, I did it! This is a personal record. If I want to do anything more, I will either have to start training hard (not gonna happen!) or learn to take some breaks. You know, a sandwich and some coffee in a thermos. But I just don’t feel like doing that when I’m skiing around home so I push through without pauses, other than to snap the occasional picture. In the mountains though, now that’s another story. Going skiing in the mountains without a sandwich and coffee thermos is downright criminal!

I paid a quick visit to Messlingen yesterday, I had to check the cabin. In case you’re wondering why there hasn’t been any updates about it, it’s because I don’t want to talk about it! Trust me you’ll find out when it’s ready, I’m still hoping that one day it will be…

Anyway, I got some time left over for some skiing. I was going to the take the snowmobile trail but when I got there, a snowmobile just drove by so I waited for it to pass. But then it stopped and the driver told me that I shouldn’t ski on the trail because snowmobiles will be coming by at great speed. Huh, so what’s new?! You can hear the machines from a good distance, there’s plenty of time to stop and step aside and wait for them to pass like I always do. But no, this wasn’t good enough, I should only follow the ski trails and stay out of the way of the machines. Somewhat perplexed about this new information, I picked the closest ski trail and followed it as far up the mountain as it goes. At one point it crosses the snowmobile trail again and I saw a skier coming up on it. I waited for her and asked if it’s ok to follow the mobile trail and she confirmed what I thought all along that it is perfectly legal to follow the snowmobile trails on foot (allemansrätten!).

When you self-appoint yourself a police, the least you can do is to check the law before you start enforcing it!

If yesterday was bit of a grey day, then today it was blue skies galore. Just a few degrees minus, almost no wind, perfect snow, and the sun was already warm on my face. Just perfect. It felt so good that I did a few km extra just for the joy of it. And imagine, it will only get better now. There’s plenty to look forward to in March!

I’m getting tired of the local trails in Loos, so I drove to Hamra today. The snowmobile trails go in three directions from Hamra: west towards Västbacka, south towards Malungshed and north to Västersjö, where the trail branches towards Tandsjöborg and Loos. I was interested in the Västersjö trail, because it crosses over some marshland and that normally means photographic potential. I even took my SLR with me today, after only using the compact camera since December. Turned out to be a good call because the trail was nice, the landscape was just as snowy as I had hoped for and the trip was great!