Visiting lake Myllyjärvi (and thinking of filters)

Tracks over lake Myllyjärvi, originally uploaded by jiihaa.

Sunshine on a dark forest, originally uploaded by jiihaa.

Hut, originally uploaded by jiihaa.

Sunny, originally uploaded by jiihaa.

Last summer and autumn our family visited often the nearby forests and lakes. One of the nicest places was lake Myllyjärvi, which is nearby the much larger lake Bodom. (There are several other lakes with the same name, "Mill Lake", here hearby.)

Today we went there again, to see how spring is progressing. It is nice that the light now lasts longer during the evening, thanks to the daylight saving time.

It was very difficult for me to select which images to keep. (Usually I delete 90-95 percent of the images I take.) Also, it was even tougher than usual to select my favorite. Anyway, here is a story in photographs of the visit to Myllyjärvi. Can you guess which of the four images is my favorite? (The answer comes later.)

Today was a day for enjoying the sunshine. The snow made everything really bright, so that occasionally it was difficult to keep the eyes open.

I'm nowadays rather used to taking photographs of snow, usually managing to make a good job of it. The real-time histogram information on the LX3 is useful for this purpose, making it easy to get the exposure you want.

As a sign of spring being nearer, I today modified my basic settings on the LX3 so that it no longer has +2/3 EV exposure compensation as standard. I realized I had to turn down the compensation more often than not, as there is less and less snow in the landscape.

Last week I ordered a ND8 filter to be used with more available light, to be able to do long-exposure photos (and to be able to use larger apertures, all the way to f/2.0, for controlling DOF). Now I'm starting to realize I need two filters to do what I really want (to do motion-blur photograph), or to get a ND64 filter for cutting down the light by a factor of 64. With this filter (or two ND8 filters) I should be able to use exposures at the range of 1/10 to 1 second.

But the ND8 filter will probably be handy anyway, as it allows the use of f/2.0 in most situations. Today I had to use f/4 or even f/5.6 to manage exposure at the fastest shutter speed of 1/2000 s.

Yesterday, when the light was flat, I experimented with post-processing. Today there wasn't much need for that.

And what was my favorite image? It is the second one here, "Sunshine on a dark forest". For some reason this image talks to me in a mysterious voice.