Time to concentrate on the main thing – flowers. Considering the slow progress of all flowers in Loos, I figured there was a risk that I wouldn’t find anything interesting (read: orchids) in the mountains. And I was right, the best I could find all day was some lapland marsh orchids which were in the first stages of opening. I also visited Torkilstöten, which is a reknowned floral hotspot, but summer is always late there. Today, the coltsfoot were blooming at their best… and the mountain avens were barely even budding. Plenty of snow, though.

The mosquitoes are turning out to be a real nuisance. This is why I’d prefer cooler weather – it’s easy to wear protective clothing, but in this heat, it’s only a choice between bad or worse. Grin and bear. The option is to stay at home and do nothing.

The afternoon hike took me to a lake in Anådalen, on the map it seemed like the lake would be a nice foreground to some mountains. Alas, it wasn’t at all like I had imagined, but now I know. One to check off the list. I did find something else nice though, ironically, just a few hundred meters from the road…

During my late evening session, I suddenly came across a pair of cranes, walking around in a marsh. It would be just perfect as a foreground for the mountain, so I took out the camera… and found that it was stuck on aperture 16. No matter what I did, take out the battery, memory card and lens, it refused to budge. The wheel itself was ok, I was able to use it to change other settings. But not aperture. Dang! The cranes are getting further and further away while I’m trying to figure it out… then it hits me. In the previous session I had assigned the focus point selection to the wheel, because I couldn’t make the joystick select the middle point. And by doing this, I seemed to have disabled the wheel for aperture, a very useful function – not! – who on earth needs that? At this point, I finally realised what had happened. It must’ve started as an accident – the focus point selection custom function was reset so that I couldn’t use the joystick to select the point like I’m used to. But I couldn’t remember which option it was in the menu, so I had to do some testing, but the testing was spoiled by a brain fart. I had forgotten that in order to select the centre point, you just press the joystick. And because I had been in desperate need of the centre point, I had gone for the next best thing which was the wheel, without realising the consequences. By the time I had all of this sorted out, with correct exposure settings and focus point, the cranes had moved away almost too far but it was still worth trying. Click… and huh? I still had mirror lock-up on!!

What did I learn from this? That accidents and brain farts will happen!

First the G10 and now the 40D… my EOS 3 is not giving me any trouble, I’m loving film at the moment…