The Quiet Picture

I wanted to find some new places, so I drove to Västersjön in Hamra today and took the snow mobile trail from there. I did part of this trail last year but now my plan was to ski to the Voxnan river, which wasn’t possible last time because the trail wasn’t used. I was hoping for some nice landscape as the trail crosses some mires, but it turned out that it wasn’t particularly photogenic anyway. The clearing cloud cover didn’t help, it was one of those strange days when there’s snow falling without any significant clouds. All the while the sun wasn’t completely out so the light was kind of 50-50 and I had no ideas what to do with it. Better luck tomorrow – the forecast says overcast, yes please.

After all the warm weather last weekend, I’m having a hard time figuring out what to wear now. It’s not as warm but the sun is shining, so do I need the middle layer or not? I decided to have faith in the sun and left out the middle layer and I was very nearly freezing. The wind isn’t helping. It didn’t help me when I tried to shoot the young birch leaf either, the branches were dancing like crazy and I had to hold the branch with one hand and shoot with the other. The Sigma 150mm macro is not made for one-handed shooting, let me assure you… but the shutter speed was fast enough to pull it off. More DOF would’ve been a bonus, but the leaves are growing so fast that either I grab the opportunity when I see it, or wait until next year.

I was short on ideas on what else to shoot, I actually contemplated to skip the daphne because I’m starting to feel that I’ve done everything with daphne that I can and it’s not very inspiring to take the same pictures all over again. But then I figured that it doesn’t hurt to check them and it’s not like I had any better ideas anyway. And oh boy was I happy that I didn’t give up on them! I found this branch which made it possible to fill up the background with the flowers, instead of having to fill the frame with extreme closeups (like I did on Monday). Having done this, now I really don’t know what else to do with the daphne… but at least I learned that it’s worth checking, because you never know what surprises Mother Nature will throw at you.

Surprises like being pounded by hail when I was doing my afternoon walk. I had to take refuge under a bridge and wait for the hail to pass, in the meanwhile the ice that was stuck in my hair started melting and the cold water trickled down my back. Now this is the April weather we all know and (don’t) love!

When all else fails, go back to basics. Or in this case, go back to what you know best and for me it’s detail. A birch as a whole is tragically un-photogenic at this time of the year, but this bark detail caught my eye and I was happy I had the little Powershot in my pocket, “just in case”. Just in case of just this!

The sunlight was diffused by high cloud which was fine in this case. I even considered making it b&w and really bring out the texture, maybe I will play around with it later. This colour version seems unnecessarily pale and there’s no point in trying to boost any colours anyway!

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EDIT: I got around to the b&w process sooner than expected, so I’m adding the new version for comparison.

Sometimes when I’m on an excursion, I come back with pictures which share a common theme. It can be the subject matter or the style of photography, but you can see this thread quite clearly. The weather plays a big role on what kind of pictures I end up with, but other than that I haven’t considered myself to have a pre-conceived idea of what to do, with a few exceptions here and there (like the moonlight pictures earlier!). But when I looked at today’s crop of pictures, I started to wonder if the idea is there in the back of my mind anyway. I try to go out with an open mind so I can grab any opportunity that I come across, but I probably gravitate towards the kind of pictures I subconsciously decided I would do. It was very evident today, I took quite a lot of pictures (considering that the conditions weren’t the best possible), but when I saw them on the screen I ruthlessly deleted most of them and remaining pictures all follow the same theme – tree trunks in snow. Very simple, borderline abstract, and perfectly suited for the day. Subconscious pre-conception, adaptation to the conditions, or co-incidence? Not that it really matters… only the pictures do!

I’m not a Christmas person by any definition, but I know it’s important for my parents so I have a tradition of going to Finland every other Christmas. Since my parents live in a middle of a busy town, I knew beforehand that this would be no photography trip and thus travelled light with only the PowerShot S95. I have a big problem with photographing in urban areas, I’m not used to it and there are just way too many distractions for me to find any such clean compositions that I like.

What made the trip even more difficult for photography was the weather. It was really cold and a couple of days was wasted mostly indoors. I tried to defy the weather and made a long walk in -22 degrees centigrade but when it took hours for me to chase the chills out of my body afterwards, I decided to wait for milder weather, which finally arrived on Christmas day (the day before going home). -15 degrees felt balmy after the big freeze!

During my walks, I made an effort to find some spots of nature in the city. The resulting pictures are complete illusion, for example in the spruce picture I was standing with traffic lights behind my back and a busy thoroughfare on the other side of the small group of trees. But appearance is everything in photography so if it looks like wild untouched nature, then that’s what it is!

It feels like the winter season is officially open when I do my first trip to the Moose Lake. The snow mobile trails are not prepared yet but there’s always some people who venture out as soon as the ice is thick enough to carry a snow mobile over the lakes, so I had some tracks to follow. The snow cover has to grow some more before they start working on the trails, there were a lot of spots which were almost bare after the snowmobiles and I guess my skis didn’t like it very much when I glided over the dirty snow.

It’s incredible how good the skiing feels now that it doesn’t hurt my feet. Today’s trip was almost twice as long as yesterday, and I still didn’t have any problems. I even realised when I got back home that I’m not as tired as I used to be after a trip like this, and I don’t think I’m in any better shape than I was back then. When your feet hurt so much that it’s a constant mental battle, you’re spending a lot of energy to keep going despite the pain. Now I don’t have to waste that energy any more and it feels like a new world of possibilities just opened for me. I can plan longer trips and discover new places… I’m ridiculously happy about the new bindings!

It was finally a sunny day, and what happens? I’m sick. Three of my colleagues were in different stages of having a cold this week and it was apparently impossible to dodge the bullet so now I’m just hoping that I don’t get any worse than I am right now. Last night was bad enough. The good news is that I don’t have fever (yet) so I was actually able to go outside just a little bit and work on a Christmas card idea I had. Other than that, I’m just too busy feeling sorry for myself to do anything constructive. I suck at being sick.

Just to give myself an excuse to whine about my aching sinuses, I’ll post a photo from last weekend. The snow cover gave a good opportunity to try high contrast (or high key, except it’s not really actually high key) with the spruce. Work in progress, I’ll try to nail this during the winter.

We had a long trip to the Orsa-Finnmark today. The weather was anything but photogenic, overcast and very windy so the grand view we had from our first stop at Finnberget was wasted. Since my only picture from the place is not a very good, I won’t post it but I couldn’t resist using the name in the post title (“A Finn on Finnberget”)! Finnberget is situated on top of a mountain at 638m in the western-most reaches of the Gävleborg county.

From Finnberget we drove south via Tjäderåsen and then turned west towards the Ämåsjön lake. And this road was a real discovery! The road goes very high, almost at 600m so the landscape takes on some sub-alpine features. There are big areas of marshland surrounded by forest covered hills and the really special thing here is that the hills really are covered by forest instead of ruined by logging. So this is definitely a road I will be driving again, but under better conditions so it’s possible to take pictures.

Then we followed the Ämån river south-east. There’s a couple of waterfalls along the way, the first one was a disappointment (just like Storstupet and Helvetesfallet I visited a couple of years ago, they are further downstream) but the second one was marginally better. But still, the most interesting part of the falls was the path there. I usually don’t shoot wideangles in the forest because I’m just not able to bring any order into chaos, but this half-fallen tree provided enough of a focal point for me to compose around it. And for this picture, it was the right weather!

Instead of following the river all the way to E45, we swung north towards Vässinjärvi because we also wanted to take a look at Korpmäck (Korpimäki). It’s about 20m higher than Stora [big] Korpimäki we visited a couple of weeks ago, so I’m just wondering, shouldn’t it be called Större [bigger] Korpimäki? (LOL) On the map it looks like it would be possible to get some pictures of the mountain with marshland or a tarn in the foreground, and this time reality turned out be as I imagined it. Except, not in this weather of course.

So now I have two new places I have to visit some other time in better conditions. And I’m fairly sure that there will be a lot more to shoot that these two places, I just need to get the timing right!

Sometimes four seasons isn’t enough. When the sun breaks out from its winter hibernation and you feel it warm on your face while the landscape is still covered with snow, that’s what we call the fifth season. It’s that time of the year when you can go skiing wearing a t-shirt and when the sunglasses is a must or you go snowblind. Early February is still winter, but the thing is that I had a fifth season feeling when I was snowshoeing today. My clothes were too warm and I was missing my shades! To top it off, I heard the birdsong that I always associate with the spring winter.

As for the snowshoe hike, it was nice as always, but I’m really struggling with the pictures. I hoped that the fish-eye would inspire me, but nix. I blame the landscape though; even with all the snow we got this week, the trees are looking a bit scabby and in the end it didn’t matter which lens I had with me. Or maybe a little bit – I wouldn’t have been able to take this picture of a pine when the wind picked up the snow from the branches and blew it towards me. Serendipitous perhaps, but isn’t that what it’s about – being at the right place at the right time?

The cold spell has finally broken. I always say that it isn’t a proper winter if the temperature doesn’t dip below -20 degrees centigrade but four weeks of it in a row… is a bit a much, only a handful of days when it wasn’t quite that cold. Somehow I prefer my photo excursions without frozen toes, fingers, face and camera gear. When the tripod leg locks freeze, it’s too cold for photography! Anyway, today it was only -12°C so really a pleasant day to be out, I picked the afternoon so I could see the sunset. It wasn’t very interesting though because it was all clear skies, so what I would really have needed was an interesting silhouette against the blue/orange post-sunset gradient. But all of these cold temperatures also mean that it hasn’t been snowing, and the existing snow we have is looking a bit old. The scenery is somehow broken with only patches of snow hanging on the trees, but sometimes you find something that the wind hasn’t destroyed yet so you just have to take the opportunity then.