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

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.

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….

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.

Ögonlock som tyngs
Tårar och snöblandat regn
En vit regnbåge

Me and Karin went today to the shore outside a small village not far from where we live. The target was set on being there not later than 15.00, because yesterday we determined that the sunset was as most delightful during the coming half hour after this. It felt like the last tour we made, when we chased the perfect autumn fog and I captured the image showed in this post, only this time we were merely chasing the perfect sunset. Imagine our despair when we drove right into a weather front that looked quite probable to ruin our little trip. But,the brave sea side managed to keep away the horribly land side, and luckily for us, our sun sets out at sea.

So, what’s with the erosion, then? Well, partly, the shore we visited is under the pressure of serious erosion. I have also been shooting a lot with my Lensbaby glass lately, also today. This time, I decided to go with the new Soft focus glass, but this time with a normal aperture disc (f/5.6). And the image erosion stopped. Heck, the images almost looked normal. Not even blurry in the corners, just plain, almost sharp images. What’s the point with that, I really don’t get it? With lensbabies, I want erosion.

I didn’t get home much sunset in my camera, but this image turned out to be quite a dish in my opinion. Like sea soup – sea weed with nicely polished stones and, yes, bricks. It must have been a brickyard near here, because the shore is completely full of these wonderfully polished bricks. I did get a few shots of the sea view too, which I processed into b+w (see my Flickr stream).

It was a good chase, after all.

Most are having days off now, running around, desperately seeking gifts. I have also been down to the town centre, not that much for shopping, just for a few errands. But, I have been photographing between those, as much as I could. Well, that and working, mostly the latter in fact… But soon I’m off too, yay for that.

Some images from yesterday and today (my darker ones went into Flickr, to keep the blog a bit warmer and more cosy ):

Two things have happened since last time I wrote here. Winter is here, it actually looks like we are getting a white Christmas, not very common these days. Not here, anyway. Even more exciting is that I have now the soft focus glass for the Lensbaby in my hands. I have tried it out for two days and I must say it’s a pretty difficult lens to use in situations where there are spot light sources. What happens is that you get a flower of flare around each light source. These images gets the look of a Marc Chagall painting or something similar, which is not quite what I seek for. But, when this can be avoided, the glass performs wonderfully poor. Some examples, more to come over the coming days: