The Quiet Picture

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!

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?

There’s a gravel pit along the road between Funäsdalen and Mittådalen. In one pile of sand which has been there for years, a flock of swallows have dug out nesting holes so the pile looks like swiss cheese. The birds don’t mind people so it’s possible to stand right next to the pile and photograph the swallows. The nests are high up on the pile though so they are well out of reach and I guess that’s the whole point – the birds can feel safe up there and there’s safety in numbers as well. My problem is that I keep forgetting to take my 300mm lens with me so this morning I was standing there with my 150mm macro. But at least it gave me an overview of the nests and a lot of birds flying around, although I do have to get there with the long lens before the birds leave the nests!

We continued to Anderssjöåfallet because it looked like we would be spared from the rain that was forecast for the day. At first it even was sunny, which dampened my enthusiasm to shoot the water while I was walking up the falls. But then, higher up after the last big fall, I finally got the shade I needed so I was able to start shooting.

Mr S. drove back home in the afternoon, so I needed to find my own inspiration for the evening’s photography. It was going to be a calm evening with a good chance of sun, so I drove to Måns-Erstjärnen and this time I had a 300mm lens with me, because the swallows’ nests are on the way there. It was overcast when I got there so I didn’t have a lot of light to work with, but I tried anyway. It looks like the young swallows are flight-ready because I’m sure I saw some of the young leave the nest and then come back again to beg for food from the parents.

When I got to Måns-Erstjärnen, there was a little wind so I didn’t get the calm water I had hoped for, but maybe with a little bit of luck it would calm down (before the wind would pick up even more, because it was going to be a windy day tomorrow). This is the second time I was following the shoreline and I was even more impressed than I was the first time. There are photo opportinues almost after each turn, all I needed was the light and the calm water. But no such luck… so I looked the other way and found this little brook meander through a bog with the peak of Ånnfjället in the background. I had to wait for a while before the sun came out again but it was great when it did! The light lasted all of one minute and when I looked back towards west, I saw that the group of clouds had only increased. So my chances of getting that wonderful evening light were reduced, but at least I could do some scouting. At one point there was a ridge with not many trees on which got me curious so I walked up to see what’s on the other side. A small lake, that’s what – and this one was calm! But still, no light. So I walked back to the bigger lake and continued my hike around it. When I had walked a long stretch without any photo potential, I was going to turn back but had second thoughts and continued ahead anyway. It turned out to be a bad idea, because of course the sun would come out now when I didn’t have any use for the light. I half ran to the small lake with the calm water and just when I had the tripod set up and was ready to take a picture, the light disappeared again. I only caught the last of it, but now I wanted to wait instead of walking around and missing the next opportunity. I waited for half an hour and the clouds in the west persisted, so I decided to give up. And about half a minute after I had put the camera in the bag, the sun came out. I swear. And I swore. But instead of setting up the gear in the same spot, I made the fatal mistake of getting back to the bigger lake and try to catch those spots that I had scouted earlier. But by now the wind was picking up again so nothing worked and I just walked back to the car feeling very crossed with myself. I mean… I had waited at the same spot for half an hour. Why couldn’t I wait for one more minute and actually get the picture?!

By the time I got back to car, I had calmed down. I will have another opportunity here, and it will be even better and it will not be down to one minute either!

Today we were a group of four photographers, my old photographer buddy and fellow botanist Mr S. had come over for the weekend and my regular photo companions from Ljusdal had driven up for the day. I had tried to plan a day that would provide the best chances with little effort, but that would require the weather to co-operate. The forecast said it would be sunny, but that doesn’t always mean that it’s really sunny in the mountains because the highest mountains tend to maintain their own climate. We started from Torkilstöten which is my favourite flower mountain and the view from top towards Helags is great as it’s so close. As just as I was afraid of, Helags persisted with its own cloud cover so it was shaded and the view was effectively ruined.

A funny thing though – as I was walking across the top plateau, I kept an eye out for the alpine chamorchis. I didn’t see it, but I figured that I was on the wrong side of the trail anyway (I had gone left from the trail, while the alpine chamorchis I found last year were to the right from the trail). I had to wait for the company to catch up, so I sat on a rock to rest my feet. I looked around to kill some time and what would catch my eye… if not this littlest of orchids! A closer look revealed six individuals in this small patch. And that’s all the alpine chamorchis I found on this trip.

When the sun just wouldn’t properly come out, we gave up on Torkilstöten and I thought we should try with a waterfall instead. Silverfallet is the obvious choice once we were on this side of Flatruet anyway, but there’s just one little problem with it – it’s very wet to get there. Previous experience had taught me to wear wellingtons but the others only had hiking boots, and for those to keep your feet dry you need a very good waterproofing. And as if the risk of getting wet feet wasn’t bad enough, there was also the millions of mosquitoes to deal with. With my wellingtons and mosquito repellant I was actually quite comfortable, but I think I was alone with that… I hope they found the waterfall worth the effort though. Personally, I struggled with the light because by now of course the sun was properly out, when I really didn’t need it. I still have trouble working with waterfalls in sunlight and Silverfallet was side-lit, so there was a lot of contrast to deal with.

I guess mountains are a little like a box of chocolates. You never know what you get…

Move over Fiskhålsgraven. I have a new favourite ravine!

My big Messlingen photo project is to document the ravines in the region. Fiskhålsgraven and Evagraven are easy and the rest of the ravines require a varying degree of effort, but they all can be reached during a day-hike in any case. Today’s hike took me to Svartmorgraven, which is easy to reach even if in the end Sportstracker had logged 17 km for me. It’s an easy 17 km though where the hardest part is right at the beginning when you take the trail from Messlingen towards Fiskhålsgraven. But once you get above the tree line, you can start walking parallel with it until reaching the ravine and the ground is easy. The kind of hiking I like the most, actually – I love the wide open spaces in the tundra and here in Messlingen in the oligotrophic conditions, there’s not a lot of growing in the tundra either so it’s easy to navigate around the scattered dwarf birch bushes.

I didn’t know what to expect from Svartmorgraven, I just assumed it would be smaller and less interesting than Fiskhålsgraven. But it really took me by surprise, it’s possible that Fiskhålsgraven is deeper but Svartmorgraven has tons of character and it’s also longer than its more famous brethren in the east. It means that you can walk up and down the ravine and constantly discover new details, one more photogenic than the other. There’s also a brook that runs through the ravine, providing some waterfalls. Would you believe that I didn’t have a tripod with me? I wanted to hike lightly but I guess that’s the best guarantee that you will find tripod-worth subjects, just leave the tripod at home. There’s even a couple of nice small waterfalls above the ravine and it’s possible to jump over the brook so you can explore the ravine and waterfalls from both sides.

What an amazing place! I really fell in love with it and was delighted to see all the greens. There are birches and rowans and other things that will turn colour in the autumn and make the place even better. Today started out sunny but it was mostly overcast when I got to the ravine. A little bit surprising to see that the ravine works even in sunlight, I’ve felt that it’s far too contrasty when I’ve visited Fiskhålsgraven or Evagraven on a sunny day. Not sure how it will look like later in the afternoon and evening light is probably no good, but now that I was there around noon I had no problems with contrast.

One thing is for sure – I don’t care how long the hike is, I will be there in September. I know I’ve said that about a lot of things, but if someone told me that I can only visit one place, then I would pick Svartmorgraven. No hesitation!

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If anyone is missing closer instructions on how to get to Svartmorgraven, I will post them separately at a later time.

I had this great plan, a short hike in the morning and then wait for the weather to improve and do a longer hike in the afternoon. A slight problem though, the weather got worse in the afternoon. Since I don’t have any Internet connection or even a mobile phone signal at the cabin, I can’t check the weather forecast in the morning to help me plan for the day. Yesterday when I checked, it told me that afternoon would be better…

In early evening when the raining finally stopped I put on my rain gear and took off towards Fiskhålsgraven. I wasn’t interested in the ravine this time, but I was very keen on checking out the little brook that runs parallel with the trail. When I got to the brook, I was feeling less and less enthusiastic about the whole thing though. With the rain jacket and pants on, it was hot. I had covered my hands and face with mosquito repellant, but as the water trickled down on me from the trees as I walked through the thick forest to get a better view of the brook, I knew the repellant would be washing off. And when I stopped, the hordes of mosquitoes were all over me. Not very pleasant. So I found myself hoping that I wouldn’t find any photo opportunities, and when I did, I tried to find all kinds of reasons why the picture wouldn’t work anyway. It took a lot of will power to set up the gear and take a picture anyway!

I also found some “new” ferns. Since I didn’t have the Powershot with me, I had to use the SLR for the ID shots. It meant that after I had used the polariser for the waterfalls, I had to remove it so I could take some snapshots of the ferns. And then I found some waterfalls, so it was back on with the filter. When I came across another fern that I needed to ID, I almost screamed out loud! I was anything but enjoying the conditions.

The best waterfalls are upstream and when I got to this one particularly fine spot, I forgot about my misery and happily composed my pictures. After all that walking through a wet and dense forest, it was slightly ironic that this spot was so close to the trail that I needed to clone out a trail marker in one of the pictures. The brook got less interesting again further up and the misery of the hot rain clothing and itching mosquito bites surfaced again so I didn’t think twice about turning back.

The Messlingen area is rather oligotrophic so there’s hardly anything of any botanical interest growing here (not including the lake, that’s another matter). However, this brook is maintaining its own little botanical world – perhaps not very many different species, but some of them are very numerous, I have probably never seen so much alpine blue-sow-thistle (Cicerbita alpina) before. Orchid-wise I found a few heath spotted orchids and one hot spot for the lesser twayblade, a very small area with dozens of this small flower. But the most interesting discovery however was the hard fern (Blechnum spicant), I know there is one spot a few km north from Loos where this fern still grows, geologically isolated. My guide showed it to me a few years ago and back then when I was a beginner with orchids, a fern didn’t really set my world alight. But I took a picture of it anyway and it helped me to keep the fern in my mind, so when I saw it now I knew immediately what it was. The interesting part of this discovery is that it’s not supposed to grow here, no more than in Loos. The 1992 flora inventory (Bengt Danielsson, Härjedalens kärlväxtflora) only gives 11 confirmed spots for this fern in Härjedalen and the closest one to Messlingen is east from the Grundsjön lake. So I’m pretty chuffed about my discovery!

This winter I found a waterfall. Obviously, it was under snow and ice at the time, but I promised myself to get there at first best opportunity in the spring and today was it. In the winter you get there following the snow mobile trail, but in the summer there are two roads that take you close and leave about 1 km to do on foot. My choice of roads was perhaps not the best possible today, there was a point the road was so bad I considered turning back, but then I thought, nothing ventured nothing gained… so my car gained a few new scratches after a couple of ground hits. My next car will have higher clearance!

Besides the obligatory photography equipment, I had also packed a gimmick and a pair of sturdy rubber gloves. I knew that there would be a lot of wood debris lining the waterfall but because it’s such a small brook, it would be easy to clear out the small stuff. And sure enough, it was – I got it looking quite nice, apart from the trees that had fallen across the brook. If you look at the first picture, you can see some of that stuff in the lower left corner and on the right but it looked a whole lot worse at first, many of those small waterfalls were broken by small branches and dead leaves. In the second picture, you see the fallen trees but this is not even the worst spot, one section of the falls were almost completely blocked out of view by a fallen spruce.

This waterfall is such a nice little treasure, I will come here in the summer for sure when everything is growing, for example I saw some ferns coming up and what could be a nicer decoration than ferns? The height of the fall is also impressive, of course it’s not continuous at all but I reckon overall it must be the highest one in Loos.

The gimmick that I had packed was my blue/yellow polariser. It’s been ages since I’ve used it, and to be honest, any gimmick filter is best used with care and seldom. The last time I used it was in the winter a few years ago so using it now in the spring and in the forest was new for me. It was a useful experience because I discovered that the polariser works magic on the bland looking mosses. Just compare the first picture with the third one, there’s a world of difference in the moss. The white balance in both pictures is set by picking a custom balance from the white water. So I was thinking, in the future, I could take one picture with a normal polariser for the water, and a second one with the b/y polariser for the forest and then combine them to get rich green mosses and natural looking water.

Other than that, the gimmicky nature of the b/y polariser is obvious. The way it paints the rocks golden can be nice (to a limit) but the blue version looks awful. Maybe the blue end of the polariser will be useful under some circumstances that I can’t think of right now, but I’m already looking ahead to the autumn because it feels like the golden effect would be perfect then!

What a dark day. Too dark for bird photography (although I tried – ISO 1600, f4, shutter speed 1/50…  doesn’t quite work), but just right for waterfalls. I drove to Hylströmmen, sort of. The freeze period last followed by the thaw and rain in the past days had turned the road into a mud track. When I almost got stuck, I decided it was close enough and walked the last 2.5 km to the falls. I can risk breaking my skull on the slippery wet cliffs but I won’t risk my car sinking in a mud pit!

And the falls then… I’m glad I didn’t even try to drive the car all the way. It certainly wouldn’t have been worth it. Note to self: don’t bother with Hylströmmen again. Ever. I just can’t make it work, I’ve been here a few times already but the number of keepers is alarmingly low. I mean, it’s a nice enough place to visit for sure, but photographically speaking, how do you capture it? If I don’t know it by now, I never will. Need to find new waterfalls!

Raining.

I’m good at rain-proofing myself and the camera, so I drove to Skärkdalen to photograph the Silver Falls I visited in the summer. It’s a 2 km hike from the car to the creek, the trail goes through some mud and muck and it was even worse now than it was the last time. I found that my wellingtons are leaking again, this is definitely the last pair of Tretorn boots I’ll ever own.

And it was raining. I hadn’t come very far when my all-weather hat was leaking water on my face. And my all-weather jacket had wet sleeves and I was only saved by the fleece sweater underneath. And my all-weather hiking pants were wet at the knees. There’s a shelter at the creek (next to the bridge over it) so I just wanted to get there, have a cup of coffee and wait for the raining to subside.

When I got to the shelter, I found that I had forgotten to take the thermos with me. So I downed my sandwich with cold water and looked at the raining to continue just the same. Then I had a Snickers and it was still raining. I waited some more (getting colder by the minute thanks to all the wet clothes I was wearing) and when it finally looked like the raining was tolerable, I went out and set up the camera by the closest fall. The camera at least was still dry, while the tripod was wet and cold and not very nice to handle.

And then it started raining some more again. I retreated back to the shelter and waited a little bit longer. And gave up. I hadn’t gotten very far on my way back to the car, when the raining quite genuinely let up and I even saw the disc of the sun through the clouds. I really wanted these waterfall pictures so I turned back, but in a minute it was raining harder again. I definitely gave up this time, it just wasn’t meant to be!

It was still only early afternoon and I had no plan B, I had a problem instead. What to do? My only rainproof clothes were soaking wet, so I had little chance of doing anything meaningful today. And the forecast said that it would continue like this tomorrow, which gave me bad odds for doing any photography.

I checked out and drove home.

It had stopped raining by the time I got to Långå, so I stopped at the Rändåfallet falls so I could investigate the top falls that I missed the last time. I got my waterfall fix anyway, and the falls were definitely worth seeing even if here’s very little water right now. I know I always say that I prefer less water in my waterfalls, but you need some water in any case or there wouldn’t be a fall!

The raining aside, I think it was a good vacation. I got to see the autumn colours, conquered three mountains, witnessed some reindeer behaviour I had never seen before, ate a waffle, did a lot of hiking that’s good for the body and soul. Now I have a whole weekend at home before work, and I’m planning to do absolutely nothing at all. Well, apart from finish processing all the pictures I took this week and re-live the good moments!