I thought it would be too late for fly agarics and other mushrooms since it got quite cold the last days, but nope, I was wrong. On my short yesterdays afternoon walk through the woods I found this nice couple: One older and sun bleeched, the other just sprouting. A patch of red in the more and more brownish landscape.
Fly agaric – Fliegenpilz
Heavy rain fall today in Skelleftehamn and quite windy with temperatures dropping to 5 °C. More and more leaves – still bright yellow – cover the streets or are flushed away into the next drain. Soon the trees will be leafless and golden October will turn into grey.
This is the season where I start longing for snow and for wintry calmness. Even if I love all seasons, winter remains my favourite one.
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”.
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.
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:
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”.
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.
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:
Sunset in Skelleftehamn is 17:55 today. Therefore I didn’t have much time to shoot an after-job autumn photo today. But just some hundred meters away there’s a small boat harbour and I managed to capture the last sun beams on the coloured trees before the sun disappeared behind the opposite line of trees.
Probably not the best motive, but I love the autumn colours. As every autumn I have the impression that I soak up those bright colours like a sponge. Soon the trees will shed their leaves and even the first snow may fall in October or early November.
I guess we all know those signs “No diving”. But today I spotted a sign on the peninsula Örviken, that surprised me. It said “Dykning (med eller utan cykel) förbjudet” which means “Diving (with or without bicycle) prohibited.
I try to imagine what happened at that place? Flocks of Swedish teens cycling like mad right into the water? Maybe, for it definitely was an extraordinary warm summer this year and I would believe many things the Swedes could do, if it’s only holidays, warm summer and twenty-four hours of daylight.
When I wake up earlier than necessary I have two choices. Either to stay in bed, turn on the other side and continue sleeping, or to get out of bed and – if weather is fine – make some photos. Today I chose the latter of the two and drove to the “lotsstation”, the nearest of my favourite places which is just two and a half kilometres away, and waited for the sun rise.
Two shots of this morning, the 1st day in October:
Last night we had a clear and starry night above Skelleftehamn. You could even see polar light, a large bow in the northern sky, but it was quite pale and quickly faded away.
Temperature dropped down to -5 °C, the coldest night since springtime. I woke up half past six – just a few minutes too late to catch the sunrise, but I went outdoors anyway. It was still chilly this morning and sky was clear.
To my big surprise there was no ice at all on even the tiniest water puddles. I guess the ground is still too warm to let the water freeze over night. However, when I’m outside I want to take pictures. Two of the todays snapshots:
Photographers comment: Contrasts are quite extreme on these against-the-light-shots, that’s why the sky it white instead of coloured. I should have taken my gradient filters with me for better exposure.
I never ever travelled for more than three weeks, two weeks in the winter. Now I’m planning for two month. And beside of which places I want to visit I have a lot of questions in my mind:
And last but not least:
Well, I’ll see.
I know it’s not true. But sometimes I have the impression that I travelled more in Northern Scandinavia when I lived in Germany than now where it’s right on my doorstep. I know it’s not true but at times it feels like it would be.
This year in spring I got the idea of travelling around in winter for a longer time, two month perhaps or even three. When I just talked about this idea with my employer, I directly got the answer: Great idea! Do it! That’s why you moved to Sweden! Well – that was kind of easy! And gave me another reason why I love working for Hello Future!
Then summer came and the dreams of snow and winter melted away while we had one of the hottest summers for many a long year. But now it’s September, 24 hours daylight are past and today in the morning the thermometer showed only 1.5 °C. Time to start planning my winter tour which I call “Nordkalotten 2015”. Nordkalotten is the Swedish word for “Cap of the North”, which is the European region around and north of the Arctic Circle.
You see the red ribbon on the map? That’s more or less the Arctic Circle and a bit of the Finnish-Russian border. My plan is to travel north and west of the ribbon and I already have many ideas of places to visit, for example Abisko, Gällivare, Honningsvåg, Jokkmokk, Karesuando, Kautokeino, Kebnekaise, Kirkenes, Kiruna, Lofoten, Nikkaluokta, Rovaniemi, Senja, Sodankylä, Solberget, Tromsø, Vesterålen, Værøy …
Whoa, Olaf, take it easy! The Cap of the North is huge! How many thousand kilometres of winter roads do you want to drive? You won’t see all places in only ten weeks if you want to leave your car sometimes.
So true! Well, as a matter of fact I hardly have any plans at all at present. I want to visit some friends for sure. And then I’ll try to do at least one ski tour, hopefully not alone. The rest? I’m not sure yet.
This is where you get into the game: Do you have any ideas? Know secret places? Have other tipps? Or even a place to stay? You’re more than welcome to write a comment (or if you want to keep it private to drop me a line by email).
I’m looking forward to your ideas.
Just a short note about the technique. I have to admit that I was a bit lazy with testing the new blog. It should work quite well but there are a lot of untested combinations. If you find a bug or a glitch or have other problems with the blog please drop me a line. I’ll try to fix the problem if it’s not linked to Internet Exporer 6 or 7.
Thank you.
/Olaf