The Quiet Picture

With the landscape looking like it does, I decided to concentrate on the birds this morning. I struck out, the birds just wouldn’t settle on the perch, nothing I can do about it. But to my great surprise, the squirrel turned up. I mean, this is me standing in full view without any camouflage, and still the squirrel came down to eat. Must’ve been really hungry! It even allowed me to change the camera orientation from horizontal to vertical and shift my position a little bit, never happened before. But then I started moving more and more, checking the limits of the squirrel’s tolerance, and it finally had enough and fled.

While I was waiting for the birds, I looked behind me to check the sun’s position. I saw that the distant hills were layered nicely in the morning light, so I turned the camera around and did some landscape photography with the 300mm lens, and wished that it would been even longer so I could’ve gotten a tight horizontal composition on the hill.

I liked the way the sky changed colour from orange to blue, so I went for a vertical stitch. When it was time to put the pictures together, I just couldn’t make the transition from orange to blue work properly (not an issue with the stitch itself, but just the way the natural gradient came out) so in the end I sampled both the blue and orange colours and used an artificial gradient instead. Since the colour is an exact match, almost the only difference between the original sky and the fake one is that the muddy transition part in the original is now clean. Would you miss the muddy transition if you didn’t know it was removed?

Been a warm autumn. Despite the cold nights we had in October, and the little bit of snow that came and went, there’s not a sign of winter yet. The days are just getting darker, that’s all. Even in the mountains it’s warmer than usual, the first cross country skiing race should go off in Bruksvallarna next weekend but I reckon the only way they’re gonna pull it off is if they had stored some snow from last year (they do that in some places you know). The only snow I saw was on top of the higher mountains and even that was melting, it was patchy and not very pretty. I walked around in some boggy areas and felt that the moss pillows were hard under my foot, so there has been some colder periods to freeze them. There was also a little bit of ice left on the small and shaded tarns. The kind of thing I’d expect in September, really.

But at least the weather was nice up there, with a little bit of sun. At home it’s just foggy and damp and the day was too dark for photographing the birds, but what else is there to shoot these days anyway? I had to go up to ISO 800 to get any decent shutter speeds, not a favourite thing to do but since the fog was providing a light background, it was possible to pull of some pictures like the squirrel closeup. Unfortunately I didn’t have a chance to flip the camera for a vertical (the squirrel would’ve been gone long before) so I just barely got the ear tufts in the frame and was happy with that. Added some canvas afterwards, no problem with that when the background is so even. And the crested is a bonus, nothing spectacular but I’m still just a little bit thrilled for getting any pictures of it at all. The crest says it all – it’s damp in the forest.

After taking hundreds of pictures of birds (and other moving things) last weekend, there were obviously quite a few shots I threw away. I mean, out of about 500 pictures, I kept 14. Either I suck at this, or the birds are really difficult, or then it’s the combination… the good news is that with digital, it doesn’t matter how many hundred you shoot if you just get one that you’re really happy with. Out of those 14 I kept, there are 3 I’m really happy with. And another 3 of them should go to the recycle bin because of motion blur and other defects, but I felt that the pictures weren’t completely without merit so I’m keeping them. For the joke factor, if nothing else!

A pre-cheating era Terje Hellesö would’ve received loads of appraise for these. If you take blurry pictures with cropped-off body parts and claim you did it on purpose and call it art, you’ll be everyone’s hero. If you’re a no-name like me and confess that these are pure accidents, then you’re everyone’s zero. I mean c’mon, the least you can do is to get the whole animal in the frame and god forbid if you miss focus on the eye!

It’s a fine line between art and the recycle bin…

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The crested tit picture came very close to the recycle bin. The lack of sharpness in the eye is a real bother but I think it’s also fixable – I could pick up the face from another picture and paste it here and .. well, then the missing wingtip would be a real bother.

The great tit has an even more blurry eye, but I think a lot of blur is better than a little bit. Both wingtips are missing, but the bird’s body and the wings make two opposing diagonals that I thought was nice and saved the picture from the Bin.

And finally the squirrel. No eye in sight, although I swear it was there when I pressed the shutter! But honestly, how could I possible delete this one? I think it’s hilarious and it’s gotta be a 100 times more unique than any other squirrel picture I’ve ever taken!

I’m so happy to see some flowers already coming up. I have a pile of snow about one meter high in front of the kitchen window, but right under the window where it’s very warm when the sun in shining, the ground is already bare of snow and I found the first crocuses coming up! Happy days. And then I also checked one spot where I know the coltsfoot are the first to bloom and sure enough, in that about 2-3 sqm area which is free of snow, the coltsfoot buds are pushing through.

Walking in the forest, it’s also quite clear that one season is coming to an end. The snow crust is hard and as long as you can find some old snow mobile tracks which have frozen, it’s like walking on pavement. It’s easy, but it’s not pretty. The snow is covered with fallen debris from the trees, but I want to see the good side of that, too… it will help the snow melt faster when the sun heats up the debris!

I warned you that I would post some more squirrel pictures! The “problem” is that I’ve taken better squirrel pictures in the past two weeks than I’ve done in the past whatever years. The second problem is that every picture I have from the past weeks is the animal sitting on the same little perch, which only leaves me trying to catch different positions and hoping for different light.

This is my favourite from the previous week’s session. Nice position with curled tail and some blue and gold hues in the background.

While it’s nice that the squirrel faced the other direction so I get some variation, it’s probably not ideal anyway. I get a feeling that the picture is unbalanced because everything of any weight is on the left side. I tried to remedy the situation by cropping from the left to get rid of the background, which you can see in the next picture.

So now we have some more empty space on the left and the squirrel is sitting on the right side (by a whisker). But I still don’t think it’s well balanced, even if it’s better than the previous picture?

And finally, my favourite! The squirrel got nervous a couple of times and ran up the tree to calm down. I could hear it coming back down, but it moves very very quickly and it was impossible to catch it in a frame and stretched out while climbing it’s too long to fit the frame anyway. But there was this one moment when it settled on the stick and curved the tail and gave me just enough time to focus on the eye and re-compose… imagine my joy when I found that the eye is tack-sharp! Needless to say that I didn’t get a second chance at this. And please don’t break my heart by saying that it’s too tight at the bottom. I think I could get some more pine trunk from another picture and add it here if I really really must, but I’ve decided to love this picture as it is!

And wanna hear something funny? I still have some squirrel pictures left…

Since I have nothing else to post, I thought I would share a couple of a squirrel pictures caught the other day. It was a pleasant surprise that this time the squirrel didn’t run off when I opened the window, so I got a number of a frames and some of them quite nice, too. But it seems like there’s plenty of food in the nature because the squirrel doesn’t visit my feeding spot every day and when it finally comes, it doesn’t stay around for very long. A few years ago when I had up to five different squirrels in the neighbourhood, they would come by every day and fight each other over the food so either they were lazy or food was running short in the wild. Although maybe squirrels are solitary and just don’t like the company, rather than fighting because they were starving!

It’s spring, there’s no doubt about that. Warm during the day and cold during the night, and the trails are covered with crushed ice rather than soft snow. I went skiing yesterday and the glide was fabulous – unfortunately it was as good sideways and backwards as it was forward. So I took the snowshoes today but I ended up carrying them rather than walking with them because as long as you’re following any tracks or trails it’s like walking on pavement. Photographically speaking, the highlight was this squirrel that allowed me to take one shot. I literally mean that – it’s the only one frame I got before it scurried away!

Spring is definitely in the air. It was a sunny and warm weekend, the snow cover was reduced by a few centimetres and the roads are thawing in the sunny places, birds are singing and I’m totally un-inspired by it all. Honestly, great weather to be out but I’ve no idea where to point my camera. Caught a squirrel anyway.

You may (or may not) have noticed that the squirrels have been absent from the blog this winter. The reason is very simple – I haven’t seen any squirrels since early January. The seeds and nuts can go untouched for days so they’re not around here even when I’m not. And when the food did disappear, it looked like it was the roe deer that had helped themselves to a snack but now there’s so much snow that the deer are avoiding the de-tour to the squirrel perch.

So now I’m pinning my hopes on the mating season, maybe it will bring some new activity to my corner of the woods – I saw two squirrels today anyway!

And speaking of absentees, I haven’t seen any birds either. I thought my new feeding setup was a success in the autumn, but then when the snowing started in December the birds disappeared and I haven’t seen them since. I hope they’re ok though and just feeding elsewhere.

Full moon tomorrow but the weather might not co-operate, so I wanted to catch the moonset today as it coincides nicely with sunrise. Only problem was the solid bank of clouds in the north-west so I didn’t stand a chance. But since I was already out and about, I went for the sunrise instead and now I got seriously lucky – cold mist. By far the best sunrise I’ve photographed this winter and to think that I would’ve completely missed this orange mist had I not been out in search of the moon. You win some, you lose some.

When I got home, a surprise was waiting for me. I have seen very little of the squirrels so far, but now one of them had finally come for brunch. So I just swapped the zoom lens for 300mm and got some keepers even if the light wasn’t ideal. I hope I will soon see more birds as well… they are only making short visits so it’s no point even setting up the tripod.

In the afternoon I had high hopes of catching a nice sunset to go with the nice sunrise. Just a little bit of cloud that might provide additional colour, but the colour never really materialised. While I was waiting for something interesting to happen with the sunset, I glanced behind me and saw the moon rising (moonrise already at 13:30, but it takes a while to work its way high up in the sky). Now I was racing the time to find a good spot for the moon before the sky got too dark, and I got lucky – again. A row of spruces on the edge of a clearing so I could put the moon right above the treetops. The picture is a bit misleading, really – the moon was much much higher on the sky than it appears here, but who cares. I got my moon.

I had hoped for a moonset and sunset… but I got a sunrise and a moonrise instead. And you know what? There’s no way I could’ve done anything better even if my plans had played out perfectly!

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The post title is a kind of a play on words, a private joke. You’ll need to watch Soapdish to get it…