07 May 2008
Here's my first post in Swedish. Not sure if I will do this more often in the future. We'll see.
Ja ... I helgen var jag och Jenny ner till Silvana och Henriks bröllop i Oskarshamn. Det kändes som en väldigt högtidlig och stor dag.
Jag fick äran att fota alltihop och i morse lyckades jag äntligen få upp bilderna till mitt Flickr-konto. För den som vill kasta sig över bilderna direkt har jag samlat dem i en ... um ... samling, här. Jag kan rekommendera att klicka på "Detail" i varje set, för att se lite större småbilder.
Vi hyrde en bil och åkte mot Oskarshamn redan på fredag kväll. Jenny och jag fick bo i Silvana och Henriks lägenhet tillsammans med ett trevligt gäng från Gotland. S & H själva hade flyttat in hos Henriks föräldrar över helgen.
Lördagen, bröllopsdagen, började för vår del kl 10.30 hos frisören. Silvana och hennes syster tillika tärna Madeleine, fick håret fixat under cirka fyra timmar.
Att få håret fixat innebär tre saker har jag nu förstått: Hårsprej, hårsprej och hårsprej.
(Alla bilder från frisören här.)
Brudparet och tärnorna for sedan till en fotograf för att ta studiobilder. Under tiden bytte Jenny och jag om på Villabacken. Därefter bar det av till ett stenbrott i närheten av Påskallaviks kyrka där vigseln skulle äga rum.
På tio minuter avverkade vi förmodligen Sveriges hittills snabbaste bröllopsfotografering. Tur att alla inblandade var så avslappnade och spralliga trots tidspressen! Följande tre bilder är nog mina favoriter därifrån:
Tyvärr var ljuset ganska hårt, men med 30 minuter kvar till vigseln hade jag inte sinnesnärvaro nog att börja mixtra med den reflektor jag fick låna på jobbet.
(Alla bilder från stenbrottet här.)
Mot kyrkan. Med ungefär tio minuter till godo hann jag ordna med blixtar och testa det jag behövde testa innan brudparet gjorde entré.
(Alla bilder från vigseln här.)
Utanför kyrkan fick brudparet ta emot allas gratulationer. Och lite ris.
(Alla gratulationsbilder här.)
Sedan gick färden tillbaka till Oskarshamn med M/S Solkust.
(Alla bilder från båten här.)
Dagen avslutades i Elajohallen där vi bjöds på en välorganiserad, god och rolig bröllpsfest!
(Alla bilder från festen här och här.)
Vi kom hem vid halv tvåtiden på natten.
På söndagen gick vi på en skön picknick i Oskarshamns stadspark. Solskenet gjorde gott.
(Picknickbilder här.)
För att ha varit min första bröllopsfotografering kändes allt skapligt lyckat. Mina enda tabbar var att jag lyckades sänka kameran efter ringväxlingen och därmed missade den första kyssen, och att jag senare var för långsam upp på läktaren när brudparet skulle ut. Plus det med reflektorn då. Ok, tre tabbar.
Labels: photography
26 April 2008
Went to the hairdressers yesterday. She is always very careful when cutting and usually ends up cutting less off than I really want. So yesterday I had prepared to ask her for the cutting machine.
We agreed on using a nine millimetre comb on top and six millimetres around the sides. She started by trimming down the sides. But then she sort-of chickened out and started cutting the top of my head with scissors. I looked like a mushroom.
After watching her with the scissors for a while I asked why she didn't just go ahead and shave it all off as we had agreed. I guess she knew how short nine millimetres actually is and didn't want to do something I would regret. But I said that I knew it was really short and said she should just do it.
So ... it turns out, nine millimetres is pretty short! But I don't regret anything. Just takes a bit of getting used to.
17 April 2008
Yesterday I was in a shooting mood and bought some interesting vegetables and fruit to shoot when I was at Hemköp.
I set up a provisional studio
on one of my chairs. I just used a large sheet of white paper that I happened to find in a photo frame. For lighting I used my desk light and a second smaller light.
I hunted down the correct exposure to make the paper only just overexpose in the brightest corner, and then shot in manual mode.
I used my Sigma 17-70mm, Canon 50mm and Canon 70-300mm lenses. I liked the results best from the 50mm, so I ended up sticking with that lens most of the time. (Except for the real close-ups where I used the 70-300mm + a close-up lens.) And most of the time I had the 50mm set at f/2.8 which seems to be this lenses sweet spot
.
If you want to see more of the shots I've put my favourites in a set at Flickr.
Labels: canon, photography, Sigma
15 April 2008
I bought the latest issue of Digital Camera (or to be more precise: the Swedish translation DigitalFoto) and found an article on simple macro shots you can take at home.
I saw a photo of a match being lit and decided to have a go at cloning the shot.
It was difficult getting the exposure right. To begin with I was over-exposing wildly and I had to go as far down as 1/1000th at f/8, ISO 200 before I got it right. I had no idea that a match was so bright — that's brighter than a clear blue sky or at least roughly the same.
After having set fire to almost a whole box of matches I ended up with 19 shots which were keep-worthy. The following two were the coolest hottest:
The weird flame in the second shot is from the match I used to light the upright match, as I was pulling it back.
I took the shots against a black background but that really hadn't been necessary. The matches were so bright that any indoor background would have looked black.
For the record I used my EF 70-300mm lens with close-up lens 500D screwed on.
The next project on my list is to have a go at weird fruits and vegetables.
Labels: photography
On the Sunday evening I went out to shoot the old trains I had found one week ago. There was plenty of — er — old stuff to be found.
I tried developing this close-up of a buffer both as a colour shot and as black and white. I preferred the black and white version because I think it gives you that heavy clonky metal feel.
This old engine was stripped of all the machinery and completely vandalized. It was packed with that eerie feeling of old abandoned places.
Not sure what kind of machine that was on the goods wagon. It could have been the engine of the engine, but it really didn't look like an engine to me.
The drivers cabin of the engine was ripped to pieces. All windows were smashed and the seats and instruments were broken.
This gauge was broken off and lying on the dashboard.
The engines must have been badly isolated. The drivers apparently had electric heaters for their feet.
More gauges.
Since most of the subjects were shaded and the light was getting low I underexposed all the shots by one to two stops to avoid the washed out look you otherwise can get in shade.
These were only a few of all the shots from the train yard. The rest are in a set at my flickr account.
Labels: photography
14 April 2008
After I bought my new memory card I found several reviews of the card saying it didn't work properly. So I decided to test mine to see that it works properly.
- First I filled it with old photos from my archive. No problems.
- Then I deleted a few, and put it in my camera. I seemed to be able to see all the photos, and I could also take a few shots to fill the remaining space.
- Finally I put it through a few disk tests. I used the Windows disk check thing and a program called CDCheck. The latter seems to work for any kind of disk. Neither of them found any problems.
Conclusion: Works for me!
Labels: photography
11 April 2008
I was just checking out Ameibo which was launched only yesterday. If I've understood correctly it is a legal, torrent based file sharing service which charges for downloads and pays users for uploads.
I haven't actually tried downloading anything yet. Since downloads cost money I'll only download stuff I really want. But everything was looking really promising and I got the feeling of Wow, finally someone has worked it out!
. How to provide legal downloads of films for a reasonable price.
But then I got a welcome
email, and I quote: (translated from Swedish)
To make best use of the service we recommend that you use Internet Explorer 6.0 and Windows Media Player 11 or higher.
Emphasis mine there. Well as you understand, that's a bit of a turn-off for a Firefox guy geek like me. At least there's the higher
which refers to IE7 I guess. That's better than asking for IE6 only, which would be plain crazy.
Don't they understand that their audience, people using (or willing to use) bittorrent, are much more biased towards using Firefox than the average internet crowd?
Then there's the fact that most of the films are DRM'ed, and therefore can't be burned and played on a DVD. But perhaps the film industry will one day understand (like the music industry now finally has done) that DRM is only a nuisance for the legal downloaders and no one else.
Labels: browsers, firefox, internet explorer
09 April 2008
Today I got the 16GB Compact Flash card that I ordered a few days ago. I just wrote about the crazy weather but this is almost even more insane: 16GB now cost me less than half of what my two 2GB cards cost me two years ago. And back then I had a serious discount since I bought them at the shop I worked at, Allradio. That means that the price per GB is now less than a tenth of what it was two years ago!
Eager to try it out (why? don't know) I put my 16GB card in my camera, formatted it and ... Oh! It now only had 8GB of space.
It turns out, the Canon EOS 30D doesn't cope with (formatting) cards larger than 8GB. And when the card had been formatted down to 8GB it couldn't be reformatted to 16GB. Not in the camera, not in Windows.
After hunting around for a while, giving up, and then hunting around some more, I found a solution: A small program called USB_Format. Just unzip it and run it, and it should let you reformat your memory card in your card reader to it's proper size.
Now I just have to remember not to format the card in the camera. But that shouldn't be so hard. I don't usually format, I tend to Delete all
instead.
Labels: canon, photography
The weather has been really wacky the last couple of days in Eskilstuna. Today I switched back to my winter jacket and boots, and put on gloves and a hat for work. I'm glad I did too, since the wind speed gave a chill effect of what felt like -20° C. What happened to the record breakingly early spring? No one knows.
Labels: Eskilstuna, photography
06 April 2008
I just removed the the borders around the sidebars to make things a little cleaner. I realized they felt a little out of place somehow.
Labels: web design
05 April 2008
I was bored this morning and felt like some photography, but I just couldn't think of anything to shoot, especially since it was around 10 and the light was very bright and sharp.
So I decided to do some location scouting instead. I packed my camera bag and went for a slow bike ride, more or less randomly around Eskilstuna. Tried to go where I had never gone before.
First I came across Eskilstuna Art Museum. Although I had read about it at work I hadn't really understood where it was.
At the entrance there was this cool piece of art1:
It is made out of sheets of glass stacked on top of each other, and I'm guessing that the naked girl visible in the block is cut out of all the sheets.
Later on I found a train yard with loads of old rusty engines and wagons. But I didn't bother taking any pics in the harsh light. Instead I'll go back some evening.
Then I found this fellar (?) fluttering about. He was unusually patient when he finally settled down though.
Well, it wasn't that much, but at least I got some fresh air... :)
1) I don't take to art very easily so this should be considered quite the compliment.
Labels: canon, Eskilstuna, photography
02 April 2008
As the title says ^^. Get it now. Or read a review over at Mozilla links first.
It's available in an amazing 45 different languages, simultaneously! I hear Vista SP1 in Swedish will be out some time during quarter two...
There have been quite a few nice little theme tweaks since beta 4. And I believe all the memory and javascript performance improvements that the Internets have been raving about are new for beta 5 as well.
Labels: browsers, firefox, mozilla
30 March 2008
If you've been here before you might have noticed the new design. I got inspired yesterday and thought I should have one if those hip dark wallpaper pattern inspired blog designs.
If you still see my old default design, the Tech Blue
, just click Dark Pattern
at the top of the page.
I started off by finding a suitable pattern for the background. I found this one:
... at theinspirationgallery.com, inverted it and used curves to make the pattern a dark grey.
To increase the readability I added a see-through (40 % opaque) black to the main section using the following CSS3 declaration:
#main {background-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.4);}
This is what it should look like:
So far, only Firefox 3 and Safari 3 have support for semi-transparent colours (RGBA/HSLA), but I think the text is fairly readable even if you don't get the darker background. Hopefully the number of Firefox 3 users will increase to about 20 % when it is released this summer, thanks to the auto-update feature of Firefox 2.
I've also changed the font to Lucida Sans Unicode (Lucida Grande on the mac), inspired by John Lilly's blog. I decided to use it for both titles and text.
And here's what a quote looks like:
I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be.
Douglas Adams
Overall I'm really pleased with the new look. Do shout if you find any annoying bugs.
Labels: CSS, web design
26 March 2008
I thought I'd do something I've never done before: I thought I'd blog my new shoes. Just for fun. :)
So without further ado, here they are:
So... what should you write when you blog an item of clothing, or footwear? I guess I should write where I got them... make, model, price perhaps?
Shop: Din Sko in Eskilstuna. Make: Ecco. Model: I haven't got a clue. Price: 995 SEK.
That makes them the most expensive pair of shoes I've ever bought. But then I'm planning to use them for my wedding, and perhaps one or two other weddings. So you'll have to try and mentally replace those brown jeans with fancy black trousers.
They're very comfortable and I'm walking around with them indoors to soften them up a bit.
Oh, and by the way: Today I found a fairly decent amount of fuzz in my belly button, from my new t-shirt.
Labels: Eskilstuna
18 March 2008
I've been going through my photos and putting together a collection of my favourites. I'm quite pleased with the outcome. It looks very colourful when they're all put on the same page:
To get the large versions of the photos, click View as slideshow
at the top of the page.
Labels: flickr, photography
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