The Quiet Picture

It’s amazing how quickly the spring is proceeding. It seems like in November when winter arrived, it arrived all at once and didn’t let go until March. And then when it got warm, it did it with a bang. This feels like the warmest Easter on record!

I walked down to the lake to check if there would be any birds in the floodplains (only some ducks and gulls) and then checked out the situation with the ice. Seems like 50/50 at the moment and in the warm sunshine the rest of the ice will probably disappear in just a few days. Loossjön is not a photogenic lake as such, but when the water level is low like it is at the moment, it becomes much more interesting. The lake is man-made so the shores are lined up with old tree roots which can be quite nice, but the best part would be that it would be possible to walk around the lake. I mean sure, you could do it even during normal water level, as long as you don’t mind hiking through thick forest. I’m waiting for the low water so I could walk on the dry mud – easy! At the moment the exposed ground is a little bit too wet and I can see that there’s still some big blocks of ice in the shaded part of the shore but I hope that in a couple of weeks it will be both dry and ice-free and that the water level hasn’t risen any higher than it is at the moment. There’s a risk that it will rise though, normally it happens every year – low water in the spring and normal until winter when the water mostly just flows out, creating the low water situation in the spring.

Back to normal time. It’s not even 4pm and the light is already fading! We definitely need some snow now to brighten up the landscape.

I walked to Kvarnsjön to see if I could make anything out of the creek and the ice. The ice is actually rapidly disappearing, when I got there I had a look at a spot with photo potential and then later on my way back I could see that the ice had receded a little bit. But it still worked for the pictures I intended, the cloud cover was patchy which gave a nice reflection. Normally the wind would’ve broken the water surface but the ice was containing the waves so there was just a nice amount of ripples in the water to contrast the ice.

I decided to try to get some flight shots of the birds. I have occasionally gotten a lucky shot of a bird with wings spread, so I figured I should be able to get one deliberately. Put the camera to continuous shooting and fire off a series, something’s gotta work, right? Wrong. After 297 frames I didn’t a single picture where the bird would have the wings spread and the eye would be sharp. Not one. But I got plenty of pictures of empty perches and quite a few amputated birds with either head or the tail missing. And when I finally got the whole bird, I found that the shutter speed was too slow to contain sharpness in the eye. The action is so fast that there’s motion blur even at 1/800 sec. Crazy! I don’t mind the wings blurring, but the eye just has to be sharp or it’s the bin.

Usually the reason I missed the bird take off was that it wasn’t sitting there long enough to focus anyway (same problem I always have with the birds). And then when the bird finally sat there a bit longer, I would keep my finger on the shutter and by the time the bird took off, the buffer was full so the camera wouldn’t fire anymore! LOL!

The only bird pictures I got today were the same old stationary ones then. But even if I didn’t get the pictures I wanted, I had another close encounter that I will remember for a long time to come. I’m not wearing any camouflage now because the birds accept my presence anyway. Just to prove it, a blue tit sat on my lens and I was just amazed to look at it from such close distance. And then… it got even closer and sat on my shutter finger! My favourite bird on my shutter finger. Wow!

In the afternoon I walked to the lake to have a closer look at the ice. Clear ice is not something to be taken for granted, usually we get snow when it gets cold so the ice is covered from start. The ice cover along the shore varies but it seemed to be about 5cm at best, all solid steel ice. I was expecting to take some more landscape-ish pictures of the ice, but when I found the bubbles I just concentrated on them instead. No landscapes, just a lot of small ice-scapes!

* * *

With so many failed photographs today, I decided to put some of them to good use instead of just trashing outright. So I created an album on Facebook, it’s kind of a tutorial of what not to do when photographing birds!

When I came home yesterday, I realised that the morning fog had never dissipated during the day. It was sunny in Ljusdal but a few km before Loos the landscape was shrouded in fog, which made think that it could well be the same thing today. The fog is very sensitive to altitude and then of course the lakes and marshland have their own microclimate as well. So this morning when I saw it was foggy, I was torn between shooting the birds or shooting the foggy landscape. I decided to stay with the birds (as seen in the previous post), and if the fog would dissipate I would then have a sunny landscape to shoot in the afternoon, it sounded like a win-win situation.

It was still foggy in the afternoon but I was almost sure that there were different conditions if I would just drive out of Loos. Sure enough, already in Ryggskog it was sunny and then as I was driving towards Voxnan, the conditions were alternating between sun and fog.

After studying the satellite pictures, I had found a couple of waterfalls at Svartån that I hadn’t seen before so I wanted to see what they looked like in real life. The bonus with this plan was that I would park my car next to a small tarn which is very nice, if a bit difficult to photograph because the eastern side of the tarn is fouled by a de-forestrated area and in the summer I found that the rest of the tarn becomes difficult to shoot because it’s mostly backlit in the afternoon/evening. No backlight problems when it’s foggy!

And so it was that what was supposed to be a quick look turned into a three-hour photo session. At first it was foggy, then I made a side-trip to the big marsh north from the tarn and when I came back, it was sunny. So I walked around the tarn again!

When I was finally done with the tarn, I was wondering if it was getting too late to venture into the forest and look for these new waterfalls I thought I might find in Svartån. But it was only a few hundred meters there so I might as well check it, if it was really good I could come back some other time. I found the waterfalls but they weren’t as nice as my favourite spot along Svartån. But if you never look for anything, you’ll never find anything. I was so happy about all the other pictures I had taken today that a disappointing waterfall hardly made a dent!

It was a rainy and overcast day on Saturday, it didn’t clear up until right at sunset. Which gave me some nice clouds to shoot, it must be the first sunset I’ve caught since… since… apparently quite a long time.

Sunday morning on the other hand was as bright as it gets in September. Maybe the sunny weather made it easier for the birds to find food in the wild, because I didn’t have quite as many of them at the feeder as I did yesterday. And numbers is a good thing – if there’s only a few birds, they have enough space at the feeder so they don’t need to stop at any of the branches I’ve set up for photographic convenience. But as soon as the number of the birds increases, they’ll use my branches for queuing. However, it was almost a moot point – shooting in sunlight just doesn’t quite work. Yes it’s nice to have a fast shutter speed and low ISO so I get sharp and noiseless pictures, but it’s impossible to get a nice background when some background trees are lit and some are shaded and the camera is barely able to contain both shadows and highlights. So it’s just a mess and a lot of luck is needed to get the bird to sit at a spot where the background at that particular moment is even. It was much more fun to take those noisy pictures yesterday!

The rest of the Sunday was supposed to be as sunny as the morning, but they got it oh so wrong. I had been looking forward to shooting beautiful autumn colours in warm sunlight, but got dreary overcast skies and dull light instead. On the other hand, we also got calm lakes for some sweet reflections and that wasn’t supposed to happen either!

The highest mountain in the Gävleborg county is Stora Korpimäki (or Korpmägg because the Swedes can’t spell Finnish) at 711 m. It’s a forest covered peak and up on top the forest takes on some alpine characteristics, but the point is that it’s still forest. Which means that high as the peak is, your views are very limited and thus it’s taken me this long until I’ve finally visited the place. Been there, seen it, done that.

On the way back we stopped at the Flarksjöberget nature reserve. I had high expectations about it but it didn’t deliver at all, that was my initial reaction anyway. Then I noticed the intense reflections in the water with the fluffy clouds in the sky and that was a whole different story. Although, you don’t need to be in a nature reserve to do this!

I had to create the image by stitching because my “wideangle” wasn’t wide enough leave blu sky above the clouds and in the reflection. Just when I had started thinking that maybe I should get the Canon S95 compact instead of a real wideangle lens… but truthfully, even if I had had a wideangle I wouldn’t have had it with me on this trip. The small and light S95 on the other hand, I probably would’ve carried it instead of the SLR today and it has a 28mm wideangle. So I have to do some thinking again.

I think I found a new favourite place. The same one I visited a week ago, except this time I followed the streak of marshland at the northern end of the lake to further explore the area. And now it was afternoon, which provides a more suitable light for this place than morning. It was a gorgeous day – nothing but blue skies. Which is of course not so exciting in a photo and then you can also add some wind so that I couldn’t use the water in the compositions, so all my pictures fall short of the experience. Having said that, I’m posting a panorama (cropped from one shot, it wasn’t worth a stitch) that highlights the problem with wideangles and polarisers shooting at a 90 degree angle from the sun. Intense blue sky on one side, and bland pale on the other! But at least it gives an overview of the lake and I will come back here, in calmer weather and with some nice puffy clouds in the sky.

The universal truth among photographers is that the best light occurs during sunrise and sunset. And then there’s the equally true “it depends”, but instead of explaining at length on what it depends on, I will just say that light is also a perception. Simply put, it is what we perceive it to be at any given situation.

Today I had a Moment which changed my perception.

I left after breakfast because the forecast said that it will be a sunny morning and rainy afternoon. As I was driving my location, I was cursing at the high cloud – that nightmarish thin cloud cover which doesn’t entirely block the sun but it makes everything look very dull. Is it just me or has there been many such days this summer? But I didn’t have a plan B so I drove ahead anyway, if all else fails at least I could do some scouting because I had never been to this location where I was going now.

By the time I got there, the sun was completely blocked. I practised with long exposures and let the wind blur the grasses and smooth the water and after a while, I was rewarded by the faintest of sunshine and a sliver of blue sky in the horizon. It was only temporary but it gave me hope, so I settled down to have a cup of coffee.

And that’s when I had the Moment.

It was about sitting on a soft pillow of moss and lichen. It was the gentle wind and warm sun on my face. It was the backlit trees on the opposite shore and it was the family of swans and how the light was playing on the feathers whey they extended their wings. It was a Moment of absolute peace.

By the time the sun was out and the sky was blue, it was already a late morning. The universal truth among photographers tells me that the light is not good. But for me it was perfect – the Moment had changed my perception of it. The Moment was more important than the pictures and it liberated me to see beyond the light.

Maybe for anyone else these pictures are just snapshots during harsh light. But for me, they are the experience, the Moment, when I no longer had to search for inspiration like I have been doing all summer because the inspiration had come to me.

The light had never been more right than it was right then.

Strange feeling. While I had this great urgency to take some pictures, at the same time I was almost unmotivated to do it. In fact, unmotivated to do pretty much anything. But I haven’t lost all of my will power yet, so at first I went for a long walk while it still was overcast, and then in the afternoon when the sun started coming out, I drove to a nice little tarn that I haven’t photographed yet. Or maybe it’s not so nice – it’s called Elaktjärnen, “mean tarn”. I tried to figure out why it would deserve such a name, and the closest I could come was that it was surrounded by a lot of dead trees but I assume they’re dead because of beaver activity; there was a beaver hut on the shore (probably abandoned a long time ago already).

I had company, a lonely whooper swan that occasionally whooped at me while I was walking around the tarn. The dramatic light and clouds faded into blandness while I was still trying to figure out how capture the place so it was just as well that I got a text message from work, I needed to look at a server that was misbehaving. It’s always a bit surreal when it happens… I’m in the middle of nowhere, and the phone beeps. Reality calls.

I waited to see if the sun would come out again in the evening but it didn’t. Until the sunset – it turned out to be a nice one, and for the second time in a row I was looking at the beautiful light through a window instead of the camera viewfinder. That was like the second nice sunset this summer and I’ve missed both! And I can only blame myself for it.

Last day with the 5D MkII that I was supposed to use for wideangle photography. Ironic then that most of the time I was zooming the 24-105mm lens at full tilt and of course found it short, so if I would ever get a full frame camera I would probably need to invest in a 70-200mm lens while I’m at it. And a new computer – my workstation had considerable trouble dealing with the 5D files which are twice the size of the 40D raws!

It was a sunny day but I’m definitely having trouble of making use of the evening light. I’ve never been quite as into sunset light as I know that I should be as a photographer, but shooting at sunset is not nearly as easy as setting up your tripod and waiting for the light to happen. You have to choose your subjects with great care, scout ahead and then double check in the evening. It’s the shadows – the thing you thought would be nicely lit is suddenly shaded in the evening. And shadow is something we have plenty of around here. In small scale, it’s the forest. In large scale, it’s the hills. What it means that you don’t ever really get to see the actual sunset, the time when the sun “officially” sets. It will be gone behind the nearest hill long before it has actually set. There are no grand views here and even if you do find a good viewpoint, there is so much logging that the landscape is guaranteed to be ruined in every direction.

Or then I just haven’t learned how to handle the evening light. I’m fairly sure that it’s exactly the same problem with sunrise light – it’s just that I rarely bother to wake up early enough to check it!