We’ve been having really cold temperatures, cold enough that it’s meteorologically winter now. Personally, I want to wait for snow before I call it winter… Anyway, the lakes are starting to freeze (as you saw in the aurora pics yesterday), even the river is freezing. And the frost doesn’t melt all day in the shaded places. So I thought I should check Tevån to see what the cold temperatures are doing to the waterfalls.
It’s a fascinating phenomenon, how the flowing water starts to freeze. The ice is underneath the water, so the water is now falling on icy rocks. Photographically speaking, it gave me a new challenge, because my normal instinct is of course to go for the really long exposures to smooth out the water. After I took my first frames, I realised that it’s not gonna work – there is no dark rock under the water to create contrast, so the water becomes just a big white mass. I mean, that’s kind of the idea with the long exposures, but it definitely looks different now. White on black vs white on white. So I ended up using 2-5 sec exposures, and maybe even that was too long.
I had the long zoom with me and I thought that this should be easy, just zoom in on the details. But Tevån is never that easy, no matter what the conditions are, so I really had to have a long look at every little waterfall to find a composition that worked, at least a little bit. But this snow-free freezing period is quite rare, normally we get at least a little bit of snow as soon as the temperatures dip below zero, so it was important to at least document what it looks like now. Next autumn, maybe it rains all through October!