The Quiet Picture

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?

It’s been a week and I only have one waterfall picture. That must be a record… I was going to fix that issue today, the idea was to locate and shoot Kvarnbäcksfallet which is south from the lake Storsjön. Finding it was easy in the end, it’s signposted from the road and the hike is given as 1 km. I could hear the water falling nearby already, so this sounded like a very promising trip. Empty promises, as it turned out – I have never seen so many waterfalls with so little to shoot. The main fall is at 1 km just like the sign said, but the hike up there is steep uphill so the the water is constantly falling. And upstream from the main falls, it’s the same thing for about 1 km until it starts to level out. So we’re talking about 2 km of waterfalls and I only found one spot and even that wasn’t very good! Unbelievable. The brook is surrounded by spruce forest so for every fall that looked half promising, there was at least one thing preventing me from shooting it. Either it was impossible to get close enough to the water, or the branches were blocking the shot, or there was too much fallen tree material in the water to spoil the view. Really, the only thing I achieved on that trip was to get my jacket dirty when pushing through the forest.

But don’t let me discourage you. If you’re a waterfall aficionado, by all means check out the Kvarnbäcksfallet falls. And please take a lot of pictures and show them to me so I will know what I missed. Because I sure missed, a lot.

On the way back, I took the small road that follows the river Ljungan on the south side. I found one nice spot and I felt considerably better after that, although I guess it’s not fair that I should be disappointed if some place didn’t turn out to be as good as I had hoped for. It’s just impossible that every place is good, this is why we do scouting in the first place. I’ve been thinking about these falls for a couple of years already and now I’ve been there and can put it to rest!

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!

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?

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!

I was supposed to get Ikea deliver my furniture today, but they called me in the morning to say that the car is broken so they will have to postpone it for tomorrow. My cabin is cursed, for sure. So I had to come up with a plan B, and quick. No vacation is complete without a trip abroad, right? So I drove to Norway.

My first stop after the Norwegian border was just before Brekken to have a look at the Ryfossen waterfalls that I discovered last year and thought were fabulous. The weather was overcast, so it was ideal for waterfalls. But last year when I was there, I was with my sister and I was only half concentrated on finding the best details. Now that I was fully concentrated, I didn’t think it was as good as I thought it had been and I only really found one detail I was happy with. I got the impression that the water level was quite high though and it looked like it would be possible to jump across with just a little less water in the stream, so maybe there will be more ops then.

I continued my journey to the Syldammen dam. It’s a bit funny driving the last bit to Syldammen which is on the Swedish side of the border, because for a moment the road curves in and out of the countries. So in order to reach something in Sweden, I had to drive to Norway and then in Sweden, back to Norway, and once again back to Sweden. No customs to drive through, though!

The reason I drove to Syldammen was to find the glacier buttercup. I had a description that there would be hundreds of them just 200 meters downstream from the dam. What the description didn’t say was which side of the river, but with only a couple of hundreds of meters, I’ll easily do both. So I started from the near side, and very soon had a couple of birds of prey circle above my head, screaming an alarm. I saw that on the opposite side of the river, there was a steep cliff so I assumed that the birds had a nest there. So I moved further away from the shoreline, I didn’t see any possible location for the glacier buttercup anyway. Since I didn’t have a GPS with me and SportsTracker doesn’t start tracking without a connection, I couldn’t really say how far I had gone but surely it was more than 200 meters. With no buttercups of any kind, I turned back and made sure to walk even further away from the assumed bird nest (but still the birds sounded their alert above my head). But this was a problem – if they reacted like this to me when I was on the opposite side, what would they do when I was approaching the cliff from the same side? So I decided to try it and turn back as soon as the birds got agitated. Said and done, I probably got just as far as 200 meters but no buttercups here either.

Now what? Had I completely misunderstood the description? While I was walking on the far side, I had spotted a patch of snow behind a group of buildings. So what if the “dammbyggnad” (literally, dam building) referred to these buildings and not the actual dam? And glacier buttercups love the late patches of snow. So I felt good about that, I figured it must be it. Except… no glacier buttercups, nothing that even hinted at their existence. With nothing better to do, I decided to climb up on the nearest peak (not high!) and while doing it, I got those birds of prey on my case again. Either the birds hate me or then there are two pairs of them but I was seriously doubting about my nest theory now. Maybe I could walk further on that other side of the river anyway… but it felt hopeless, I figured my best chance of finding them had been this patch of snow. All I wanted now was to drive back, I had some blue sky already and metre by metre the clouds were creeping up on Sylarna so maybe I could see the peak from some nice viewpoint along the road.

No new furniture, no glacier buttercup and no mountaintop on the way. Still, it was a good day. Weird, huh?