The Quiet Picture

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!

We are now in the time between where autumn comes to end and the waiting for the snow begins. The nights are cold and the weather forecast said that it would be a sunny weekend, so I was really looking forward to a morning shoot at my favourite tarn of the year (it keeps changing, because the tarns are so small that the photo ops are soon exhausted). When I got to the place, I sure wasn’t disappointed. There wasn’t as much ice on the water as I thought there would be but as long as it was calm, the open water worked just fine. The moss was almost frozen and half the time it carried me without breaking, giving me this surreal feeling of walking on water and then on the next step an actual feeling of walking in water when the crust broke…

As the sun climbed higher on the sky, it started melting the frost and the magic. It was surprisingly warm, actually, but I knew that I had already taken my keepers so my heart wasn’t in it any more and I left. But I will tell you one thing… my disappointment at missing most of the autumn colours is gone. I couldn’t possibly have any regrets after a morning like this!

A little bit crazy. It’s October and it’s so warm that I was walking around wearing a t-shirt. The jacket was just too much! This must be a first, I sure can’t remember an October when it’s been this warm. So it was nice to walk around in search of autumn colours, and it should’ve been easy because we actually have them (unlike the mountains). I tried it in the morning, and then spent most of the afternoon on it, and got nothing! It was getting so ridiculous in the end that I could just laugh at it. I visited a lot of spots that have been productive in the past, only to discover that pine and spruce are the dominant trees everywhere, and in those places with some birches the leaves had already dropped. So I was driving… and driving… on roads that are lined up with birches in beautiful yellow colours, and didn’t take a single picture of them. Because I didn’t want to shoot a birch by the road, I had higher ambitions than that. And got nothing.

Note to self: Find birch locations next summer.

I didn’t have any hikes planned for today, just prepared the cabin for winter and then left. But I did drive via Funäsdalen instead of taking the gravel road to Hede, because I was hoping to see some snowcapped mountains along the Mittådalen road. What took me by surprise was to see that the lakes were mirror calm, even though the morning was late. We’ve had a lot of these calm days on this vacation, it seems like either the wind is blowing very hard or then it’s totally calm; there weren’t many days when it was something in between. Would it be too much to ask to get these calm days next year when we hopefully have proper autumn colours in the mountains?

There’s this lake I pass every day on the way to work (and back). I always check what it looks like, and many times it looks really nice. In the morning it can be mirror calm with some mist. In the evening the small island in the middle of the lake can be glorious in backlight. A few times I’ve stopped by the lake but I’ve never ventured further from the parking lot. For the past six years, I’ve more or less managed to ignore the potential. But yesterday I finally took a little bit of time to follow the shoreline and it only confirmed what I’ve seen from the road when driving by. It is a nice place and shame on me for not exploring it before! The conditions weren’t perfect yesterday but I got a few shots, and vowed to get back some other time. Not sure when, but I won’t wait for six years in any case…

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Those of you with Google+ accounts, I uploaded another picture there. If you need an invite to G+, let me know!

It was great weather on Monday evening. I was looking through the bus window towards a dark cloud behind me, and sunlight in front. An amazing sight and I knew the rainbow would be somewhere there, so I half ran home from the bus, grabbed the camera and drove out. I had to stop at every possible spot, because I didn’t know how long the rainbow would last. Didn’t want to risk it fade away while I was driving to the best spot (when I didn’t even know where that spot was). Unfortunately another bank of clouds had materialised in the west, so the sun was obscured again. After chasing that rainbow for a while, the clouds started to disappear in all directions and it was a nice evening in the end. And then I found my best spot, but by then of course the rainbow was but a memory.

I noticed a weird phenomenon in the clouds, I haven’t been able to find an explanation yet. There were some kind of rays radiating out from the horizon… in the east. Light rays coming from the direction of the sun is nothing new, but this was perfectly the opposite. You can see the rays in the second picture, if anyone can explain them to me I would appreciate!

The weather forecast said it would be sunny. Right now. I looked outside and the sky was overcast. I had a plan though and I intended to the follow it, maybe it would be clear out a bit later… so I drove to my spot and found out that I had nothing to do there and the cloud cover didn’t show any signs of lightening up. I took some pictures with the analog camera to try out what 16mm really feels like (so the pictures will be worthless but what am I going to do with slides anyway?) and had the 300mm lens on the 40D because I had this great idea that I would use the wideangle on analog and then shoot dragonflies with digital. The only insects I saw though were mosquitoes so I just walked back to the car, it was pointless. I had no plan B so I had to sit in the car for a while and figure out what to do. In the end I decided to drive to the little tarn I discovered earlier in the summer, there’s a nice wind shelter where I can drink my coffee and wait for the sun.

There was a little bit of wind that broke the surface of the tarn, but sometimes the wind quieted down and gave me nice reflections. I really like this tarn, you can walk all around it and the shoreline is filled with interesting features so there’s always something to catch the eye. You just have to remember that the shore is really just more or less moss floating on water so watch where you step and be prepared to fall back and you’ll be fine.

Of course it would’ve been nice with some sunshine but it just wasn’t happening and I wasn’t too disappointed to be honest. I might be a little bit odd but I don’t mind overcast weather, it’s not necessarily a bad thing for landscape pictures. Purists may scorn at it, but maybe it’s the flower photographer in me that can settle with flat light! By the time I had done one and a half rounds around the tarn, I saw that the clouds were a little bit brighter in the horizon. I didn’t bother to wait and see if they would clear out, I was happy with the shooting I had so far and didn’t feel the need to take the same pictures all over again in the mid-day sun. So I drove off and on the way home when the sun really did come out, I stopped at another tarn and walked around it in search of dragonflies. I found some, but need a little bit more practice before I’m going to post any dragonfly pictures here!

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I’m already good friends with the new Tokina. I know I have to work harder on my foregrounds and I also need to figure out how to take horizontal pictures because I’m mostly taking verticals at the moment. Then again, I’ve always liked verticals… so maybe I shouldn’t blame the Tokina for that. I also took some pictures at f2.8 and the centre sharpness is really good. At first I was horrified though at the corner sharpness until I realised that it’s more of a DOF problem than sharpness issue as such so I’m not worried about it. It’s a great lens and I can’t wait to see what I can do with it in the mountains in September on my vacation!

Ever since last year when we did some driving around in Orsa Finnmark, I’ve been wanting to go back to explore the places. Last year it was late autumn and the weather was a bit iffy so I didn’t really stop anywhere, just made mental notes about the places we drove through. Well today, the conditions were going to be better so we had made plans for a day-trip to see if these places were hiding any photogenic spots. The weather perhaps still not ideal, but most of the rain came down when we were driving anyway and then, with a little of waiting, we got those sunny spells when we wanted to shoot something.

The first stop was at Trollgraven at the Vässinjärvi power plant. It’s a man-made ravine for the water run-off, the photogenic qualities can be debated but it was worth checking out, especially because we were going to drive past it anyway so no de-tours required. I was more interested in the next stop, the Korpmäck mountain. It’s over 700m high, although you can’t really appreciate the height as such because the road goes at over 500m altitude. However, the eastern side of the mountain is steep so it provided a great background for whatever we could find as foreground.

From Korpmäck we continued to Majkölen, it’s a large mire at an altitude of about 600m so you can see some sub-alpine character in the forest. But I have to say, from that drive-through last year I had the impression that this would be a great place… it wasn’t. Sure, it’s nice to look at, but when you have a camera in your hand, you find your options are quite limited. So this was a disappointment.

Then we headed back north and stopped at the Sundsjön Nature Reserve. A couple of years ago I drove past here, saw a potential good spot and kicked myself for not stopping to take a closer look. Remedied.

By now it was late afternoon and we finally arrived at what I considered to be the main attraction of the day, the St. Gönsjön lake. Unfortunately the wind was blowing a lot harder than I thought it would do today, and the surface of the lake was completely whipped up. Using a long shutter speed, you could create an illusion of calmer waters but then you have the moving clouds to deal with, and there was even a moon in the sky and that doesn’t tolerate any long exposures without blurring out. So it was a kind of a lose-lose situation. Use a short shutter speed to keep the moon and the clouds sharp and you’ll have ugly water. Use a very long shutter speed and water is nice and the clouds are blurred but the moon is just a streak. Use something in between… and nothing really works. But I’ll say this – St. Gönsjön is a great place and deserves more visits, just during calmer waters. Later in the evening a bank of clouds moved in and we lost the light so there was no point in exploring the lake any further, so there’s still plenty to see for new visits.

Looking at my pictures now, I didn’t get anything that I’m completely happy about. I’m a little bit disappointed, to be honest, I had a lot more expectations. But having said that, I’m not disappointed at the trip as a whole – I think it was a great day of exploration, it answered all those questions I had in my mind. Most importantly, it gave me St. Gönsjön, I definitely I have to get back there!

Finally taking a closer look at my vacation pictures. Found one HDR which needed processing, did it manually because I didn’t like the result that any HDR software produced. It still needs some work but I’m undecided if it’s worth the trouble. I was waiting on Flatruet for the sunset to happen with glorious colours, it didn’t do it but a herd of reindeer came running by. In the low light, I got some serious motion blur but it was a concious choice, I wanted to see how it works out.

It was nice to see the pictures from the unforgettable evening at Måns-Erstjärnen. I’m well pleased with some of them, but they all remind me of what a wonderful experience it was. I can still feel the warmth and hear the eerie cry of a loon echo from the distance… just amazing.

In fact, I think I’m still basking in the glow of the vacation. My shutter finger isn’t itching yet, although it did feel good to shoot the white waterlily today. One thing I wonder though, where are all the mosquitoes? There weren’t any at the lake. But… I’m guessing I will find them in the forest. I have some orchids to shoot there and I also need to find some blueberries and raspberries to pick… and I need to get my exhibition ready, it opens on Saturday. Nervous!

Flowers, give me flowers! I went to my favourite daphne spot to see if the flowers would already be in bloom. They were, but only by a very narrow margin and there were more buds than open flowers. But the scent, it was already there. Love it!

In the afternoon I took my bike down to the lake and found two pairs of cranes and one pair of swans in the flood plains. The weather is so warm that I can hardly believe it… cycling in a t-shirt in April. That’s a first!

Later on, I drove to Kullas to see if the crazy pair of cranes would be nesting by the road again, and sure enough, one of the cranes was lying down so I think it’s incubating an egg! But at least the nest is not completely in the open, it’s visible from the road (if you know to watch for it) but behind some trees so there’s no clear view. I won’t even try to approach the nest, obviously, so if I want to photograph cranes I will have to find them elsewhere.

One of my spots was the road that my guide took me last year to see red-throated loons. And oh joy – I found a pair of them! It was difficult to get a good shot though so I drove on to the small lake where we found a red-throated loon last year. Only this time, I saw two. This is absolutely brilliant! I’m not a loon expert but I’m thinking that they are out fishing during the day and come back “home” for the evening (black-throated loons live in the big lakes, but red-throated loons only fish in them and breed in the small lakes or tarns). Just perfect for me, it means that I can expect to see red-throated loons just about any evening and I have two lakes to choose from, as well. Today I settled with shooting from the car so I have my work cut out for me to get out of the car and crawl to the water’s edge without disturbing the birds.

But I found something else at this lake as well. I saw a dark spot on the opposite shore – a black grouse! It was way too far for any meaningful pictures but of course I had to try and as I was looking through the lens, I realised that there were actually four of them. Four black grouse and two loons… and then that other pair of red-throated loons in the other lake, and I also saw a pair of cranes between these two lakes. I wasn’t even disappointed when I didn’t see any cranes in the flood-plains at Loossjön!