The Quiet Picture

I think I found a new favourite place. The same one I visited a week ago, except this time I followed the streak of marshland at the northern end of the lake to further explore the area. And now it was afternoon, which provides a more suitable light for this place than morning. It was a gorgeous day – nothing but blue skies. Which is of course not so exciting in a photo and then you can also add some wind so that I couldn’t use the water in the compositions, so all my pictures fall short of the experience. Having said that, I’m posting a panorama (cropped from one shot, it wasn’t worth a stitch) that highlights the problem with wideangles and polarisers shooting at a 90 degree angle from the sun. Intense blue sky on one side, and bland pale on the other! But at least it gives an overview of the lake and I will come back here, in calmer weather and with some nice puffy clouds in the sky.

The universal truth among photographers is that the best light occurs during sunrise and sunset. And then there’s the equally true “it depends”, but instead of explaining at length on what it depends on, I will just say that light is also a perception. Simply put, it is what we perceive it to be at any given situation.

Today I had a Moment which changed my perception.

I left after breakfast because the forecast said that it will be a sunny morning and rainy afternoon. As I was driving my location, I was cursing at the high cloud – that nightmarish thin cloud cover which doesn’t entirely block the sun but it makes everything look very dull. Is it just me or has there been many such days this summer? But I didn’t have a plan B so I drove ahead anyway, if all else fails at least I could do some scouting because I had never been to this location where I was going now.

By the time I got there, the sun was completely blocked. I practised with long exposures and let the wind blur the grasses and smooth the water and after a while, I was rewarded by the faintest of sunshine and a sliver of blue sky in the horizon. It was only temporary but it gave me hope, so I settled down to have a cup of coffee.

And that’s when I had the Moment.

It was about sitting on a soft pillow of moss and lichen. It was the gentle wind and warm sun on my face. It was the backlit trees on the opposite shore and it was the family of swans and how the light was playing on the feathers whey they extended their wings. It was a Moment of absolute peace.

By the time the sun was out and the sky was blue, it was already a late morning. The universal truth among photographers tells me that the light is not good. But for me it was perfect – the Moment had changed my perception of it. The Moment was more important than the pictures and it liberated me to see beyond the light.

Maybe for anyone else these pictures are just snapshots during harsh light. But for me, they are the experience, the Moment, when I no longer had to search for inspiration like I have been doing all summer because the inspiration had come to me.

The light had never been more right than it was right then.

Strange feeling. While I had this great urgency to take some pictures, at the same time I was almost unmotivated to do it. In fact, unmotivated to do pretty much anything. But I haven’t lost all of my will power yet, so at first I went for a long walk while it still was overcast, and then in the afternoon when the sun started coming out, I drove to a nice little tarn that I haven’t photographed yet. Or maybe it’s not so nice – it’s called Elaktjärnen, “mean tarn”. I tried to figure out why it would deserve such a name, and the closest I could come was that it was surrounded by a lot of dead trees but I assume they’re dead because of beaver activity; there was a beaver hut on the shore (probably abandoned a long time ago already).

I had company, a lonely whooper swan that occasionally whooped at me while I was walking around the tarn. The dramatic light and clouds faded into blandness while I was still trying to figure out how capture the place so it was just as well that I got a text message from work, I needed to look at a server that was misbehaving. It’s always a bit surreal when it happens… I’m in the middle of nowhere, and the phone beeps. Reality calls.

I waited to see if the sun would come out again in the evening but it didn’t. Until the sunset – it turned out to be a nice one, and for the second time in a row I was looking at the beautiful light through a window instead of the camera viewfinder. That was like the second nice sunset this summer and I’ve missed both! And I can only blame myself for it.

Last day with the 5D MkII that I was supposed to use for wideangle photography. Ironic then that most of the time I was zooming the 24-105mm lens at full tilt and of course found it short, so if I would ever get a full frame camera I would probably need to invest in a 70-200mm lens while I’m at it. And a new computer – my workstation had considerable trouble dealing with the 5D files which are twice the size of the 40D raws!

It was a sunny day but I’m definitely having trouble of making use of the evening light. I’ve never been quite as into sunset light as I know that I should be as a photographer, but shooting at sunset is not nearly as easy as setting up your tripod and waiting for the light to happen. You have to choose your subjects with great care, scout ahead and then double check in the evening. It’s the shadows – the thing you thought would be nicely lit is suddenly shaded in the evening. And shadow is something we have plenty of around here. In small scale, it’s the forest. In large scale, it’s the hills. What it means that you don’t ever really get to see the actual sunset, the time when the sun “officially” sets. It will be gone behind the nearest hill long before it has actually set. There are no grand views here and even if you do find a good viewpoint, there is so much logging that the landscape is guaranteed to be ruined in every direction.

Or then I just haven’t learned how to handle the evening light. I’m fairly sure that it’s exactly the same problem with sunrise light – it’s just that I rarely bother to wake up early enough to check it!

After a couple of trips to the mountains with a lot of hiking, I was happy to take it easy this weekend. It was un-inspiring weather anyway, with a slight chance of evening sun and calm waters last night so I took the bike and pedalled down to the lake. There’s a nice little tarn next to the shooting range, they even set up a new picnic table this summer so it’s a great place to enjoy a cup of coffee in the peace and quiet – provided nobody’s there shooting, of course. But they never do that on a Saturday evening, so I got the place all for myself.

I walked up and down the shore with camera in hand, ready for any ray of light through the extensive cloud coverage. I found a nice spot and to my amazement, the sun did come out a little bit! No spectacular light by any means, but better than nothing and it actually fits the mood of the day.

I wasn’t all lazy all weekend though. I found a spot with lots of wild raspberries, it’s very close to home but for some reason nobody else seems to have discovered it because the raspberry bushes were unpicked, although the berries are ripe and sweet. This is in a place where the forest was cut a few years ago so the raspberries haven’t been there for long, I won’t tell anyone they’re there but I suspect that sooner or later they will find the spot. Loads and loads of wild raspberries…. easy pickings, quite literally!

There is a really nice waterfall close to the road between Hede and Funäsdalen. As usual, it’s not signed from the road so you need to do your research beforehand to find out it’s there. The creek is called Rändån and the waterfall is Rändåfallet.

When you come from the direction of Hede, you will pass thru a small village called Långå. About 8 km from the T-junction in Långå (a road branches off to the right but you continue straight on the 84), the road crosses over two creeks. In between the bridges, there’s a yellow sign for “Långå 7″ for a gravel road. Look right and you’ll see a parking lot and a large information board – that’s where you park the car! And now you just hike the very easy trail 1 km through a pine forest to get to the foot of the falls. The trail is level and dry (unless it’s been raining a lot) so you don’t even need any hiking boots to manage it. But then if you want to follow the falls up (which you will definitely want to do!), you have to work a bit harder to get up the steep hill. But it’s still easy.

The first part of the falls is wide but it falls in many smaller falls instead of one big. It takes some searching but you’ll find some nice angles to shoot those smaller falls close to the right bank where the trail is. When you get past this part of the falls, the creek levels off a little bit so now there’s a series of smaller falls. About 300 m further upstream, there’s another big waterfall and that’s as far as you need to go.

As usual with waterfalls, their photo worthiness depends a lot on the volume of water running down. My personal preference is low volume because it reveals more textures and forms, so the best time to visit is late summer and autumn. However, I think that Rändån is regulated upstream from the falls so the volume of water might not always be relative to the season. You’ll get an idea of the situation already from the main road where the bridge crosses over the creek so if it looks like there’s too much or too little water, you might want to save the visit for another day.

Rändåfallet is perhaps not the most photogenic waterfall and it certainly takes some work to find the best angles. It’s a very nice place though so if you’re at all interested in waterfalls, it’s well worth the visit and you should never leave the camera in the car!

I’m back at home now, had a relaxing day at work – meaning, I didn’t have to use my feet much. Coffee machine and back! I did two small hikes yesterday which puts my four day total to exactly 50 km of hiking, and I could easily go for another hike now. The only thing that is making me tired is the mosquito that kept me awake the other night, I tried to kill it but every time I switched on the light, the bug would sit still and I couldn’t find it. A male mosquito obviously because it didn’t bite me, but the noise it makes just keeps the stress hormones going and thus no sleep. But enough about the mosquitoes!

The first small hike I did yesterday was to the Svalåkläppen fell off Bruksvallarna. A very easy peak to reach from Rockvallen and then you get to eat a waffle at the Kariknallen cabin, even if their waffles are not as good as those server at Djupdalsvallen. But then again, the waffles at Djupdalsvallen are the best, period! Maybe I’ll get there in September before they close for the season…

As I was driving home and the clouds were still not clearing much, I suddenly had an idea that I should visit the Rändåfallet waterfall in Långå. I’ve been there only once before and it was years and years ago when I was shooting film. The falls are very easy to reach and they are quite nice so it was about time I paid another visit. Since there isn’t any abundance of information about the falls on the Internet, I will write another blog entry about them later – for now, just a picture that shows a small detail of the falls.

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I’ve reprocessed some of the pictures I’ve posted here in the past days. If you’re a regular reader, clear your browser cache and re-visit Thursday‘s (first picture updated) and Friday‘s posts (all pictures updated). I’ve re-done the stitched panorama in Friday’s post, I used an adjustment brush to “fade” the tree that was cut off in the frame. It’s still cut off, obviously, but I hope it’s not as distracting as it was before.

I also realised something about the Tvärån falls from Thursday. I was already speculating when I was there that I took a wrong turn and didn’t end up quite where I was supposed to end up. The thing was that as I was following the trail up the creek, there was a brook that came from the side. I was almost sure that I should’ve crossed the side brook, but there was no way I could’ve gotten across without getting my feet wet. It was too wide to jump over and too deep to wade over (without taking off my boots). And the trail that continued over on the other side was much weaker than the trail that turned to follow the side brook, thus I decided to follow the better trail. Had I had the instructions with me (forgot them in the car with the map), I would’ve taken off my boots and waded across the water, because that was the right trail to take! So now I’ve missed what presumably is the best waterfall in Tvärån, very annoying to have done all that hiking and miss the target. Which means that I will have to get back there one day, long and boring hike or not!

Today’s hike was to the Ösjöstugan cabin and then over to the peaks of Ösjövålen and Osjökläppen. It’s a long-ish hike so I wanted to make it a bit easier by taking the ski lift up from Ramundberget up to the plateau, which meant that it was fairly level hiking to the Ösjön cabins. After that, the trail goes up and when I got to the pass, I had Ösjökläppen on my left and Ösjövålen on the right. Both are low peaks so I didn’t have to put much effort on reaching them from the pass, as you can see from the picture (both peaks are there and the pass in the middle, and you can just barely see the cabins as well, the trail is pointing the way).

Ösjökläppen turned out to be interesting. There was this barren streak going down the mountain, just about the only plant growing in the streak was the alpine catchfly (Lychnis alpina). But then, there were loads of them. Never seen anything like it. A bit higher up I came across some rock piles and holes that were filled with water now. And then it hit me – copper. The alpine catchfly loves copper, which means that there is a very high concentration of copper here. No other plants survive. But outside this barren streak, it was life as normal.

If the plant life was normal, I found it very strange how many fallen reindeer antlers I was seeing. You’d think that there are antlers everywhere in the mountains, but it’s not at all like that. It’s quite rare that you see any and on this hike, I found 11 and they were all on these two mountains, within a distance of about 1.5-2 km. That’s probably more fallen antlers than I have ever seen before, all put together!

On the way back I stopped at the Ösjöstugan cabin. I had read about a natural well close to the cabin and I must say it’s the most special well I’ve ever seen. I’ve seen natural wells before, but I haven’t actually seen how the water flows up. But here, the water was just bubbling up (without creating any bubbles but I don’t know how to otherwise describe it) and the water was absolutely clear. I drank it and it didn’t taste like anything. I mean, there was really no taste in the water! Pure as it gets.

All that remained was the hike back to the car. When I was going down the hill to Ramundberget and my car, I was glad I had taken the lift up. The hike was over 16 km and although I wasn’t tired as such, I was still hoping that the evening would be cloudy so I didn’t have to drag myself out to shoot the light. It’s almost time for sunset now as I’m typing this… and it looks like rain!

Today was going to be the rainiest day of the vacation but it didn’t bother me in the least because I can rain-proof both myself and the camera. And I knew exactly what I was going to shoot today, as well – waterfalls. There just isn’t any better motif for a rainy day than waterfalls. I love the exposed wet rocks surrounding the waterfall, you can do wonders with the polarising filter. Dry rocks on the other hand, it doesn’t matter how much you rotate the filter but they’ll still be dull.

A few years ago I visited a place called Silverfallet off Skärkdalen (a few km north from Flatruet) but I wasn’t impressed. I found the falls to be un-photogenic and all but forgot about them until this trip when I knew I would be having some rain and needed waterfalls to shoot. So today as I as hiking up along the falls… all I could think about was that I must’ve been having a bad day back then, because now I found them absolutely gorgeous! It’s a 2.5 km hike along a very wet and muddy trail (it’s like that even when it hasn’t been raining) until you get to the Öjönån creek, there’s a bridge across and then the trail follows the falls up to where they level out near the Öjön lake. It’s 1 km there – and it’s just one exciting fall after another during the whole distance. Some of them are harder to photograph than others, but considering how many of them there are, you still have plenty to shoot! So why would I ever have thought that this was not a good place? Well, it was early summer when I was there. Too much water – I don’t like it when the volume is high. You lose the definition and detail. And secondly, it was a sunny day. I can’t deal with waterfalls and sunlight.

There is quite a lot of marshland on the way to the falls. I’ve been here before to shoot orchids, but it’s always been early July. Now in late July I could see that this was an even better place for orchids that I had thought. Most of them had withered already of course, but the fragrant orchids were still colourful. Also found twayblade in bloom and some late blooming heath spotted orchids. And the withered ones… early marsh orchid ssp. cruenta. Lapland marsh orchid. And I even found a lesser twayblade! I was just simply amazed by the abundance of them. Two weeks ago, it must’ve looked amazing! Easily beats Hamrafjället and Mittåkläppen which are normally touted as the première flower locations. Of course it’s not all about orchids, but in my mind, I always start with orchids and the rest is bonus.

Silverfallet turned out to be ten times better than Tvärån that I did yesterday, with only half the trouble. Faster to get there and nicer to be there!

Since this was a relatively short hike, I did a small promenade in the evening. I followed the Mittån creek upstream, I knew there wouldn’t be any major falls but some whitewater anyway. I got to this place which I thought could be something…. I stood there for a long time, trying to figure out how to do it. I couldn’t think of anything so I continued walking and didn’t really find anything interesting along the way. On the way back, I was determined to try the spot anyway. I set up the tripod and camera and tried and tried… but I just couldn’t make it happen. Until suddenly this semi-abstract materialised in the viewfinder! Persistence paid off.

I have another mini-holiday this weekend. And there’s only really one place where I can spend it – the mountains.

Today’s hike was at Ramundberget. I’ve read about the waterfalls of Tvärån and because the day was going to be overcast, waterfalls were just the right thing to shoot. Problem is… the waterfalls weren’t as photogenic as I had hoped for. However, I was impressed by the surroundings, especially up towards the tree line. Another place which will look just simply spectacular in autumn colours! But it’s a long hike there, 5 km just to get from the car to creek and then about 2 km upstream. The waterfalls are bigger downstream but it’s difficult to find a good angle, maybe it will be easier in the autumn where the insects aren’t quite as numerous. They can be a real inspiration killer!

And to be honest, the waterfalls further up were a little bit less exciting. It’s clear that the volume of water is very low at the moment, but I’m not sure if more water would help. But I wasn’t disappointed as such, I was just so happy to be there. Always. Hiking up to the alpine tundra cheers me up like nothing else!

And while I was up there, I also got a close view of Skarsfjället. It’s an impressive mountain at over 1500m, the highest peak of the massif is bit like a round-sided pyramid which is easy to recognise. Because it’s the highest mountain in the neighbourhood, it means it’s visible from a lot of places around here. When it’s visible at all – it seems like has its own climate and the peak is often hidden in the clouds. But not today, even if it was a bit of an overcast and dull day.

So what did I forget then? I forgot the macro lens and compass at home. I forgot the map in the car. I forgot to check the reserve batteries for the GPS (which I wanted to keep operational when I don’t have a compass and a map!). It turned out that the spare battery holder I grabbed when I left home contained used batteries which I obviously had forgotten to throw away back when the batteries were used! But no harm done, there was just enough juice to keep the GPS powered up so I could see when I was back at the car that I had hiked over 15 km. Not bad… but I think I will do a shorter hike tomorrow!

But most importantly… I forget all my worries!