Om jag kisar lite
Målar med mjuk, vit pensel
Ser jag ett sandslott

I don’t live in a metropol, so night time can be a rather silent experience, especially this time of the year. I had a walk the other night, we had ‘warm’ weather for the first time in months , it had been raining all the day. Great. I can’t remember when I welcomed rain the last time…. Probably never happened, this isn’t really the most desert-like place on earth. Anyway, it appeared as I made a bunch of photographs of different places where there  are restaurants, or were in one case. Well, one of them can’t hardly be called a restaurant, but you get the pattern. I must have been hungry.

These images are from the outskirts of East Lund, where I live, along the route I have started to take when running. The area is not new to me, but definitely unexplored, and usually, when running, I always spot images that I would like to make but can’t because I wear no camera… This time I decided to make a walk along the same route and bring my camera with me. It was cold and windy, and the latter made the snow on the fields smooth as if it had been sanded with a fine grained sandpaper. My black and white heart just melted.

I met this chap on a short walk in the outskirts, where I live. There are some vast fields around here, and this gentleman stood at one of them. To get out to him, I had to paddle a few hundreds of metres in deep snow. Already at distance, he appeared very prominent –  seemed to own all the fields around here. While approaching him with my camera in hand, he made it very clear from what angle he looked best, and that I’d better obey. What a grumpy scarecrow, I thought. I would have chosen that angle anyway, without telling me in that tone. Must be the season. He seemed to have gained lots of weight, too.

There has been an exhibition at a gallery in Malmö that I have been longing to see since it was announced a few months ago. Despite the much I wanted to see it, I almost missed it. Last week was really the last, and me and Karin finally made it there on Saturday. Shown was work under the title ‘The last golden frog’, by the Swedish visual artist Helena Blomquist. The images are (digital?) photo montages, and in this particular series of images, monkeys plays a central role. The old film ‘Planet of the apes’ comes to mind but that isn’t why I enjoy her work. It’s rather the surreal environments she depicts, the dried out lakes, the silhouette of vegetation, and the monkeys in place of man. And that lonely frog, in the moonshine at that dry lake bed. I can’t tell why I was drawn to these images, but I suspect it is the dreamlike scenery and her use of a few characters, multiplied to populate the world. The monkeys look like cuddly toys, but their eyes don’t look very inviting, rather very tired. Striking work, that really should be experienced on big prints. The web images I have linked to are so small they really doesn’t make  the originals any justice at all. I bought a book, though, so I could continue look at the images at home, although the size and print quality don’t  made such an impact as the big prints did.

Brrrr…..

Looking at this chair makes me thinking it must be like this some less fortunate birds and animals experience this winter.

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.