The Quiet Picture

I had originally planned to ski another stretch of the snow mobile trail from Hamra, but after almost getting stuck in the snow when parking my car yesterday, I didn’t feel like trying my luck. So I took the same old trail in Loos, the one which goes over three lakes, up to Ryggskog and then back to Loos. It’s a nice 12K trip and the most photogenic of all the routes I have in Loos, although of course the law of diminishing returns is eating into my results. What helps is the changing conditions and today the landscape was at its snowy best.

Initially it looked like the clouds would break up like they did yesterday, but the sun never showed itself so the light wasn’t a problem. And initially I wasn’t getting any interesting pictures done, I’m raising the bar by using the small Tokina wideangle and for some reason I just have trouble making it work in the snow. But like I said, I’ve taken a picture of almost every photogenic or semi-photogenic spot along the way, so I’m trying to create something different using the wideangle instead. Maybe I’ll get lucky.

And lucky indeed! When I got to Ryggskog, I finally decided to check out a deserted house that the trail passes. I’ve been looking at it for years, wondering if it’s safe to trespass… but with all this snow, it’s pretty obvious that nobody’s been at the house all winter so I didn’t worry about it any more. And am I glad that I did this! The place turned out to be a real gem. Maybe the house itself isn’t so fascinating, but there’s a few barns as well and as soon as I had a closer look at them, I knew that I just have to get back there in the summer. It’s bound to be even better with things growing in the garden, so now I just have to find out if the house is inhabited in the summer or if it’s free for me to shoot!

With the big solar eruption the other day, the forecast for aurora was good last night. I wish the weather forecast had been equally good, but there were some clouds which could ruin the whole thing. I decided to try it anyway, I mean if I got a break in the clouds then it would definitely be worth the while.

As I was packing, I realised that I had forgotten to recharge the batteries. That left me with one almost empty and one half charged battery, which is not a lot in the freezing temperatures but good for some frames anyway.

When I was halfway to my spot, I realised that I had forgotten to take a flashlight with me. On a moonless night, a less than ideal situation and I was reluctant to turn back to get it (especially when the next possible place to make a U-turn was actually that spot I was driving to). Then I remembered that I had one of those small key fob flashlights in my car keychain so I checked if it still lights up after all these years – it did! Better than nothing, because it was really dark – no moon, and almost no stars because of the clouds.

It was -17°C so a bit on the cold side to be standing still all evening and wait for something to happen. It’s possible it would’ve been less cold if I had chosen a higher spot, but I was standing by a lake. The foreground is such a big problem (I haven’t found anything I’m happy with) that this time I decided to eliminate it out of the equation and go for the best open view instead.

The clouds finally cleared and revealed the stars but the aurora was not the spectacle I had hoped for. There was no action going on, just a big green mist that was actually beginning to fade out. I decided to wait until either my extremities or the camera battery would freeze and as it turned out, it was my nose. So I’m still waiting for my first great aurora picture, but at least I got to drive my new car. I love that car!

It was another great day with overcast weather. The difference to yesterday is that there was no fog, but it was snowing a little bit from a thin cloud cover. That cloud cover provided a very special light that made the snow radiate in pure white in contrast with the different hues in the sky. Towards the sun, the clouds were yellowish grey. In the opposite direction, they were blueish grey with just a touch of sky showing behind the clouds. And between these, it was just plain old grey. That luminescent snow is just awesome and when it happens, you have to be out there to enjoy it. It was a brilliant day – both figuratively and literally!

I’ve been thinking that January has been quite disappointing so far, but just one weekend like this and it turns around the whole month. Sure, I’m not creating any masterpieces here, but the funny thing is that I’m also skiing for the sake of skiing and not just to take pictures. Before I moved to Loos, that would’ve been unthinkable!

Couldn’t ask for anything better than this. In the dead of winter, these overcast and slightly foggy days with snow on the trees and cold temperatures are my favourites. In the spring winter when the days are getting warmer, those sunny days with snow on trees are preferred… but it’s only January now and I spent three hours skiing and shooting and enjoying every second of it. Well almost, by the end of it I was absolutely starving and wondered why I didn’t pack any snacks when I knew that I would do this long trip. Tomorrow then… it should be an equally nice day!

This must be a personal record. I’ve waited until Thursday to upload Sunday’s pictures! The reason is quite simply that last weekend was not very good for photography. Saturday was completely wasted (good for skiing, but not for photo) and on Sunday it started snowing a little bit, but not enough to decorate the trees to any significant degree. I just took some snapshots but since this blog also serves as some kind of diary for myself, I’m posting one of those snaps. So that in the future when I try to remember what the weather was like in the middle of January in 2012, I can refer to this one…

On Friday when I was skiing, I noticed that some others had been skiing the same trails. I was very surprised, because normally nobody skis these trails except me so I thought maybe some new people have moved into the village (as unlikely as it sounds). Then today when I was skiing, I met no less than three other skiers. That’s like… three more than I’ve ever met on these trails, all winters combined. It turned out that they were visiting relatives, so that explains that. We chatted a little bit and agreed that it’s a crying shame that the locals don’t take advantage of these fine trails, other than for snowmobiling, of course. They made a perfect analysis of the villagers’ mindset – “åker snöskoter, fiskar, grillar korv och blir feta” (ride snowmobiles, ice fish, grill sausages and get fat).

Since these visitors were going back home today, the trails will be my own again. Except for the snowmobiles and their sausage chomping riders.

The day had started overcast but by the time I came back, the clouds had started to dissipate. The sky cleared completely by moonrise so I had a go at it. I’m getting really annoyed that I can’t find any good spots for moonrise/moonset or sunrise/sunset within an easy walking distance from home, so doing anything like that on a short notice is almost impossible. There is no lack of good viewpoints, but good foregrounds are conspicuous in their absence. And to be honest, I haven’t found any good viewpoints without any signs of logging within a reasonable driving distance either, so I’m always in trouble with the full moon scenery. It has almost lead me to hoping it would be overcast weather every full moon so I don’t even have to search for a spot…

With the late winter and some bad weather in between, I haven’t done any skiing this winter. Until today! I was so excited about going out that I was on the move before sunrise and it really was great to be back on track. I was happy to see that I wasn’t completely out of shape either, so I did a small extension to my trip instead of taking the shortest route back home. But now that I’m writing this, the trip is catching up with me and I’m half tempted to go to bed already and it’s not even 9pm yet.

And yes, I know that the copyright stamp in the pictures is old, but I’m way too tired to fix that now!

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?

Last night we got hit by a storm. I had trouble sleeping because the wind was screaming in the forest and I heard some cracking sounds which told me that trees were falling or breaking off. I was really nervous that a tree would fall on the house, but as far as I could see when I looked outside, the wind was blowing in a rough west-east direction which meant that the only part of the house at risk of a fallen tree is my neighbour’s flat (this house consists of two flats). I also check the weather forecast and it said the same thing, winds blowing from west or south-west. So I finally decided to put on earplugs to get some sleep anyway.

In the morning as soon as there was enough light, I looked out the window and saw that a tree had fallen outside the bedroom, almost touching the house. I went outside and found almost total destruction – well over half of the trees in that part of the forest had fallen or broken off. More so, the direction they had fallen was north-south, which means that they had all come down towards the house! I was happy about the earplugs… had I heard what’s going on, it would’ve frightened the living daylights out of me for sure. This forest closest to the house, they did some logging here a couple of years ago so the forest wasn’t very dense to start with, thus making it more vulnerable to the winds. And now it’s obviously even less dense and the few trees that are left standing are probably weaker than they were before. Which means that when the next storm arrives, there’s a big risk that more trees will fall even without a tornado. There is safety in numbers, but those numbers don’t exist any more.

When I walked around, I started getting a better picture of the night’s events. In some parts of the forest there were only a few trees fallen, but they were in the west-east direction, thus following the direction of the storm. But the areas which had suffered the worst damage were more in the north-south axis and I can even plot the path this tornado took through the forest and my house was right in the middle of it! So I’m counting myself lucky that no damage was done to the house. I just hope that my cabin fared as well, considering that the storm was even worse in that region. Maybe I should go and take a look next weekend… in my new car…

Considering the havoc from a photographer’s perspective, things are looking pretty bleak. If I thought yesterday that the snowcover was spoiled, then today you can hardly even see the snow from under all the debris. But maybe in some places which were spared from the hurricane, new snow can still rescue the landscape and give me something to shoot this winter. But this forest closest to me, which has given me so many pictures through the years, it’s gone. It’s just a wide open space now.

Isn’t it wonderful, the days are getting longer already! But the winter has hardly begun, we still have to get over January which really is the dead of winter. Today however, it reminded me more of a day in March with mild temperatures, bare trees and totally spoiled snow cover. Definitely no conditions for landscape photography but I had the Powershot with me just in case. And would you know, you can always find something. If the nature doesn’t provide, then make it yourself…