The Quiet Picture

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…

Awesome! It’s snowing, so the snow cover will be pretty again.

I wanted do a long hike that would take me to some areas where snowshoes are required, while about half of the hike would be on a road where snowshoes would be more of a hinder. I’ve never liked carrying the snowshoes in hand for any longer stretches, so I decided to do something about it now. I rummaged through my sparepart drawer and found a shoulder strap which was just perfect for the snowshoe bag. As long as I’m hiking lightly (small backpack with only the camera, no tripod), it’s possible to sling the snowshoes at the back so they’re not hindering hand movement while walking. Problem solved.

Part of the trail goes under the power lines. They were making their buzzing bad-weather sound and it was a bit creepy to walk under them, with this constant reminder of the high voltage just above my head. For a moment I imagined that the power line was affecting my heart rate, but of course it was all that heavy walking through the snow with snowshoes on my feet that got my heart racing… a good workout for sure!

It’s been a windy week with temperatures above freezing, so the beautiful snow we had last weekend is looking a lot less attractive now. But I wouldn’t let that stop me from going for a walk, I had an idea of a picture so I set out in the forest. The path took me past a cabin which I’ve never taken a closer look of, I just think it’s impolite to trespass. But now with snow on the ground, I didn’t see any tracks going to the cabin so I thought it would be safe. When I got to it, I realised that I wouldn’t have needed to worry about anybody being there – ever. Clearly an abandoned place, and I was really intrigued when I saw a pink Minnie Mouse backpack hanging from the chair on the porch. This was definitely not the kind of subject I had had in mind, but I’ll take it. The original picture idea I had didn’t work out anyway!

Sometimes I’m absolutely convinced that I am the stupidest person ever to hold a camera. This morning I had this great plan to do a double whammy – drive to a spot which would provide me a view to both the moonset and sunrise. I was even going to take a closeup of the almost full moon so I had the 300mm lens mounted on the camera. I figured, first the closeup, then swap lenses, shoot sunrise, shoot moonset. Great plan, eh? So I was driving to my spot and on the way I saw a very nice scene with snow covered pines lit by the early dawn light and full moon above. But I was going to my spot, so stupid me drove on without stopping. I got to my spot, viewed the sky towards sunrise and noticed that there are no clouds, boring, viewed the sky towards the moon, there are clouds in the horizon and the moon was rapidly going down. Stupid me decided that it’s no point in stopping here when I wasn’t going to shoot the boring sunrise and drove on. And drove on… at this part of the road there were no spots to get a decent foreground for the moon and time was running out. But then my luck changed and I found a great spot and half ran out of the car so there I was, stupid me, with a 300mm lens attached to the camera and a scene that required the 24-105mm lens (in the bag)… and the moon disappearing behind the clouds. Absolutely no time to change lenses any more so I just stood there in total disgust and hated myself for not stopping at that first good spot I saw.

When I got back home, the first rays of the sun where lighting up the bird feeder and my anger quickly subsided when I saw that I had quite a few birds as well. It’s been relatively quiet at the feeder in the past weeks, I’ve only had to refill once a week instead of every other day like it was in the autumn. But with that sweet light now, I made use of the 300mm lens that had been so wrong a moment earlier and desperately wished for a bird to settle down on the perch during those few minutes that it was lit by the early sun. No such luck – goes without saying – but if there’s any benefit of the short days, then it’s definitely that the light is good any time there’s any of it so I got a few pictures when the sun had climbed a bit higher in the sky and the perch was lit again.

I’m still thinking about the missed opportunity with the moon. Sure, it was a big mistake to drive past the first spot. But the second spot I found, it would’ve been ever better but I got unlucky with the clouds. Last week we caught the sunset because we took the first best spot instead of searching for something better, but it appears that I didn’t learn anything from that. Stupid me.

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!

Since there isn’t any snow yet, I haven’t given up on the ice patterns. I drove to a small lake that I’ve visited a few times before but never photographed, maybe it doesn’t make much difference with the ice but I also wanted to check out the forest around it. It hasn’t been very cold since yesterday so the frost was gone in most places but the most shaded ones, which of course meant that the ice was nice and clear with a sheet of water on it.

I shouldn’t have been surprised but I was, when I saw that the ice was at least 5cm thick. For new ice, it means that it would’ve carried me if I just dared to walk on it, but I’m the kind of person who’s nervous about crossing lakes in January! The weird part of the ice is the sounds it makes. In the dead of the winter you can hear the ice crack, but right now it sounds completely different. A bit like playing a saw, except deeper and muted. Many times when I stepped on the frozen moss on the shore, the vibrations planted into the ice, making it sing. In my ears, it was saying “stay out of here”…