When I lived in Ljusdal, I used make long trips by car in search of nice places to photograph. When I moved to Loos, the car got some rest and I found many good spots within walking distance. And a lot of more great locations are just a few kilometres further so there’s not a lot of driving required anyway.
But today I felt like doing a road trip again. I had found one interesting location when studying the map and I decided to make a big de-tour getting there. Loos is in the north-eastern corner of Finnmark, and there’s a lot of interesting nature in Finnmark. History as well, but I’m more interested in the landscape, even if I’m a Finn and get an occasional kick out of seeing the Swedish spellings of the old Finnish names! My company on this trip was a Canon 5D MkII that I got to borrow for the weekend. To be honest, I wasn’t quite as keen on the camera as I was on using a wideangle but since there was no wideangle lens I could get my hands on (that would be a wideangle on the 40D), the full-frame camera did fine with the 24-105mm lens of mine.
I really should have stopped at every interesting place, but for whatever reason, I drove past most of them. This small tarn was the first spot I saw so it was a good beginning, but then after a while… how many nice tarns can you shoot during one trip? After I had set up the tripod for the picture and started attaching the camera, I found out to my horror that I had forgotten to switch the camera plate from the film camera to the 5D. I had no way of securing the camera on the tripod! After thinking about it for a moment, I noticed that the rubberised zoom ring of the lens provides enough friction to make the camera stay on the quick release platform by itself, so with the remote release in one hand the camera strap in the other (so I could catch the camera if it slips off!) I was able to use long shutter speeds without compromising image quality. By long shutter speeds I mean ISO 50 and polarising filter – it’s not handholdable even in sunlight. This makeshift support system worked fine for horizontal pictures, but it was a whole lot trickier to balance it for vertical. Adjusting the camera position for the composition was a real pain in the butt in horizontal, and it was near impossible in vertical!
The goal of this trip was Amsen, a large-ish (in local scale) lake north-west from Fågelsjö. I saw on the satellite picture that there’s a really long curving beach at one end of the lake, and sandy beaches are rare enough around here that it would get my attention. I had a suspicion that it would be difficult to get that long beach in a picture so that you can actually see what it is, and indeed it turned out to be even worse. You can see the beach in the horizon, but obviously it’s impossible to appreciate it from this earth-worm perspective. And I didn’t find many other opportunities either, the place is ruined by logging which reaches all the way to the shore so just trying to avoid the ugly wasteland reduced the composition options to minimum. Having said that, it was interesting to see the place. Never seen anything like it in this corner of the world and I might go back there one day, to explore it better than I did now.
And the 5D MkII then? Interesting. It has ISO 50 which I love. Honestly, if the next version in the x0D series has ISO 50, I’d seriously consider switching. That is more important to me than any other feature, closely followed by weather-proofing. But working with a full-framer gave me a problem I never have with the 40D – vignetting with filters. I was still seeing black corners at 28mm and what kills me is that the vignetting was evident in one picture but not the next, when they’re both taken at 28mm with the same filter, with only a slight difference in composition. I can only speculate that I rotated the filter in between the frames and the glass element is a little bit loose so that it would hang down a little bit in some position. I only saw the vignetting in the upper corners which would support this theory, even if it sounds a bit strange. In any case, it’s not the camera’s fault. The camera is fine, but it’s not good enough for me to upgrade. For one thing, I can’t afford it. For the second, my 40D still works and that is good enough for me!