This winter it has been rare to see shadows on the ground when you wake up in the morning; it has been a VERY dark and wet season…either lots of snow and ice or more common around here…rain, rain and more rain! Therefore I jumped at the chance to get some photos taken with shadows in them and to get a bit of fresh air as well…without having to tote an umbrella around.
Read Morewinter
...'tis the season to be jolly (etc etc)!
The weather has been unusually cold and snowy in the southernmost parts of Sweden this winter so it made for some extra Christmas vibes when it was time for the annual Christmas market at the Malmöhus Castle, the old renaissance fortress in the center of town. There’s just something special about walking across that causeway through the old gatehouse (thankfully no drawbridge or portcullis anymore) into the courtyard and experiencing the good vibes of the place.
Read MoreHello darkness my old friend...
It is Halloween (October 31st) when I write this and we are now in the period of the year when my photography usually takes a sharp drop in frequency. The daylight is getting shorter and shorter in these northern parts of the world - especially so after Daylight Saving Time is over - and frankly the stuff out there I want to take pictures of get less and less interesting. Foliage is rapidly falling off their branches and the all too frequent rainy and cloudy weather takes away many of the interesting shadows and potential light situations.
Read MoreOut there at night...
A second blog post in less than two weeks’ time…what is this? Is there suddenly a return to old times when I posted several times a month? I don’t know honestly, but I figured that I’d post something of my recent stroll through the twilight and first hour of darkness in Malmö. I was there for a board meeting at my photo club and some other errands and figured I’d arrive a little early and give myself some time to walk around with my Fujifilm XT-3 and a 35 mm 2.0 lens.
Read MoreFirst photos of the year
Last weekend was the first outing with a camera for 2023 and I went to my usual monthly Photographers' Brunch in Malmö, Sweden. We're a group of 10-20 photographers that meet up for a Sunday morning brunch followed by a slow stroll through the streets with our cameras, ready to take a picture or two.
Read MoreThe 365 Project Mark VI - Month Two
The older I get the faster time flies by…it’s hard to believe one sixth of 2021 is already over. I guess we’re still in some sort of holding pattern, still waiting for a change from March 2020 so that the “real” 2021 can start.
The second month of the year, this short month, was full of weather contrasts. We both had warm-ish spring days as well as bitterly cold days (and nights especially when the mercury…or whatever’s in thermometers these days) plunged to -12 C (10 F). That made for some rather unusual winter scenes here in southern Sweden where it usually doesn’t get that cold for any prolonged period of time beyond a day or three.
Read MoreIce, Ice, Ice Baby!
First…apologies for the title…it was too obvious a pick (also, now you’ve got that dreadful Vanilla Ice cover on your brain for awhile…congratulations!)
The weather this winter has been…interesting. As I write this during the last week of February we have 12 degrees Celsius (54 Fahrenheit) and birds are chirping away outside while some tree thought it a good idea to release pollen into the air, way too early for my eyes to appreciate it. A week and a half ago we had -10 Celsius (14 Fahrenheit) at night and it was definitely thick longjohns time if you wanted to spend extended amounts of time outside in the dark!
Read MoreIn the halls of the mountain king...
Yes, that title is blatantly stolen from an orchestral piece by the Norwegian composer Edward Grieg (but he’s been dead for over a century, so he can’t complain much), but in a way it fits the location that I visited last weekend. The Tykarp Cave outside Hässleholm in the northeastern part of my home province Skåne is an old underground limestone quarry (that closed in the late 1800s) that you can visit year round as a tourist attraction, but this particular weekend they held their Christmas market.
Read MoreChristmas Market time...again
During the month of December (just like in every other part of the world I am sure) there's a tradition for Christmas markets around these parts of southernmost Sweden. I've been to a number of them through the years, and this year I chose the one at Jakriborg, a faux-medieval housing area a short commuter train ride away from Lund. It has a definite North German feel to it with its narrow buildings with steep roofs, even though it was all built in the 1990s.
Read MoreAt a Wintery Beach
Starting the new photo year
We’re just over a week into the new year and I’ve taken my DSLR out once so far. I can’t say that I am happy with that amount of photography, but it just hasn’t felt that interesting to be out there with it yet. So it rests comfortably in its backpack for the time being. No doubt it’ll see plenty of action soon enough though...once the weather improves just a bit.
The photos in this post are from the beach at Ribersborg in Malmö on a pretty cold January morning, but before we got the recent dusting of snow. The winds were pretty fierce so my dad and I didn’t stay very long. It’s hard to operate a camera when your hands feel like they turn into icicles! We took a brief walk over to the dog park area nearby and saw a few little critters who weren’t bothered at all by the ice cold winds. They were too busy having a good time with their other four-legged friends, old and new.
On the Instagram 365 project
I am now on day 10 of my Instagram 365 project and I’ve updated the page here on the site with photos from the first week, with many more to come as the year progresses. I am pretty content with the photos so far, but it feels like I’ve not been experimental enough with the cell phone camera yet. It can handle much poorer lighting conditions than my previous phone could, so I am not as limited in what I can do with it. Hopefully as the year progresses I can explore that more! I’ve got 356 more opportunities to do so before December 31st, so that ought to be enough! :-)