I had big plans for the weekend, but I had to revise them already when I woke up – the cold night had turned the wet roads into icy roads, so I had no business driving around with summer tires. I waited until the sun was high enough to thaw out the worst and then got out to discover new places. I don’t know why but there are still some forest roads around Loos that I haven’t checked yet, and it’s definitely my loss because this road turned out to be one sweet photographic experience. It’s just perfect in the morning light and I didn’t have to kick myself too much for not going out as early as I had planned because the low sun wouldn’t have reached the scenery anyway (forests and hills in the way). The downside was that there was thin high cloud again so while the sun was shining, it also wasn’t. The sky cleared towards noon but the light wasn’t the same anymore.
At the Össjön lake I found these old boats, some completely broken and rotting away and others still in one piece but probably not sea-worthy (lake-worthy?) anymore, and the place was complete with a boathouse with a caved-in roof. All you needed to do was to avoid the colourful new(er) boats in the composition and it was photographic eldorado right there! It worked fine at this time of the day, but it would look even better at bit earlier in the morning.
I didn’t find any opportunity to test the new ND filter, but I was able to put the levelling base and ICE through their paces. I took a 3-image panorama with the polariser mounted on the lens and important detail in the foreground. Foreground is normally almost impossible to stitch manually unless you’ve found the nodal point of the lens, which I can’t even try because the 24-105 mm lens doesn’t have a lens collar and I don’t have a specialist panorama head. ICE did another perfect job though and the result is an image that could’ve been taken with a wideangle lens, but my 38 mm (24 mm x 1.6) wasn’t enough for the scene so I decided to try stitching it together. A very useful experiment, and a very useful technique!
Such a productive day and it would’ve been even better if I had had the light early on. Driving along with beautiful things all around, stop and look, take some pictures, move on to the next one…
