These last few weekends this analog film shooter has done quite a bit of digital photography (sacrilege I know!), since I’ve visited a few events where there are more action filled elements and I am not really good at capturing action with my analog cameras…yet.
Last weekend it was time to head back to the Viking Market at Foteviken, south of Malmö, where they stage a big market and a recreation of a battle that allegedly happened in the area in 1134 AD. I’ve been to this market many times through the years, so it wasn’t exactly a new thing to me. It was however brand new to two of the photographers who tagged along on this day trip, and it was a lot of fun to see their reactions and what caught their eyes. I shot a bit of analog too at the Market area, but I’ve yet to develop them so they’ll have to appear in a later blog post.
Before I develop my market shots I can share a few shots of the fish tossing competition where participants were challenged to toss a big cod as far as possible along “Main Street”. Before the competition the announcer made sure that everyone in the audience knew fish would be flying and that you might get hit by one of them. I can verify that yes, people did get hit (fortunately only fish juice reached me though). The winner flung that fish well over 20 paces (with a good bounce afterwards into the crowd). :-)
I also attended an event that weekend that is called “SM-veckan” in Swedish (or Championship Week if you will) where a lot of smaller sports all staged their annual championships in one city so they get added publicity and people can check out sports they’ve probably never heard of, or even seen. I went out to the Ribersborg beach where a few events were held, including the Tug of War competitions. I don’t get how those guys (and gals) could tug that rope until complete exhaustion and collapse, then they got up and did it again and again. I’d be dead after half a pull!
Yesterday (Sunday) I went on another day trip, this time with my 17 year old nephew to the Battle for Trelleborgen Viking Market where a lot of the same people that had shown up for the one at Foteviken also made an appearance. The mock battle yesterday was a lot better though, since the first event had been quite sparse as far as participating vikings went. Not so this time! Well over 30 fighters showed up and put on quite a show, and there was even an Odin’s Valkyrie on horseback making an appearance, leading the slain fighters to Valhalla (i.e. off the field). :-D
It was my nephew’s first Viking Market and he definitely enjoyed it, even though the crappy weather southern Sweden has had in the last few days made the attendance quite slim compared to previous years when the place was really crowded. When I watched the battle at Trelleborgen last year the ramparts were all packed with people watching.
Culling the images
One of the things I’ve enjoyed most with the analog photography I’ve done a lot of lately is the fact that once I’m done scanning the negatives into my Lightroom catalog there’s not all that much I need to do to them, other than cleaning up dust and other blemishes. There’s no deciding which pictures stay or go, since the whole roll is there. And you shoot pretty few images from the start so the editing happens mostly in camera.
With my digital photography it’s totally different since I can be MUCH more liberal with my shooting. The “Spray and Pray” method was applied liberally these two weekends since I was dealing with those fast-paced events. That also means I had A LOT of images to go through once I got home. The Viking battle yesterday was well over 140 images to go through for instance (with around 30 keepers in the end).
That’s not a problem for me; to let images disappear into the aether, never to be seen again. It used to be though, back when I started shooting digital around 2000. I kept SO many unnecessary pictures back then! Today though, for my sanity’s sake if nothing else I delete as many as I can! “Out of sight, out of mind!” It also saves space on my hard drives, even though storage doesn’t exactly cost a fortune anymore.