I woke up early to catch the morning light, only it turned out that I might as well have slept in. Once again there was enough clouds in the sky to make photography just one long exercise in patience and I really broke my record while I waited for light to fall on both my foreground and background. And when it finally did, some high cloud had started to build up so the sky behind the whole thing was milky white. An hour thus wasted, I relocated myself to another mountain and found a great spot. Except, just as I had set up my tripod and camera, the light disappeared again. I waited half an hour and never got more than partial sunlight on my subject, so it was just as well that my photographer friends arrived and released me from the misery.
There are still a lot places in the Funäsdalen mountains that I haven’t discovered, but I’m getting more familiar with the area after every visit. It’s nice to be able to share that knowledge with other photogs, although it would’ve been a whole lot nicer if we had had the light with us today. Nothing wrong with the places we visited (I hope), but when the light fails like it did today, you’re left stretching your photographic skills to make anything out of it. I don’t mind overcast weather with proper clouds, and sunlight works fine, but this high cloud that blocks the blue sky and half the sunlight… for me it’s just about the worst possible.
In the evening we went to the sunset location I had found on Thursday. We were hoping against hope that the clouds would part enough to give us some colour, but for a long time it looked like my only keeper from that outing was a photo of a juniper root. Then when we were almost back at the car, we found that the wind had completely died and we had a mirror calm lake in front of us. Light was starting to fade, but we suddenly had wonderful opportunities to play with reflections, form and shape on the calm water. And then at last – colour! The last rays of the sun managed to colour the clouds red, but it was more like an ironic reminder of what could’ve been than any real sunset. We had to laugh while quickly scrambling for a last ditch attempt at catching the light. I think I prefer the juniper root…
