The Quiet Picture

I’ve noticed that lately (=past few months) I’ve been doing a lot of  (=a few more than usual) black and white pictures. It has gotten me wondering if something has changed with me, because I’ve never really had any appreciation for b&w pictures. Which is kind of strange actually, because if my goal is to simplify my pictures, then wouldn’t it be logical that I would also eliminate the colour from them? But the answer to that is that I’m a nature photographer. Most of photography (if you don’t like the generalisation, then read it as “most of my photography”) is actually documentary; what sets photographers apart from each other is how we document it. For me, colour is an essential part of nature. I don’t think I’ve ever even considered converting any of my flower pictures to b&w, because what is a flower without its colour? The botanist in me wants to portray the flower, the only tricks I will use are a careful selection of background and foreground, DOF and composition. That’s flower photography 101.

So back to this b&w issue then. Since colour is so important to me, the only times when I’ve converted a picture to b&w, it has happened out of necessity, not out of inspiration. In other words, I’ve had a picture I’ve otherwise liked but where I just can’t make the colours work. Use greyscale, problem solved. So why are so many of my recent favourite pictures b&w? Just a coincidence of having a lot of colour issues recently, or a shift in my thinking?

I decided to put this to a test. I couldn’t have picked a better day for it for sure, a typical November’s day with sleet, rain, drizzle, fog, low clouds, icy lakes and creeks and low light. I drove to one of my favourite places, the Svartån creek with old pine forest, rocks, cliffs and all kinds of mosses and lichens. Normally I visit this place to shoot the waterfalls, but this time I was set on exploring the forest instead. A good choice, because I found that the cliffs around the creek were covered with wet ice; it would’ve been stupid dangerous to venture on them when they were so slippery that you couldn’t even stand still on the cliffs without your feet starting to glide. So there I was in the forest, with a goal to find b&w pictures – not something that I will convert to greyscale as an afterthought, but something that I know even beforehand that I want in b&w. It was a good exercise and I spent a lot of time exploring the place, which gave me a great opportunity to reflect on this b&w issue. I came to the conclusion that my photographic preferences haven’t really shifted. I think what has happened is that I have learned to accept b&w as a creative option, so it has become a tool in my photographic toolbox just like DOF or background control or the shutter speed. But one thing hasn’t changed – I still don’t think that b&w is a “one size fits all” option. The best way (only way?) to use it is when it brings out something in the picture that colour can hide. But let’s face it, how often does that happen in documentary style nature photography?

After getting the crested tit portrait last week, I feel like my bird portrait quota is full. So I decided to try something new and catch the birds in flight, or at least with their wings raised. Now that’s a challenge for sure! I stood a little bit further away than normal to give the wings some room in the frame and then when a bird sat on a perch, I kept the finger on the shutter to catch the moment they take to flight. And then of course the bird would just sit there until the buffer was full and lift off right after that… But even when the buffer didn’t get full, it’s incredibly difficult to catch the right moment. I also found out that the 40D is not fast enough, and all too often I would have a sitting bird in one frame and an empty perch in the next, because the bird flew off in between the frames. That’s how quick they are! And stuff like getting a sharp eye, I can just dream about it. It wasn’t the brightest of days and I was working with shutter speeds of about 1/500 which would be plenty enough for the portraits, but for the birds on the move it’s not enough and there was motion blur in the eye.

So doing this perfectly, in natural light in the late autumn, with the 40D, is borderline impossible. I could of course keep shooting hundreds and hundreds of frames and at some point the numbers would tip in my favour and I would get that perfect shot, so we’ll see… until then, I’ll settle for this compromise where the eye is sharp for a sitting bird, and the wings are spread for a bird in flight. I had no idea I had caught this until I saw on it on the computer!

Anyone who has seen any of my close-up photos knows that I like smooth backgrounds. While it makes for very simple and accessible pictures that truly highlight the subject itself, it’s not always the desirable effect. Sometimes it’s nice to show the flower in its environment, so occasionally make some efforts to achieve this. And invariably, I fail.

When you start including the environment in the picture, it gets very complex. Finding the compromise of showing a little but not too much as to distract has proven to be a monumentally difficult task for me. Take the wood sorrel I tried to shoot last night. They were growing among grasses so I wanted to leave some of the grass in the picture, a bit fuzzy but still recognisable. But the grasses were all over the place… so I took a frame, reviewed it on the LCD, decided that one blade of grass was going distractingly in the wrong direction and removed it. Take a new frame, decide that one straw is showing too strongly. Remove. Click. Remove. Click. Remove. In the end I had the wood sorrel and a smooth background where you could just see a hint of a grass blade. And this is how it always goes for me. I start with good intentions but end up with the same type of picture I always take, simple and accessible.

The picture you see here is somewhere in the middle of the process. I’ve already removed quite a lot of the grass and I’ve also stepped up to f3.5 (started with f5.6 for more DOF) but you still see some pattern in the grass. I don’t like those light reflections on the right, so of course I removed the grasses for the next frame. And then removed more… and more…

Last week I was hoping that I was done with the crocus pictures, but I just had to post this one. It’s not very polite to shove a lens up to anyone’s reproductive system but the crocus didn’t mind and I promise that no flowers were harmed in the process! In order to get this picture, I had to use an extension tube with the macro lens and this is actually the first time I’ve ever used the combo. The Sigma 150mm lens does 1:1 magnification but it wasn’t enough to completely fill the frame with the crocus so the extension tube came out of the retirement where it’s been since I got the long macro. I’ve been thinking about my flower strategy for the summer and one idea I’ve toyed with is doing more genuine macro photography. The definition of what “macro photography” really is can be a bit fuzzy, but I think that most of my flower pictures are close-ups rather than macro – true macro starts with life-size magnification. But regardless of the amount of the magnification, the appeal of the technique for me is to completely fill the frame with the subject!

Since we now have more and more green things sprouting from the earth, I made an inventory tour of my favourite spring flower places. I was mostly interested in the daphne and wood anemone and found out that I probably won’t be shooting the daphne on 1 May like I did last year. And the wood anemone… I got a real shock in my favourite wood anemone spot. It was covered by 40 cm of snow! The place gets direct sunlight only in the morning but the nights have been cold so the morning light doesn’t do much. It hasn’t been raining either and the days haven’t been particularly warm, so this snow is not going anywhere. Will be very interesting to see when the wood anemone will bloom here and in what numbers. In a much sunnier place I saw the wood anemone already sprouting leaves.

My camera needs flowers, and so do I!

So it’s the last day of the year, time to wrap up photography for 2009. The scenery is still nice and wintery, but when you look through the viewfinder it’s not so pretty anymore. Windblown debris and pockmarks from fallen snow, not ideal for landscapes. But I had to try anyway, so I opted for high key pictures. I thought I was doing ok with them until I started processing them, high key is apparently not quite as easy as I thought! The last time I tried, I was much happier with the results, maybe it was beginner’s luck. So bit of a bummer with the day’s results, but it’s a nice to try anyway. And once I got my brain in the right gear (it’s all about shapes!), I now have quite a few ideas so maybe I’ll try tomorrow again. Not much else to do anyway, the landscape isn’t going to magically improve overnight (which it would do if we got a lot of new snow and no wind, but that ain’t happening).

You haven’t seen this before and you won’t see it again anytime soon (ever, I hope)… a picture of me, in my blog! I wanted to try the spooky effect with long shutter speeds where you move in the frame and only leave this ghostly semi-transparent impression. Not very easy to find the right combination of shutter speed, movement and stillness, it definitely belongs to the category “things I’d never try with film”! The composition wasn’t easy either because I needed to avoid having any trees behind me or the head would disappear in the dark branches. After a few trial and error, I got it.

It’s obviously not a very good picture but the fun was in doing. I’m not sure about the blueness, the colour is true because I was out after sunset but I’m nearly obsessed about having my snow white. Maybe I should try this at noon with a dark ND filter instead… or maybe not, it’s a nice way to kill some time on a lazy afternoon but the model is very un-co-operative!

Early in my photography “career” I had great doubts about abstract work. I just felt that photographs should be transparent, i.e. it should be instantly obvious what the photograph was about. Abstracts were way too fluffy and I tended to avoid them. But then as my photographic vision started to form, I started making some experiments with abstracts and I suddenly found myself at home with them. I like it when a picture is stripped of everything unnecessary and it doesn’t often get more stripped than in an abstract.

An abstract photograph is an intellectual challenge for me while an abstract painting normally has to be approached on an emotional level – well, that’s at least what I remember from my art lesson back at school when our art teacher had us look at an abstract painting. All I could see was white canvas, black lines and some coloured blobs, while the teacher saw a great piece of art and a rainbow scale of emotions. So I have a tendency to rationalise my art and when a rational approach leaves me wanting, there’s not much left in the photograph for me too look at. In other words, in order for a photograph to reach my emotional level at all, it has to pass the technical filter first.

The way I see it, abstract photography goes hand in hand with minimalism. A minimalistic picture contains a minimum of elements while still being recognisable, while an abstract can at least momentarily make you wonder exactly what you’re looking at. In the natural world, an abstract image is almost by necessity also minimalistic because abstract art should “exist independently of visual references to the world“. A painter can create something that doesn’t exist, but a photographer has to create on the terms of the natural world. In order to do that with nature photography, you really have to get creative and I reckon the macro specialists have the upper hand here while landscape photographers are out of luck.

I once called snow the “big equaliser“, meaning that snow covers all distractions in the landscape, making it easy to compose a minimalistic landscape photograph or an abstract close-up (or black&white, another style I often struggle with). That’s just another reason for me to love winter! With that in mind, I have put together a gallery on my snow pictures, found on minnak.net.

When I started to photograph the night sky, I read that I should use a wideangle lens, high ISO, big aperture and bulb setting with remote. Unless of course I wanted to photograph the rings of Saturn or the Andromeda galaxy, in which case I needed a telescope, but I’m not an astronomer so I stick to the basics. It all sounds simple enough but it seems like there are as many settings to use as there are people giving advice. So in the end, the best way to learn is to not listen to the advice and make your own mistakes and it seems like every time I point my camera at the stars, it’s a new mistake (and a lesson)!

My interest in astronomy is pretty much limited to the stars visible with naked eye. I’ve never felt the need to invest in a telescope, but I frequently study star maps and try to learn the names of the constellations and stars. So when I photograph the night sky, I normally want to have a recognisable constellation in it. Star trail pictures can be really cool and I’ve done some of those, but in the end I found that I’m much happier with small dots of light instead of streaks and I want to top off the picture with a silhouette of something (trees are best).

So what I’ve learned is that you have to keep the exposure at max 15 sec in order for the stars to appear as dots. There’s ever so little streaking even then, but it’s only visible in the full scale original. And if you want real star trails, then you need a minimum of 15 minutes or otherwise those streaks will have an appearance of camera shake because they are too short to come across as genuine trails. That’s my star 15 rule – you know, sunny 16, moon 11 and now star 15!

Once you’ve decided which effect you want, there are other decisions to be made. Let’s say that I want to photograph the stars as dots and I’ve set the camera to 15 seconds. Now I have to decide how many stars I want to record (or how dark I want the sky to be). A wide open aperture is almost a must, so the only thing left to adjust is the ISO speed. ISO 200 is a starting point, it will give you the bright stars but you’ll probably end up going higher to get some of the fainter stars as well and more definition in the foreground (=better silhouette). You’ll want at least a little bit of moonlight to lighten up the sky, otherwise the sky will be just as black as your foreground which makes the foreground a moot point.

But let’s say that I want the star trail effect. ISO 100 is doable and you can stop down, anything to get a longer exposure. However, there’s a risk that the trails will be very faint with these settings because there just simply isn’t enough light hitting the sensor. With a long enough exposure you can bring out detail in the foreground, but those trails are stubbornly faint even for the brightest stars. I’m guessing it’s because the brightness of a star is kind of an absolute? The star will keep moving along during the exposure so it will not “collect” light the same way the foreground and sky does, thus you end up with faint streaks and only for the bright stars while the foreground and sky look correctly exposed. Just compare the long exposure on the left to the first picture which is much darker overall, but the stars are much brighter in comparison to the trails.

So for the star trails, the solution is to photograph on a dark night with maybe a moon crescent to lighten the sky ever so little. Then you can bump up the ISO and stop down without a risk of your foreground and sky becoming unnaturally light, all the while gaining enough sensitivity in the sensor to catch decent trails for even the faintest stars.

What did I say about learning by mistake? The next opportunity is in early December when the first quarter moon is up in the sky in the evening. Just no clouds and no wind…

I had big plans for the weekend, but I had to revise them already when I woke up – the cold night had turned the wet roads into icy roads, so I had no business driving around with summer tires. I waited until the sun was high enough to thaw out the worst and then got out to discover new places. I don’t know why but there are still some forest roads around Loos that I haven’t checked yet, and it’s definitely my loss because this road turned out to be one sweet photographic experience. It’s just perfect in the morning light and I didn’t have to kick myself too much for not going out as early as I had planned because the low sun wouldn’t have reached the scenery anyway (forests and hills in the way). The downside was that there was thin high cloud again so while the sun was shining, it also wasn’t. The sky cleared towards noon but the light wasn’t the same anymore.

At the Össjön lake I found these old boats, some completely broken and rotting away and others still in one piece but probably not sea-worthy (lake-worthy?) anymore, and the place was complete with a boathouse with a caved-in roof. All you needed to do was to avoid the colourful new(er) boats in the composition and it was photographic eldorado right there! It worked fine at this time of the day, but it would look even better at bit earlier in the morning.

I didn’t find any opportunity to test the new ND filter, but I was able to put the leveling base and ICE through their paces. I took a 3-image panorama with the polariser mounted on the lens and important detail in the foreground. Foreground is normally almost impossible to stitch manually unless you’ve found the nodal point of the lens, which I can’t even try because the 24-105mm lens doesn’t have a lens collar and I don’t have a specialist panorama head. ICE did another perfect job though and the result is an image that could’ve been taken with a wideangle lens, but my 38mm (24mm x 1.6) wasn’t enough for the scene so I decided to try stitching it together. A very useful experiment, and a very useful technique!

Such a productive day and it would’ve been even better if I had had the light early on. Driving along with beautiful things all around, stop and look, take some pictures, move on to the next one…

This is a follow-up to my previous post about using slow shutter speeds. I wanted to elaborate on the water theme a little bit so here goes.

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The shutter speed to use with moving water is one of the more interesting issues in landscape photography. Some prefer a fast shutter to freeze the water, and others prefer a long shutter speed to smooth out the water. And some people prefer something in between, and then of course “it depends”.

I’ve liked the smooth water effect so much that I succeeded in taking my favourite waterfall picture already in 2004 using good old film. This is a detail of the Anderssjöåfallet waterfall in Härjedalen and believe it or not but I have not photographed the falls since then – maybe it’s because I know that I can’t improve on this one and every time I look at the falls, I just see this slide in my head. It is a fairly abstract picture, one that is stripped out of everything but the very basics (even the colour is gone, although this is not B&W), making it a very simple capture which to me is a perfect example a quiet picture. Now imagine this same image, but with a fast shutter speed which captures every drop of water. Would you still say that it is “quiet”?

I posted the Anderssjöåfallet picture on Fotosidan a few years ago and someone commented that the water was unnatural. Absolutely correct, I admit it’s 100% unnatural and I didn’t argue with them and I never will, but it got me thinking – where is it written that nature photography should be “natural”? We only have our own photographic visions, and there’s no right or wrong with them. Every vision is equally valid, every shutter speed used with moving water is equally good, the only thing different is your own taste and I respect that. Smoothing out water is just one way of manipulating the subject, but the manipulation really starts already when you choose your composition and focal length. So when is photography ever really natural? It’s all just a photographer’s vision and you choose the means which fulfill your vision. It’s all good!

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I browsed through my waterfall pictures but the pair of images above was the only one where I could actually show a comparison between slow and fast shutter speeds. Pictures are taken in June 2006 at the Sveån creek which falls into Ljusnan at Ramundberget.