I’ve got a new hobby – geocaching. I know I’m really late with it, but I never saw the point with it. I’m out and about thanks to my camera, I don’t need to look for the caches. But as I’ve said so many times, I am suffering from motivational problems so it occurred to me that if the weather is counter-productive for photography, then the prospect of looking for caches would work. And it will get me to places that I haven’t visited before and with any luck, some of these places could turn out to be nice for photography as well.

With that in mind, I drove to Gröntjärn with the GPS and my new camera in tow. The first cache was at Svartsjöarna and that’s where I got my first picture with the 7D MkII as well. The lake surface was mirror calm, really beautiful! It is flooding though and when I tried to walk thru the forest that you see in the picture, I found myself wading in the water. It looks ok at first glance, but it’s really waterlogged.
Then I drove to Gröntjärn. There’s a bit of ice on the lake, it’s a few degrees above freezing today but not warm enough to have melted the ice and snow yet. I found the second cache without problems and then concentrated on photography. At one point I saw these paw prints in the snow… the only fresh footprints are mine, so this animal was not attached to a human. It’s not a fox for sure, the prints are too big and too far apart for it. So it’s either a runaway dog or a wolf!
When I got to the back of the lake, I continued through the forest in search of another cache. There’s another lake very close to Gröntjärn but I almost never visit it, because it’s basically just a normal lake like a thousand others. The cache however turned out to be impossible to find. I was right on top of it, according to the GPS, but I didn’t see any likely place where a cache would be hidden and I didn’t find it any unlikely place either. The hint was ”between waters, a fish”. A fish could refer to it being under water and after a while, I came a conclusion that it was indeed drowned. This lake is flooded so there wasn’t any ”between waters”, there was just simply water everywhere, in fact even my GPS was showing the cache as being in water and I’m sure the map is not based on a flooded lake. Or then I’m just very inexperienced in finding caches, so better luck next time.

But what was it that I said about geocaching maybe taking me to photogenic places? I didn’t find the cache, but I found some great subjects to work with! There’s an article in the latest Outdoor Photography about black and white and it actually got me very inspired to do more b&w, and a day like today was perfect for it.

I had planned to look for a lot more caches today, but time flies when you’re having fun. Such is the nature of November that light started fading when I was walking back to my car so I drove home instead, eager to see how these first pictures out of the 7D2 would turn out!

At the moment the only software I have that can read the RAW files is Canon’s Digital Photo Professional. It’s nice to see that some things never change – it was like going 10 years back in time when I opened it. I’ve said it before and I say it again, DPP sucks, so deep, I can’t even find the words. Maybe if it was the only RAW converter that I’ve ever used, I might think it’s ok. But coming from Lightroom, I got so fed up with DPP that I gave up and just converted everything to JPG as is, and imported them to LR. I hope Adobe will update LR soon so I can properly process the pictures!
If you’re wondering what I think about the 7D2, it’s too early to say. I saw one thing which got me a bit concerned but I have to do a lot more shooting to form an opinion. What I can say at the moment though – I can use the camera to take pictures. And when it comes down to it, isn’t that what cameras are for? 😉