I have seen this a few times as I passed by, but never photographed it until last night. It stands in a Bicycle shop display, but, too much of the store interior disturbs the overall impression of this magnificent bike during daytime. Look at the fork and that frame, pretty neat work. I hope it gets to stay in there, in the warmth, because if it gets sold, it has to come out in the cold and quite probably, eventually end up as a rusty wreck.

As you might have seen, I reworked my blog design since I partly wanted a clean layout without distracting elements, and partly wanted to be able to display 1024px images, as this one. It’s not ready yet, and there are links and stuff that I don’t know what to do with. Yet, I hope it works as is, for the time being.

I caught this view the other day,  but I have passed it many times and every time with the wrong lens mounted. This time I had the right lens, so I was happy to be able to photograph the view with this amount of detail. What on earth is going on behind those windows…? Makes me think of the Moomin characters, which almost none but Scandinavians knows who they are… I’m thinking of hattifnattar, to be specific, which makes even fewer understand now, since that’s what they are called in Swedish. Well well, for all you not fancying Finnish stories, the image per se shows lots of details from a typical house in the centre of Lund.

East of Lund, facing South. Malmö in the horizon. Cold as hell, which you might think would be a hot place, but is not. If you think about it, it makes sense. It’s a cold place, considering the sense while freezing to death. It’s a very warm sensation.

Yay, that was lively. It’s not as bad as it sounds, it’s just my way of thinking. In reality, when I most often am on the lighter side, I’m a pretty positive thinker who takes the day as it comes. It’s in fact cold now, but I have so much work that I nearly don’t mind whatever weather it is. I’m doing lots of illustration work with a small portion of product photography, which is really good, since I want to focus more on my graphical side in work. You, who have learnt to know me through this blog, know that my imagery might appear rather dark, sometimes. I can tell you that I really have to fight that urge, to express me in darker tones. It really don’t work with marketing people. Quite understandable, too – so, I’m learning.

If I’m lucky, the worst portion of this Winter will be over when time slows down again. But, as it looks now (snowstorm outside my window), I doubt it ever will pass.

This weekend, I believe I learned how to keep the diffusion in control, by slightly underexposing to retain a bit of the focus. When I expose as usual, too much light is let in through the diffusion holes in the aperture disc, which completely washes out the brightest parts of the image. The flip side is that underexposure may push noise in the shadows to unwanted levels, but usually that’s not a problem to me since I can either use or suppress it during the b+w processing.

I must also say that I sometimes like the sun ray effect you get around direct light sources within the viewframe. To much of them, and the image is completely spoiled, but when the light source is not too bright, the result may occasionally look really lovely. Okay, it’s almost not photography any more, but anyway. In the image above, the rays came through a bit too strong, but I liked them anyway. It’s like the sign points in that direction, and as if there were blinking lights over there that called for you.

I think I’m getting a grip of this little creature now. But I have also started to look around for other ways to get the diffusion effect. I would love to use for instance my Summilux, which is both sharp and contrasty, together with a diffusion filter. I have seen that there are Schneider filters for still photography, previously only being available for motion film equipment. There are filters for overall softness (Classic soft), but the one I found most interesting diffuses only on the lighter areas in the view and retains all shadows (Black frost). They seem to come with a hefty price tag, though… The classic solution to use a pair of stockings is perhaps the most viable solution, who knows, black stockings might do the trick with the shadows.

We made a short tour to one of our favourite places in Malmö today to get some sunset images. There were no temperatures for shooting any longer sessions but we fled into a coffee shop only ten minutes after we’d arrived. When I was little, all parents said there aren’t no bad weather, only poor clothes. I guess we were poorly dressed for the occasion. Now, when later on viewing my images from today, I was thinking. Having seen all the lovely images from Paul’s Charlotte, from Chris’ trip to California, and also Ray’s image from Port Townsend, wouldn’t it be nice to show how the beaches look around here? Here they are, but beware, do not pull off your shoes….

Is it possible to thrive during wintertime, I don’t think so. This has been the most terrible winter ever, at least since I moved from Stockholm to Lund, in 1989. In fact, most around here refer to that very year when they try to recall when it was as cold as this, last time. That winter, I were neither in Stockholm, nor in Lund. I was on Iceland, me and a friend thought we would become millionaires by working there, cutting fish to be specific, for a few months. How wrong we were. It took several months to earn enough money for the flight ticket home again. It was cold also on Iceland, that winter, but I think I was more hardy when I was young. Foremost, they had their most severe recession in economy for decades, that’s what I remember mostly. Before 1989, you have to go back to the early years of WWII, when it was a bit colder than now. My God what they must have suffered, a war like that and this kind of winter, without the convenience of central heating, hot chocolate and after ski fur shoes. My suffering gets pale in perspective, of course. To leave the sad thought behind, I get a little bit warmer at heart by seeing a window that seems to withhold and protect an entire rain forest, full of the most beautiful plants and flowers. A flower shop……..I can imagine even I would thrive in there…sleeping through the winter, waking up sometimes by the scent of the flowering plants, seeing all the people outside that cope with their everyday lives and covering themselves from the weather as good as they can. It wouldn’t take long to fall asleep again, and yet, these flowers are in full bloom. Amazing, and hard to understand.

Åh, jag är så trött
Denna eviga längtan
Fastfrusna drömmar

They have built a new IKEA store in Malmö, a nearby town to where we live. We visited it on an early morning before the rest of Malmö came. Yes, they easily fill there huge parking areas during the weekends, but this time we could really chose where to park. And there they were, the two IKEA caravans standing all alone in the cold garage. What a sight, I just had to make it a permanent memory. Captions that came to my mind were Mobile homes, Swedish home brew, and so on. Although the bright and colourful appearance, they look somewhat sad. I guess that I always look for sad angles in everything, it’s a side of me. My dark and moody, black and white images are often very sad, I don’t know if this is a good thing.

Well, well, when not taking time off and visiting IKEA, I’m pretty busy in trying to get more jobs as an image maker. All creative juices goes into that, for the moment. Until now, my bread and butter has been writing with illustration as added value. Now,  I’m trying to turn this around to get a greater share of illustration and image work. I guess these are not the best times to dream – most companies that I have as potential clients are laying off – but I have to keep mine alive. Nevertheless, even if I love image making more than writing, I still think a combination of these is the best way forward.

Heck, this was not the everyday ovepove post, but, a glimpse of my home brew business life wont hurt either.

Last summer we made a trip along the South coast of Sweden, and among the places we visited, the ship setting Ale stenar was one of the more spectacular. This morning, we had planned to continue on our sunrise chase to exactly that place. We planned it very carefully by determine how the clouds would move over that area and to, of course, check when the sun actually rise. And off we went from our house, at 7.40 to be precise. Sunrise was expected at 8.40, but hey, the sky already looked too interesting to leave our minds at piece. Were we missing the entire show now? No time to think, we hit the pedal and about one hour later we arrived at Kåseberga, where Ale stenar is situated.

The weather guys were right, the sun really rise at 8.40, but honestly, the light was much more interesting during the hour before that. Not that I didn’t know that, looking at this in retrospect. We call this hour the “blue hour”. The same type of light occurs after sunset. Well well, what could we do? We went out to hike up to the place were the ship setting is, and got our second shock for the day. It was -14°C and the wind was not hard but present, and mostly pretty damp since Kåseberga is located by the sea. We managed to get out to the stones, but we were already pretty cold before we even had taken our first photo.

I made a few, and managed against all odds to even change lens two times during the shooting session. It lasted at most ten minutes, then we had to get back to the car. It was terribly cold, and my hands were completely frozen. The first image is made with a soft focusing Lensbaby, with the sunrise in my back. It’s the moon you see in the image. The second one is taken against the sunrise (it hides behind the large stone in the middle), with my Summilux 25.

After having warmed up at a café, we took a long way back home, where I spotted an abandoned house that was located very dramatic on a height with only a tree as company (that’s the last image in the series, taken with my Lensbaby). All in all, it was a great trip, with some really good images to work with, so I’m pretty happy tonight.

It’s never an easy task selecting the images of the year, and to be honest, I don’t have the urge to make the ultimate top-10 list either. Nevertheless, it might be interesting to see a selection of what I photographed during the year, not the least for myself. It’s good to look back, sometimes. Since all images shown on this blog are originally stored on Flickr, and since I upload more images there than I show here, I thought it would make sense to make the selections from everything I have uploaded there. Keep it simple, kind of…

Time to cut, huh? I agree, please enjoy:

My colour images slideshow

My black & white images slideshow