The Quiet Picture

Now this is what I call a Christmas present – new car! It’s a Nissan Qashqai 1.6 diesel, and I hope it will be everything the little Yaris wasn’t. My patience with the Yaris ran out last summer when it became painfully obviously how hopelessly inadequate it is on the mountain roads I was driving. And then of course I’ve always had a problem with the ground clearance, it’s just not enough for the forest roads around here. And the small engine with semi-automatic gearbox… I promise you I was starting to tear out hairs in frustration when I had to literally floor the gas pedal to get any decent acceleration out of it. And then you were suddenly doing 60 kph on second gear… I’m no race driver and the Yaris is not a racing car for sure.

The Qashqai fixes all these issues I’ve had. High ground clearance, bigger and more powerful engine, manual gearbox… and then it has a bigger trunk, more space inside (so it’s just simply bigger in every way and this time bigger is better), it’s actually more quiet to drive with an efficient sound proofing and you almost never hear the typical diesel engine noise, and the interior is less plasticky which means less rattling noise when driving on rough roads. And it’s smoother over bumps, all these little things which make the driving experience fun and not frustration.

There were some things about the car that made me so happy I was grinning for ear to ear… like for example, the car actually accelerates as soon as you push down the gas pedal, instead of waiting for a couple of seconds and then shifting down to a lower gear and then slowly going faster. And even when driving at 95 kph, the Qashqai is not even doing 2000 RPM. Do you know what the Yaris does at under 2K revs? Nothing!

Of course, when I got the Yaris I was initially very happy with it, I mean you’re always happy with a new car, right? But when the novelty wears off, the little nags start to surface. But considering that the Qashqai fixes all those nags I had with the Yaris, I have high hopes that I will stay happy with the “KasKas” (you need to be a Finn to appreciate that nickname…) for many many years to come!

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!

Another quick visit to the mountains yesterday to fix one last detail before letting the cabin hibernate over winter – I’m not planning to use it until March. There was plenty of time for photography as well, but in these days when daylight is at a premium, time is a relative concept. We thought we would wait out for the sunset at a scenic spot, but when there was no sign of gaps in the cloud cover we decided to drive back home. Only problem was that only a few kilometres on, there was an orange glow in the clouds. The closer to Funäsdalen we got, the better the glow but now we really had no time left to scout for the best spot. We took our chances and caught the glow and as we continued the drive home, we had the nagging feeling that it would’ve been even better if we had driven all the way down to Funäsdalen. But the important thing is that we got some pictures, instead of going for the big win and miss out on it completely!

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!

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?

The weather forecast said it would be -4°C degrees in the morning. Bah. It was -8 when I got up, and -5 when I left. Not that I’m complaining, because it meant that there was frost everywhere. In some places the frost was so thick it looked like snow.

I had a plan, at first check out Svartåmyran because it was open enough for the sun to reach it in the morning, and it was a sunny day – no a cloud in sight. It didn’t quite work out though, I took quite a few pictures but in the end I deleted almost all of them. All hope was not lost though, the second part of my excursion was my old favourite, Svansjöbäcken. I haven’t been there all year but I was really hoping to find an icy lining to the water… but it turned out that there was quite a lot more ice than that. It wasn’t just a lining, it was a full ice cover everywhere but in the waterfalls.

So you’d think that I was disappointed, but no such worries. What makes this place so great is that there’s more to it than just the water, so I turned my eyes towards the forest instead. There’s a lot of old fallen pines around and now that they had a frost all over them, it wasn’t hard to find something interesting to shoot.

But all that standing around in the frozen moss, my toes were freezing. Seriously. The kind of thing that hurts when the circulation comes back. Note to self: the hiking boots are not rated for four seasons!

My cabin is shaping up nicely. There are only two major jobs remaining and I have a reliable guy to do them and then it’s pretty much done, actually. There are a few minor things that I have to take care of myself, but then again, a cabin owner’s job is never done. Most of the furniture is also in place, I only have one cupboard that’s waiting to be compiled and then I have to get a bunk bed in the guest room. The cupboard can wait, and the bunk bed arrives next week, just in time for my parents’ visit!

I have a two weeks vacation in September. Unfortunately this is a wrong year for a long autumn vacation because the birches are suffering from some kind of fungal infection which turns all the leaves brown and then kills them before the leaves would naturally turn colour. In some places the alpine birch forest was already stripped of the leaves and it looked more like October than August. In some other places the leaves were still hanging on, but they were infected so I expect the leaves to be gone by the time I have vacation. I’m not going to cancel my vacation though, because September is a wonderful time in the mountains. There won’t be any colour explosion but I can still enjoy hiking in the fresh mountain air. And if the weather is not so good, I can just sit on my couch in the cabin and read a book and take it easy… isn’t that what vacations are for anyway?

Very windy on Saturday but I had planned to drive to Funäsdalen anyway so it was fine. I did some shopping; got myself a new backpack again! My quest to find the perfect photo hiking pack, part 7.

Back at the cabin, did some more cleaning and cleared out some junk, so now it’s starting to look like a liveable place. Just needs a lot of furniture. I also discovered that I have no talent whatsoever as a DIY handy(wo)man, I even fail with the simplest things like setting up blinds on a window. But it sort of worked anyway, the important thing is that it blocks the light in the bedroom, I’ll fix the rest later…

In the evening when the wind wasn’t so bad any more, I did a small hike. I wasn’t planning to go to the Fiskhålsgraven ravine, but somehow I ended up there anyway. On the way up I followed the little brook with its many small waterfalls but the sunlight made it difficult to shoot in the forest for all the contrast. Not that there were so many opportunities, the brook is still a litte bit flooded and it desperately needs some greens for decoration.

Up at the ravine, I saw the sun bathe the cliffs in warm evening light, and the light also reached a birch inside the ravine. Just the perfect opportunity so I set up the tripod and got ready to shoot – and a cloud appeared. Well, the wind is still brisky, so it will blow away the cloud soon, right? Wrong. Somehow the cloud was morphing on the spot so instead of moving away, it just simply stayed there and blocked the sun. Extremely frustrating, because it was just about the only cloud in the sky at all! I have seen this phenomenom before, I guess you have to be a photographer waiting for the light to notice that half the time the clouds morph instead of move. But I waited, and then waited some more, all the while knowing that the more I waited the less chance I had that the light would still reach the birch inside the ravine, with what the sun going down. And then finally, I had an opportunity that probably lasted all of 10 seconds, and took my picture. Sure enough, only the tip of the birch was lit at this point so that was an opportunity lost.

Then I set up the kit on a new spot. And waited some more. I think all in all I waited about half an hour, all because of one small cloud that just kept changing its shape in front of the sun! But I got my second picture at last and and the cloud looked like it would be dissipating, but I didn’t care any more. My fingers were numb with cold, I had heard on the radio that it has been a very warm day elsewhere in Sweden but it sure wasn’t warm up there.

On the way down, I noticed that the cloud was gone. It never blew away, just morphed itself out of existence.

I’ve been in a bit of a photographic limbo recently. It would be normal if this was November when there’s hardly anything left to shoot, but it’s July which is traditionally the busiest month of the year for me. I’ve got too many other things in my head and it’s draining my energy so I’m not really even feeling any regret for missing out on stunning sunset light like last night. Missed it by about 20 minutes… had we been driving at Hiviåsen 20 minutes later, it would’ve been a great opportunity. But nix, I was already at home, in front of the computer, downloading the pictures I had taken earlier when I glanced out the window and saw the amazing colour in the sky. But nevermind. I’m happy with the pictures I had. Which I wouldn’t have taken if I didn’t have any photographic company with me because otherwise I don’t think I would’ve bothered to lift up my butt, that’s how bad it is right now.

Anyways, enough of lamenting the current state of things and on with the show. We drove to my favourite brook which I’ve already visited numerous times, but which still keeps inspiring me. It was overcast weather which helped, because during most of my visits it’s actually been sunny, which is the only bad thing I can say about Svansjöbäcken. It doesn’t quite work in sunlight, unless you get there at sunrise in the summer which I’m very unlikely to do. As to why do I always go there when it’s sunny? Because it’s such a great place to be! So now I was taking pictures which I’ve kind of “seen” before but haven’t been able to take because of the light.

One of the first things that caught my eye was all the green grasses. It seems like the colour spectrum consisted only of reds and greens, the only exception being the greys. It’s a lovely combination so my post processing was all about making those colours pop and it took me a while to figure out how to do it in Lightroom. The secret was to use a warm colour temperature to pop the reds, and then cool down the greens using the hue slider. I’ve never actually used the hue slider before but now that I discovered it, it will solve a lot of problems I’ve encountered on previous occasions. I think I need to reprocess some old pictures!

I’m a member of the Ljusdal camera club (Ljusdals fotoklubb) and every year they make two excursions. For this spring excursion, it was my turn to be the guide. I decided to show them some of the nice places I found last year along the Voxnan river, so we started from Holmsjön and then made our way back and stopped at the Skalhålet ravine. I’ve only been there once and it was raining then, which made it difficult to move around on the lichen covered cliffs (very very slippery when wet). So I didn’t get any pictures that time, and I didn’t actually get many pictures this time either. But I got a picture, so at least I now have some documentation of the place. It’s just not very photogenic, but interesting enough to see. We don’t have a lot of ravines around here.

I had planned the excursion so that the last stop would be the Svansjöbäcken brook. Very simple reason – I figured that nobody will want to do the difficult hike down along the brook so everyone can leave when they want to, while I can stay as long as I want to! The weather was overcast and this was actually the first time I’ve been there in completely overcast weather. Otherwise it’s a difficult place during the day, because everything will be backlit. Normally you want to shoot running water looking upstream, and this means that you’ll have the sun on your face unless you get there early in the morning or late in the evening. The cliffs and forest surrounding the brook are also photogenic but somewhat difficult in sunny weather, so I could finally take some forest pictures today.

I think it was a good day out, I hope that the other club members enjoyed it! Although I must say they left a bit quickly from Svansjöbäcken… I think I should’ve warned them about the terrain, I didn’t think how difficult it will be for someone who is not used to it!