Nature
Experiment
This summer didn’t end up as I had hoped. Among several things I had hoped to get done was a lot of photography, but this didn’t happen. Instead I ended up doing a lot more house renovating stuff that I could have imagined. And now vacation is over. Anyway, yesterday I decided to try to take a few photos again and and the same time try to do an experiment.
I recently watched on online seminar which got me thinking about several things of how I photograph things, without going into details I have a huge problem in that I don’t take photos “intentionally”, instead I snap photos without thinking much if I can get a better photo by moving around finding another angle, wait for better light, etc.
So yesterday I tried to kick myself in the behind by putting on a wide angle zoom (14-28mm) before going out into the forest. This is something I never do.
I can’t say that the result was especially good but I got me thinking so I consider it a success. Here are the photos with some comments why I don’t think they are that good.
This is perhaps the photo that I find most interesting, it was the light that caught my attention but at the same time I go “meh” when I look at it. It’s interesting to me for how it looks like in the forest, but it doesn’t really work as a photo.
A “standard” photography, it could have worked much better if the groups of trees to the left hadn’t been there … but I couldn’t move to the right without getting serious wet. I like the clouds, the grass and the light but those trees “destroys” the photo. I would have liked to have the center of the photo more to the left so that a few of the trees to the right wasn’t in the frame.
Kind of interesting from a personal view but the photo is bad, the trees to the left shouldn’t be so prominent, and the fallen tree is completely wrong in the photo. My only excuse is that I couldn’t really move to some other place that would fix these things.
I find these red plants quite interesting and beautiful, but the top photo isn’t that interesting. I tried different angles, framings, etc but I couldn’t make a good photo. The top one is the one I think shows the plants best, I think this photo would get a few likes if I posted it to Instagram but it doesn’t really work for me.
The second shows how it looks where this plants grow, on top of a small hill, and I think it’s fun to see the environment. But the plants should be more prominent.
I’m quite fond of tree stumps with some kind of mushrooms growing on them. Sometime I see one where the mushrooms make the whole thing looks like some futuristic city from StarWars/StarTrek. This one is quite boring, it’s just a recording of how it looked like when I walked past it.
As I wrote above, the photos above are not very interesting but I started to think about things, which I consider a success.
If something can go wrong, it will - funny
I thought you would enjoy a good laugh. I try to take at least one walk each day, the last few week I’ve got up 4-5 and taken a nice walk before work. This is purely for exercise but I still have my camera with me. I usually carry my Lumix G9 (m43 system) with a 12-60 mm zoom (24-120 in full frame speak), sometimes a 35-100 (70-200) zoom, or once in a while a 75-300 (150-600) - I only have one lens with me, remember this is exercise.
I usually take some photos of interesting trees, some landscape, etc. I rarely see any animals, perhaps a rabbit, a few birds, but that’s about it. Sometimes I scare a capercaillie (name translated by Google) or a moose but I usually don’t see them. I don’t mind since these walks are really good both for my body and for my mind, I don’t really need the photos.
Anyway, having seen the same trees almost daily for 1.5 year made me want to try something new. So, today I attached my 7-14 (14-28) lens to the camera, first time since the pandemic started, with the intention to see see if I could get a new perspective of something.
Well, I started to walk and 45m into my walk I saw a raven, that happens, then I see four more sitting on two stones just 40-50 m in front of me. I’ve NEVER seen so many ravens so close up, I lift my camera and … remembered what lens I had. So let me show you my very nice picture of 4 ravens sitting on two stones very close to me, with a 5th circling above me. 🤣
I would have had wonderful portraits of these ravens if I had brought my 35-100 !!
A Sunday in March
Not much to say about today. I took a 10km walk and going south wasn’t much of a problem. But walking north wasn’t fun, it was blowing pretty hard and it got a bit uncomfortable (I’m not very fond of strong wind). Anyway, here is how it looked like on the lake.
Vatten är hållfastare än vad man tror
Jag blir alltid lika fascinerad när jag ser sånt här, det är lite svårt att tro att det verkligen möjligt att snö/is kan hålla ihop så här utan att ens röra vid snön nedanför.
A quick visit to a national park
My son and his girlfriend invited me to come along for a quick visit to my mother + an even quicker visit to one of the national parks. I, of course, said “yes”, packed my camera bag and after some struggle managed to get into the car (old man with larger than average feet and body).
After a few hours at my mothers house, and way too much to eat, we headed to one of the national parks in the area. Unfortunately we didn’t have that much before sunset to it was a quick visit but I managed to snap a few photos.
Since it was a gray day and the sun was setting and I had no tripod it was sometimes difficult not to get blurry photos due to me moving the camera.
Sometimes I wonder about dogs, doesn’t he understand that the water is cold? I mean there is ice slightly outside the frame.
On the way I tried to take a photo of a “waterfall” (it’s about 5-10 cm high 😋) which became a problem since it was in the woods and it was getting dark. But considering that the photo was taken without any kind of support for the camera and I was wobbling around trying to keep still, I think this came out OK.
Thanks to the image stabilization on my camera !!
Årets första dag
Årets första dag, åtminstone en här i byn verkar ha firat lite väl mycket i natt och är lite trött i ögat idag.
Annars började året bra med solsken, ganska trevligt efter ganska många veckor med moln, regn och allmänt skitväder. Snön gör ju att det är lite ljusare ute och jag blir på allmänt bättre humör bara för att det finns snö ute. Jag förstår inte hur folk står ut i södra Sverige.
Ibland så behöver man inte anstränga sig utan Moder Natur gör allt grovjobb och allt jag behöver göra är att trycka av och ta en bild.
Höst
Även om jag tycker om hösten för dess färger, dvs orange, rött, gult, så tycker jag att denna bild är höst också.
Det som är det sorgliga är att denna är egentligen inte en höstbild eftersom den är tagen i november. Sorgligt men sant.
More water than usual
Yesterday was unusually windy and rainy, at least for being Umeå. There were reports of wind speeds of 25+ m/s, and we got at least 64 mm of rain (the rain meter didn’t work all day so it was probably more). We also have had a six-hour power outage. Some parts of Umeå seem to have had more than 1 m of water in their house, several streets in the city were closed due to the water, one car drove into a creek since the road had been destroyed, and I think that an old stone bridge was destroyed.
This kind of weather is a bit unusual for Umeå, I think this is the strongest storm I’ve experienced in this area. However, if compared to what happens in other parts of the world it probably fair to say that this was a minor inconvenience.
Fortunately, the damage in the village where I live were minor. I noticed one old barn with a partly damaged roof and the road close to our house had partly been damaged.
But what was really striking was the water level in the lake. This is how it looked like some time ago, notice the stones out in the water.
This is how it looked like today
In another place it looked like this
So, it was an interesting day yesterday.
Boring weather
The weather the last week has been really boring. Well, not that boring, I would probably have been able to take a few interesting photos but I’ve been busy with other stuff … so yes, I miss taking photos.
