The Quiet Picture

It’s the coldest day of the winter so far, around -20°C. It was  -22°C when got up and the strange thing is that unless my memory totally fails me, it’s colder than it was last winter. Last winter was special in that the cold period lasted such a long time, but up here in Loos the temperatures never plummeted as seriously as it did in the lowlands. It happened a number of times that when I went to work, it was about -20°C in Loos but when I got to work, people were saying they had temperatures all the way down to -30°C. Warm air rises up… It’s not unusual that it’s 5 degrees colder down at the lake than it’s at home.

Anyway, as much as I like skiing and as little as I mind cold weather, I draw a line at -20°C. No point in risking my lungs. So today I will concentrate on indoors activities and I started by playing around in Lightroom. I created a collection of all my unprocessed pictures to see if I could find something worthy of working on and I was shocked to see that I had almost 3000 unprocessed photos… I had no idea it was that bad! I expected they would all be from my pre-Lightroom era but there were hundreds of pictures even from recent years.

In the end I decided to take something really old and see if I could make anything out of my first year of digital shooting (with the 3MP Canon D30). There was this special day in Järvzoo in May 2002, I got to witness the birth of two moose calves. I shot a lot of pictures just to document the event, but obviously it’s difficult to make anything photographically outstanding of such an event (say what you may about giving birth, but it’s really very messy!). After the calves were born, I did my round in the zoo and on the way back I visited the moose enclosure again and found the calves on their feet, nuzzling up against the new mom. Sweet!

May is a good month for other animal babies as well. The ural owls are cute, they leave the nest while they’re all fuzzy and they stood all lined up on the branch. Unfortunately I didn’t have my camera ready when all five of them were sitting in a row, but at least I caught three. The light was difficult and I couldn’t fade out the net with the Sigma 170-500mm lens I was using back then so I just simply underexposed the background in Lightroom until I got rid of the net, and concentrated the light on the owls.

Spring is almost around the corner…

Last night we got hit by a storm. I had trouble sleeping because the wind was screaming in the forest and I heard some cracking sounds which told me that trees were falling or breaking off. I was really nervous that a tree would fall on the house, but as far as I could see when I looked outside, the wind was blowing in a rough west-east direction which meant that the only part of the house at risk of a fallen tree is my neighbour’s flat (this house consists of two flats). I also check the weather forecast and it said the same thing, winds blowing from west or south-west. So I finally decided to put on earplugs to get some sleep anyway.

In the morning as soon as there was enough light, I looked out the window and saw that a tree had fallen outside the bedroom, almost touching the house. I went outside and found almost total destruction – well over half of the trees in that part of the forest had fallen or broken off. More so, the direction they had fallen was north-south, which means that they had all come down towards the house! I was happy about the earplugs… had I heard what’s going on, it would’ve frightened the living daylights out of me for sure. This forest closest to the house, they did some logging here a couple of years ago so the forest wasn’t very dense to start with, thus making it more vulnerable to the winds. And now it’s obviously even less dense and the few trees that are left standing are probably weaker than they were before. Which means that when the next storm arrives, there’s a big risk that more trees will fall even without a tornado. There is safety in numbers, but those numbers don’t exist any more.

When I walked around, I started getting a better picture of the night’s events. In some parts of the forest there were only a few trees fallen, but they were in the west-east direction, thus following the direction of the storm. But the areas which had suffered the worst damage were more in the north-south axis and I can even plot the path this tornado took through the forest and my house was right in the middle of it! So I’m counting myself lucky that no damage was done to the house. I just hope that my cabin fared as well, considering that the storm was even worse in that region. Maybe I should go and take a look next weekend… in my new car…

Considering the havoc from a photographer’s perspective, things are looking pretty bleak. If I thought yesterday that the snowcover was spoiled, then today you can hardly even see the snow from under all the debris. But maybe in some places which were spared from the hurricane, new snow can still rescue the landscape and give me something to shoot this winter. But this forest closest to me, which has given me so many pictures through the years, it’s gone. It’s just a wide open space now.

I’ve never done a hike in the mountains in October before, so it was exiting to see what the day had in store. It turned out that it was all good – the first snow had fallen in the tundra and apart from the occasional snowfall that flew past in the heavy wind, it was a sunny day which allowed us to see the landscape in all its glory. The colours were muted under the thin layer of snow and all the features of the landscape were highlighted, giving it a very graphical quality that you normally don’t see.

We hiked up to the Lill-Skarven fell because there’s a road that takes almost up to the tree line, thus sparing us from wasting time and effort on climbing up the boring part through the forest. Once you’re up there, it’s easy going until you’re at the foot of the mountain but it’s not such a bad climb anyway. It was cold though, so much so that the water in the tube leading out from the water bladder in my backpack was frozen! The October weather is nothing to toy with, the wind was biting through my supposedly wind proof clothing but by the afternoon the sun was sufficiently warm to melt the snow on the ground and the ice in the water tube. But the slight discomfort aside, it was an amazing hike. There’s nothing like the first snow in the mountains!

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 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.

I’m trying to fight off a cold and it seems like I’m doing a good job at it, because I’m not getting very sick… but I’m not fully fit either so something is going on. Normally I stay indoors when I have a least suspicion of having a cold, but yesterday was an exception. We had agreed to drive to the mountains so I just packed up some painkillers and hoped for the best. And to my pleasant surprise, it was fine. In fact, it seems like doing something like that just helped me feel better!

But anyway, the trip. I was rather naively thinking that we would get sunshine, blue skies and white mountains but we got clouds, heavy wind and snowmelt instead. Oh well. The weather is obviously always a game of luck, but I didn’t expect to see so many black blotches on the mountains. I’ve done many April mountain trips and now that I checked my old pictures, it proves that I wasn’t completely wrong in expecting those white mountains (just check out the pictures from my April trip last year!). But if the weather is a game of luck from day to day, then the seasons aren’t the same from year to year either.

If the clouds hadn’t been bad enough during the day, they just got worse in the evening. In fact, when we drove through Slagavallen which is at about 850m altitude, we found ourselves inside the cloud. So just when it was at its worst, it was at its best – the best pictures of the day, right at the end of it!

It was -4 degrees when I left today. As I was putting my skis on, I heard something dropping on my jacket and a closer look revealed that it was rain. In -4 degrees? I was sure it would stop soon and turn to snow instead, but obviously I have no weather forecasting skills because the raining just intensified during my trip. After a while my glasses were covered with drops and I could barely see where I was going so finding anything photographable was a bit difficult. I made a few efforts but mostly I just concentrated on seeing where I was going. And when I wiped the glasses, I found that those drops were not even water – it was ice. I looked at my jacket and saw that it was frozen in every spot that didn’t benefit from my body heat… and every spot of clothing that did benefit from my body heat was just wet. Even my hair was frozen! You’d think it would be really uncomfortable to ski in those conditions but it wasn’t actually half bad. The skis were gliding really well and because I was wearing the right kind of clothing, it didn’t feel as wet as it really was. Interesting trip.

Note to self: You have one-day contact lenses for days like these… use them!

It has been snowing quite a lot but the wind has also been quite heavy, so the landscape is once again not looking as nice as I would hope for. But that doesn’t stop me from going skiing of course, it just means that it’s harder to find any good pictures. I had a really nice trip today, even if it was more like walking with skis on rather than actual skiing, with what all the new snow on the trails.

As much as I like the snow, I do have one problem with it – it’s too soft. It has been cold since November, so there are no layers in the snow. It’s soft all the way through and the only way to transport myself off-road is by following the snowmobile trails where the snow is packed. Step outside the trail and you’ll be treading at least knee deep, it’s impossible to make any meaningful progress like that. What we really need right now is a few days of temperatures above freezing, and maybe even a little bit of rain, to compact the snow and then create a solid crust on it. Until that happens, my skiing is restricted to the trails and it won’t be long until I will be bored by them. I have about four different options for my trips, and I normally do two trips every weekend… you do the math. The conditions don’t change fast enough to make every trip interesting, but having said that, I’m really enjoying the skiing!

I thought yesterday was a great day. Today was better! During my walk, it suddenly started snowing. A lot. I loved every second of it! And the walk which wasn’t supposed to be as long as the one yesterday just kind of got extended so I hiked 12 km through the snow and I was almost regretting I didn’t extend it further because the landscape and the trees in particular looked so nice.

I have a favourite spot every time there’s new snow, an old meadow with a barn and a forested hill in the background. Last year I noticed that the barn is barely visible behind the young birches that grow in front of it. And today when I was approaching the spot, I found myself surrounded by the birches! I’m sure I was here last year and the birches didn’t reach above my head. I didn’t even think there was this kind of a tunnel through them at all. They grow fast – I also found that the barn is no longer visible at all behind the birches. I need to find a new favourite spot!