reviewing some older shots

led me to stumble across this one



nice place ... thanks Mikko

swan dive

With Winter well in retreat the lakes and inlets to them are clearing and the Swans (parked over the lake in slightly warmer regions like Estonia) are starting to return to Finland to begin the nesting season.

I thought that this year we have had a more rapid thaw than previous winters, even though we have had far more snow than recent years.

(As an aside I will be interested to see how next year fares as the Climate change debate took a swift kick by those who seek to deny evidence rather than examine it carefully. It will be interesting to see how fickle the public is if next winter is warm in Europe. I wonder if any of those who slammed the process of collecting data and examining it will then have the balls to step up and say "heck I was wrong, we just don't know yet, lets keep looking"... but I doubt it)

I found these guys "heads down bum up" doing some team synchronized swimming ...



Well, after a long fly and a loud hoot we all need to fill our bellies. So we decided to see if we could get closer so we towed a small boat over to the inlet at the far end and slowly paddled down ... but we didn't get very close before they were soon aware of us


and soon they were hooting and clearly unhappy ..


even with a slow and quite approach in the rowboat they looked like they started walking across the ice away from us...



so rather than disturb them more, and perhaps force them to fly away we pulled back and "beached" (on the ice). Perhaps being exposed to us may have let us get closer the next day (although we didn't end up trying).

Strangely the Skido did not bother them as my father in law roared around the area within half the distance we got to.

This backs up other experiences I've had in Australia where nesting river birds are totally unconcerned about the "noisy jetSki hooligans" but very agitated about the bird watchers attempting to get close.

... I'm sure however it would be another story if he'd stopped.

So with that under our belts we though we'd head back to our nest where the Skido driver and boat owner got a well deserved rest with the grand kids.

quite a blow

With thoughts of moving back home to Australia, places I love like Fraser Island are coming back to my memory ...

I was looking for an image to test an idea on and ferreting through my collection found this one of an advancing sand blow on Fraser Island.

The wind blows the sand in from the coast and with the right conditions a large dune of sand advances across the landscape, filling in any lakes and killing the trees that happen to be in the way.

They are quite a natural feature, and not caused by any man made activities. Its almost like the sand island swallowing the trees.

You can see one forming here


View Larger Map

They are an interesting feature of Fraser island and responsible for some of the interesting formations you can see on the sand dunes.

Like this example where there were old dead trees seeming to arise from the dune.


As an Australian Europe is clearly a well trodden old world, so tts a wonderful place to go and see the world as it once was ...


before everything became covered in cities ...

snowy river, beautiful scenery and making good images

Just last week the snow was still here and looking soft and fluffy.

With time on my hands and the snow looking perfect I thought it was time to stop looking out the window at the perfect winter weather and join it.

This is just down the road from where I live and has got a bit of a hill, which I thought would make a great test of my skis in soft powder snow.

Especially after the last debacle I thought it might be nice to actually enjoy things.

This weekend just gone the weather has indeed turnef warmer (and foul) so looking at these images today makes last week seem all the more winter wonderland.

Lovely

Now an interesting point here is that all of these images were taken with my OM 10 camera with a Olympus 21mm f3.5 lens. Personally I love wide angle lenses for scenery and I still enjoy using my cameras with negative film, especially on a bright and contrasty day like this.

Back to the snow conditions, we've had an unusually large amount of snow here in Kouvola this year with absolutely perfect conditions. The temperature has been consistently below zero and so the snow has remained soft and powdery.

the hill there didn't present enough slope for my ski's (Åsnes combat, just a great all round BC ski) to get much flotation (even though I have the 220cm length) and as soon as I got to about that first left turn I just sank in .. to about my thigh.

:-)

but it was really worth being down there as you can see


some person had been skiing down that bit a few weeks before looking at the track, and a bunny rabbit (well ok a Hare) had been hippity hoppity along the path. The light is (as you can see) just bewdiful and being Finland and being winter the sun never gets high in the sky. I slogged along (no, its not easy going in thigh deep powder snow) over there to the right to get closer to the river and see what the place looked like there


peeking through the branches (you can perhaps just see the river over there under the sun through the pine tree) its a lovely warm day and some of the snow is just starting to fall off the trees (especially where the squirrels have been chewing the branches)

I can't help myself here and have to toss in a few comments about photographic stuff. Its just so good to look at images like this and not see blown high lights despite having massive amounts of provocation. The colour negative just handles things fantastically. Not only that, but the sheer amount of detail captured by my 35mm film is just amazing, take a look at a 100% pixel peep of that first top image:



gee-uhhst stunning innit? I encourage the photographically inclined to click on that and notice how much tree and twig detail (and pepper grain in the sky) is present. Compare it to the first image back up above.

Keep in mind this is a camera made in the 1980's with a lens from about the same year too and scanned with zero attention on fully automatic settings on my 7 year old scanner.

Makes me really wonder what the hell has gone on with the digital camera revolution. Sure, noone wants to be sitting round scanning film (especially me), but with excellent post development scanning stuff around like the Noritsu system we could all have access to great digital images and high quality printing from our images. My scanner gets a very detailed 5500 x 3600 pixels from each 35mm neg.

Wouldn't it be lovely to just drop off a roll of film and pick up 21 Megapixels on CD ... no work, no hassle, go do the shopping come back and pick it up ... thank you very much

Not bad and you'd need a camera like a Canon 5D MkII (costing a couple of thousand) to beat it. Considering this is supermarket negative (3 rolls for $6) you do need to shoot quite a bit to make that purchase worth your while. Well anyway, that's just flogging a dead horse now and not really the point of this article.


So, back to the day :-) ... with the river before me I skied up yonder around the bend ... following in someone elses tracks



there was a large flock of grouse on the ice just up around the bend, but not having a telephoto lens with me you'll just have to imagine that

:-)

---

PS scans were done in a hurry with my coolscan in automated batch and 8 bit with nearly nothing in manipulation. So if the images don't leave you gasping in their colour rendition and contrast its because I didn't put much effort into it

muh local ski track

I was chatting on the phone today with someone back home about the local ski conditions, so I promised to put together something to describe a little of this.

This is more or less the start of the track ...



which is in an urban area ... as you can see here ...



The snow here is quite different to Australian snow (as I understand it, haven't seen much snow back in Oz)



Anyway, lets head out onto the track and you can have a look around...




the heavy breathing is of course because I just skiied UP that where the ladies are coming along ...

The view from the top of one of the down hills ...


but as I needed my hands for that one I had to stop there ... the next ones are easier so we'll get some better footage ...



after this hill, its off back to the the track entry. Also, you can see the cuts in the track where other people are doing "skating" style skiing (like you see mainly in the biathlons and stuff ... the grooves are for "classic" ... but as I wanted to balance while I was skiing and shooting I picked skating (and its easier down hill than up).



I've skipped the boring bits, the track is about 4km long and has quite a few long slow uphills which I've missed out from this.

hope it was fun

frost on the lake

This year we thought we'd buy some "Nordic skates" (here they're called retkiluistimet).

These attach to the bottom of regular boots or in some models require you to use particular ski boot bindings. We bought a set that attach to regular boots because we often like to ski and hike in places. Ski boots aren't really good walking boots ...

They work best on plain ice, normally in Finland by the time the lakes are frozen they are covered with snow, making it impossible to Skate.

This year we've had a long warm period in November with the temperature only dropping below 0°C in December.

We've had clear cloudless skies and -10 or -20°C all week, so we expected the lakes to be frozen and snow free.

So, armed with our new toys we set off for a local lake to try them.

We didn't expect to find that the lake was covered in what at first glance was snow, but we discovered to be frost.

It was quite simply the most stunning display of frost ice crystal growth I've ever seen.

We struggled with the skating a bit then gave up as it was too hard ... should have bought the skis.

As you can see above the ice was growing up in 3 dimensional sheets which looked like small ice plants all over the ground, with small leaves in all directions. This is how it looks close up



a beautiful "ice cover" of plant like ice structures.

Walking on them you could hear the smashing of the ice (as it was still -17°C), I felt like a kid breaking beautiful crystal in a shop with every step.

We dumped the skates in the bushes and set off on foot to explore and walk around a little.

Hope you enjoyed this little winter wonder here ... today its started snowing lightly so it's all going to be buried and crushed. In places they were so densly grouped as to look like snow at first.


lovely

snowy christmas walk

We went for a short hiking trip to Niemipuro between Christmas and new year, we wanted to go there by skiing, but there just wasn't enough snow.

There is this nice little cabin there. The cabin is quite small, but this is an advantage in heating up the inside. When its -15°C outside its nice to be able to heat it up to above 10°C

Inside is quite dark (unlike the way it looks in my images lit by my flash) but is very comfortably (if spartanly) appointed.

One of the things which is fantastic in Finland (and I also found the same in Northern Sweden) is that people actually leave useful items (like candles, matches and tins of food) behind in the cabin. This can be handy if you happen to stumble in with not much.


Inside the cabin on the opposite wall from the door there is a raised platform which is intended for sleeping on. Keeping people off the floor is handy as it not only keeps sleeping bags warmer but cleaner!

As well, the platform is covered with 3mm thick high density foam just like many camping mats. So even if we didn't have our mats with us we'd have been able to sleep warmly enough.

I thought you might like a quick look around the inside the cabin. Looking back towards the door you can see there is a small bench table beside the window, a box of firewood and plenty of places to hang your gear.

Its nice that these places are right around the heating stove ...

which helps them dry out! There is enough room inside the cabin for 6 people to sleep.



The cabin is more or less on the bank of the river, so its not hard to then drag yourself out of the sleeping bag to admire a beautiful sunrise (assuming its not overcast like 99% of the days in Finland)