Just testing the new Nikon 35mm f/2 AF-D

Yesterday my new Nikon lens arrived: A Nikon 35mm f/2 AF-D, which I got secondhand on Tradera (the Swedish Ebay) for less than 200 Euros. So I was out yesterday evening and today morning to make some more or less silly test shots. Today I had a workshop in Malå, which is 126 km in the inland. We arrived half an hour too early and drove onto the Tjamstanberget, where we had a view over Malå and the hilly landscape behind. “Click”, another test shot.

Testshot: Mushrooms – ISO 800 f/2.0 1/80 secTestshot: Stone and water – ISO 200 f/2.0 1/8000 secTestshot: View over Malå – ISO 200 f/2.8 1/800 sec

Tonight I left the house to make photos of the starry night, but it was a bit hazy and making pictures didn’t work well. So I made a photo of the copper smelter Boliden Rönnskär instead, which shows quite big but nice stars on the lighting. I’m quite happy with the new lens.

Boliden Rönnskär

Then I headed back to the car looking at that stronge cloud, which was quite greenish … And if clouds get greenish you either smoked the mushrooms instead of photoing them or it’s no clouds but Northern Lights. And thus it was! I just managed to make some shots of the pilot boat with the aurora above before it got weaker again and faded to some kind of greenish glow, hardly visible. Not the best photo, but I like the motive.

Pilot boat and polar light

Now I’m hoping for many starry nights and polar light, I need more practise.

The illusion of winter

No, no, it’s not winter yet, it’s October. Yes, it snowed a bit in Skellefteå last weekend. Yes, some frozen snow is left. Yes, the maximum temperature in Skelleftehamn was only + 0.2 °C yesterday. Yes, we even have snow storm this night (snow warning: 5 – 15 cm until tomorrow morning).

But after the snow storm it will get warm. And rainy! 4 °C at lunchtime and 6 °C in the evening. With wind gusts up to 60 km/h. Probably the streets will be full of wet slush tomorrow and I won’t leave the house without rubber boots. But, as I mentioned above, it’s not winter, it’s just plain old October.

Anyway, the snow covering the houses, the gardens and the streets and lighting up the whole nocturnal scenery gives a perfect illusion of winter, even if it’s only for a night and half a day.

Some photos made in the forest two hours before the snow arrived:

The illusion of winterWinter treeWinter tussock

And some photos I made in Skelleftehamn just now, between ten and eleven o’clock:

Way to StorgrundetAnother forest wayTallvägen, the street where I live

 

Faint polar lights

I wake up at 1:50 and stood up to drink a little bit and directly continue sleeping, but I made a mistake. I looked out of the window! Quite clear and colourful polar lights glowed on the northern sky.

Aurora photographers question number one: Shall I go out? Or continue sleeping?

Guess which ten minutes were the best of all? Right, those ten minutes in the beginning, where I put on winter clothes for a cold October night, got camera bag, flashlight and tripod, spend valuable minutes with scraping the ice from my windscreen and drove to the nearby beach. At the tiny beach of Storgrundet, same place where I took pictures of the first sea ice last morning I sat more than an hour on the frozen sand and looked at the faint and pale polar lights, that increased for some hopeful seconds just to fade again.

Pale Northern Lights above Storgrundet

Aurora photographers question number two: Shall I go in again? Or continue waiting?

What did I do, while waiting for the polar light to become stronger? I took photos. It’s always a small challenge with night shots, but I think it’s fun, even if I’m tired and both motifs and results are mediocre. When it comes to polar light I normally try to catch as much scenery as possible by using a wide angle lens. This time I used a telephoto lens to go more into details. A new trick I learned tonight when polar lights where pail and formless.

OverexposureStone in polar ice

I got frost (- 7°C), ice and Northern Lights. Now I’m looking forward to the first snow. It could come on Sunday or be long in coming. Stay tuned for the first photos of snowy landscapes.

Autumnal kayak tour

Today morning weather was calm with a grey sky, but later it brightened up a bit and I decided to take a kayak trip. Summer kayaking with just a life vest over your t-shirt are definitely past for this year, since both air and water where chilly. It always takes a bit of time before I finally sit in the kayak: Emptying the kayak from this weeks rain fall, dressing, fixing map and compass as well as the camera and finally dragging the boat into the water.

Minutes later I paddled round the northwest point of the island Storgrundet which lies off the coast of Skelleftehamn. The birches on the island where almost completely leafless, only the rowan trees still wear their many-coloured leaves and bright red berries.

Rounding Storgrundet

On the outer side of Storgrundet the sea was a bit wavy and I tried to make pictures of the waves flooding the bow of my kayak. But I wasn’t lucky because when bigger waves came I felt safer with the paddle in both hands.  I landed on the small island Brottören, hardly more than a flat pile of stones, some birches, rowan trees and a shallow pond. On one of the bigger rocks I found a twig with rowan berries and I wondered if a human or a bird laid it onto this stone.

Rowan berries

I continued in calmer sea between Brottören and Storgrundet where I had a nice view on the Island Norrskär with many coloured trees. Alas the sun hid behind clouds again.

Clouds – trees –wavesAutumn colours on Norrskär

Since weather was a bit dull I didn’t continue to other island but returned to the tiny sandy beach where my kayak has been laying since summer. The sharp tracks of the keel where the only tracks I left today.

Leaving tracks

Protected against wind and waterTo protected against wind and weather and – much more important – I use a dry suit. I bought it second hand, it is too big and not at all breathable. This could be a problem on longer tours since you start sweeting and getting means getting cold. The head was protected by a balaclava – there may be prettier things – because on the open sea it’s always a bit windy and chilly. And even if I love cold and even rough weather, I don’t like to freeze.

On my wish list: A neoprene balaclava – much better when it gets wet, and a better dry suit for kayaking, but those are extremely expensive and cost up to 1000 Euros.

Étude – making photos at the rocky shore

There’s nice autumn weather with blue sky and there’s today, a windy day with a clouded sky, but at least no rain. I took a tour to the rocky shore at Långhällan, one of my favourite places nearby. My plan was to practise. The musical pieces that provide you with practising material are called étude. That’s why I’ll call it “étude” when I practise photography.

Todays topic: Long time exposure which filters at daylight to blur the waves. I’ll show you the unedited snapshots of two motifs at the coast. That’s how it looks like, if you just do “click”.

Rocky islandsTuft of grass

Ok, that’s the motifs. They show some kind of chaos, because the windy weather created quite big waves (at least for the bottenviken – the most northern part of the Baltic Sea) and it’s hard to distinguish between the waves and the rocks. There’re several way to improve the photos. One: Wait for better weather. Two: Work with filters.

In the following images I used the Big Stopper, a filter that takes away 99.9% of the incoming light and forces you to exposure 1000 times longer than usual. Instead of 1/20 of a second for example you would expose 50 seconds, long enough to blur all the moving objects as the waves, but to keep the sharpness of the stable objects as the rocks. Additionally I used a graduated filter to avoid overexposure of the sky. And that’s the first motif with the filters, edited in Lightroom.

Rocky Islands

The long exposure transforms the waves in some kind of a foggy layer, making the photo look like flying over cloudy mountains. I’m not so happy with the shot. Waves are too high blurring bigger parts of the rocks and the sky is quite dull making the photo almost looking like black-white.

By way of comparison a photo of the same motif I made last year which I prefer instead of the todays shot:

2013-10-07: The same motif last year

The next photo I like much better. The rocks are looking rougher and the tuft of grass is a nice eye catcher giving the photo both a focus and a story. It will be the first image of my series “one”.

Little tuft of grass

What do you need beside of the filters to make these photos: First of all a stable tripod, it’s a must. A remote release is quite handy to avoid shaky images. And last not least, warm and water proof clothes. I had chest waders to get to the big rock through knee deep water and to kneel without getting wet.

Some vocabularies for my German readers:

exposure – Belichtung
expose – belichten
blur – weichzeichnen, verwackeln, verwischen
tripod – Stativ
remote release – Fernauslöser
chest waders – Wathose

Last not least, just another photo from today, perhaps my favourite:

Rocks at Långhällan

A new blog

Hello. I am Olaf Schneider, a German jazz musician, web developer and photographer having been living in Northern Sweden since April 2010.

It’s September 2014 and I just started a new blog. The main focus will be the great outdoors in Northern Scandinavia: about travelling, landscape, nature, weather and being outside afoot, with skis or kayak, but probably there’ll be many other articles, too: about swedish culture, events, photography, cute kittens and other bits and pieces. And a lot of pictures because I love outdoor photography!

I hope you’ll enjoy way up north. I’m looking forward to your numerous comments.

Have fun!
/Olaf

Selfie at Abeskosuolu near Abisko

For nordwärts readers: why another blog?

Some of you might already know me in person or my German blog nordwärts, where I wrote more than 800 articles and published more than 3500 photos You’ll may ask “Why another blog?”

1. The language

nordwärts is German. There’re many Swedes that can speak a bit of German and understand more than they would admit. But only few of them can read it quite fluently. So I thought about writing nordwärts in German and Swedish. But beside of the increased time exposure writing bilingual I got more and more contact to people that neither speak Swedish or German whether they are from Finland or Dubai. Therefore I decided to write in English. (Yes, I’ll definitely make many mistakes.)

2. The topics

Four and a half years ago my new life in Northern Sweden was all amazingly new and exotic to me: The first snow in October, the Swedish language and culture, the reindeers on the inland roads. But many things got quite normal now. Still I adore my life in Northern Sweden, but it’s not new to me longer. I started writing about playing music on nordwärts or other things that are not at all Sweden-related. Should I write a public diary for the rest of my life? Probably not. Therefore I decided to shift focus away from “my (not so) new life in Sweden” to other topics as mentioned above.

3. Change

I love change. That’s all me!