Just went outside and photographed a garden snail.

Five of us set out on the photo walk arranged for by fotonen.se to Eldgarnsö and with cameras at the ready we got quite a few pittoresque Swedish summer pictures there. We had vary varying weather but not rain to speak of, and the landscape on this island is very interesting and varying, from naked cliffs down by the waterline to pine and spruce forest to oak and other such nice trees.

It also boasts a farm in the middle of the island and some other houses where people still live and this makes for open fields and a very nice general area.

See all photos here.
See a slideshow here.

 

 

It smells like ldaybugs outside right now. Today was a little warmer again but later it got back to the chilly spring that we are having. Some years we could go swimming (and enjoy it) in mid May but I am certain it won’t happen this year. But springtime is here and all the dreadful snow is melted away now. Not even the north facing hills on my track had any snow now (which they had last sunday).

 

I recently got an email from what appears to be the manufacturer of an app I am using on my Android phone. The app in question is the GeotagPhotos Pro, which records GPS locations and time to a database, then when you take pictures using your digital camera (not the mobile camera) providing the camera’s time is set to the same time the GPS has it will then be able to geotag your pictures after you have downloaded them from the camera.

I have used this software for a few months now and out of the blue I get the following email from what appears to be a legitimate email from the manufacturer:

Dear Geotag Photos Pro user,

recently, we got information from Android Market / App Store about all licences of Geotag Photos Pro. When mathed with users in our database, we were unable to find valid licence for your account. This can be just bug in licence database, so that please if you are sure, that you bought our application officially, please send us your order id. You can find it in orders history in Google Checkout (for Android) or in iTunes (for iPhone). We apologize all legal users for this inconvenience.

If you downloaded our app from another source, than official store (Android Market or AppStore), please consider of buying  official full version. To help you with this, we will make “licence amnesty” this Wed, April the 6th, when Geotag Photos Pro will be offered with 50% discount – for $1.99 instead of $3.99.

Please contact our support staff, if you have any questions.

Best regards,

Jindrich Sarson
CEO of TappyTaps

I find this deeply disturbing. All the signs of a bad phishing attempt is here, the bad spelling (however the manufacturer is a Czhech company which may explain that in part, but the idea of sending payment credentials from the Android Market and Google checkout is deeply disturbing to me.

I have contacted the manufacturer to ask them to verify that they actually are who they claim to be but if they, as they claim, have a problem with their licencing database they should be able to verify the data with the raw payment data from Google Checkout that they as a seller receives.

There is also no information about this problem on their home page and this leads me to suspect foul business and that this is not legitimate. Otherwise I should think that there would be at least a mention about this…

We will see what comes back…

Google Sweden has a specially designed snowmobile that they are using with the google camera technology to creat a first person view of all the ski slopes in Sweden. The snowmobile has been spotted in several different ski slopes, large and small, documenting the whole slope.

You can expect an integration in “StreetView” with the swedish ski slopes soon. Something that I believe ski enthusiasts will be happy for. You can virtually visit the ski slopes before you pack your bags and go there in person. Very handy…

My whole idea was to create something very alien feeling from familiar things. The landscape was actually photographed during a nice winter day, the moon was shot last summer and with some “slight adjustments” and combining them together at least I got that alien feeling here.

I recently went to Singapore for the TETRA World Congress, a congress where users, providers and others related to the communication standard TETRA for land mobile communication meet and share experiences. I had been invited as a speaker to the seminar speaking on special coverage since my involvment in the Stockholm Metro underground coverage system.

But that was that and here are some of my pictures from Singapore, an interesting place for sure but I have been to some far more interesting places in the far east. For business however Singapore is *it* especially in the telecoms business.

Progressive Builders Plt.

Malaysian workers on their way back home across the border from Singapore again after a full days work on some construction site. It caught my eye because of the difference from us riding a grand tourist coach out to the Singapore Zoo in the evening for the night safari which was really great, more about that later.

Raffles Hotel

Raffles hotel is well known for the invetion of the drink “Singapore Sling” which they can make you here for about three times the price anywhere else in Singapore. However the feeling of sitting at the Long Bar is worth the extra money, isn’t it?

Buisiness Centre

The Singaporean business centre with it’s high-rise buildings where most of the banks, stock market and other such things resides.

Casino Boat

This casino does not float on water, instead it is floated atop three high-rise buildings complete with spa, pool, and childrens activities.

Fruit Bat

Went on the night safari at the Singapore Zoo and this fruit bat caught my eye. It was difficult to photograph here because of the limited light, it is just moonlight basically, and therefore it is a little bit grainy and blurry.

Spotted Leopard

The spotted leopard is an endangered species and very beautiful. This one fast asleep after a good meal. You may notice there are not fences or bars or anything, that’s because at the night safari the animals are out, there are no barriers between you and the animals which is quite and experience in itself.

My Bash bases photo album generator Albatross is back by popular demand. If you are hacking your own version I’d be happy to integrate it with the base code.

www.ichimusai.org/albatross

A spontaneous photo shoot in the studio this weekend resulted in some photos that I’d like to share.

(more…)

Djursholm is a rather fancy suburb to Stockholm and I had a good walk around there with my good friend Jenny yesterday! Here are some pictures from this walk!

 

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A good friend of mine and an ex colleague from my old job has a stable not so far from where we live. I asked if I would be able to come and take some pictures of her horses and she said yes and we had a wonderful day out at Stensunda Stable. You may see more here!

 

 

Again together with fotonen.se we arranged a nice portrait photo course and as usual we had two days of incredible fun in the studio ending with a model shoot at the Sunday afternoon.

Återigen hade vi tillsammans med fotonen.se ordnat en porträttfotokurs och som vanligt hade vi två dagar av mycket roliga stunder, teori och praktik varvat och avslutade med att fotografera en modell.

It is the time to be outside now… Wish I was feeling better though.

Today I needed to get out a bit from the apartment, been ill and in bed too much and I am going to work tomorrow again so I ventured in town with camera ready to take some pictures. I went off the train at Centralen the city central station and then walked Sveavägen down. On the way I passed old Grand which is one of the well kept old cinemas that does a bit different films, not just the ordinary run of the mill action movies and dramas from the big Hollywood circus but also does more narrow French and Belgian movies as well as low budgets and Swedish movies you may or may not see again.

Explore is a function of Flickr where amongs all the photographers that sends pictures to the site a few are selected (500 to be precise) on each day to be included in a kind of hall of fame called the Explore.

The exact criteria for when pictures are included is not known, in fact it is a well kept secret for it is fine-tuned all the time, if you have been in explore many times it gets harder to become picked, if you send a photo to many groups it can be harder but also the number of views, comments, fave markings you get contribute to your Explore score.

1. It was a fabulous moon, 2. Where I am going, 3. The Night Watch, 4. The Small House, 5. The Cat, 6. Grödinge church infrared, 7. Ghost in the Window, 8. Kapelludden Cross, 9. A Second in Life, 10. Pompom and the Sea, 11. DSC_1355, 12. Polished Metal, 13. The Sky and the Snowcovered Lake, 14. Fluxfallet, 15. Strokkur, 16. Fontain Rainbow

The smallest things requires the biggest cameras, IBM research lab in Zürich have managed to photograph a carbon molecule called pentacene and it is a first time something so small has been depicted like this.

Pentacene is a five benzen ring molecule used in the making of some semi-conductors today, mainly OFET (organic field effect transistors) and similar devices.

The photograph was made possible because on the tip of the microscope a CO (carbon monoxide) molecule was used as a lens.

Incredible stuff.

The moon is a drop in a black hole
The sun is a hell of a light
But nobody’s blue is brighter
Than the blue in my baby tonight

I’m in danger
In your jungle
I’m a stranger
Land of mambo
Cause what you do
Must be voodoo
I’m in danger
Oh baby-do

En av bilderna som jag har tagit när vi körde “franska kort” i studion sist har hamnat etta på tio-i-topp listan över “fine art” på Modellbilder.se. Stort tack till en kanonmodell att jobba med också!

(Jag är ganska stolt)

One of my pictures from the last studion session with Karin when we did “french postcards” has been ranked #1 on the top-ten list of fine art pictures at the model site “modellbilder.se” here in Sweden.  Thanks to the great model as well!

(I’m pretty proud of that)

Plats: T-bana Slussen uppgång Södermalmstorg, vid strömmingsbilen kl 13.00 den 10 maj 2009.

Vi går runt södermälarstrand med avstickare efter eget behov och så slutar vi på lämplig krog med en bit mat och kanske en pilsner ca 17:00.

När mer information blir tillgänglig kommer jag uppdatera det här.

Välkomna!

• Diskussion i Svenska Amatörfotografers flickr-grupp

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Place: Metro station Slussen (2 stops south of T-Centralen on the red or green route) exit towards “Södermalmstorg” it is the middle exit from the platform. Outside there is a cart that sells fried herring which is well known and that’s where we will meet. Time and date is 1pm on May 10, 2009.

We will be walking around the south shoreline of lake Mälaren with beautiful views over the Stockholm city and waters. We expect to end around 5pm for a meal and something to drink at some good restaurant in the cheaper range.

When more information becomes available I will be updating this post.

Welcome!

We had a photo course this weekend and the last day we had a visit from Sally, a great model for the students to practice shooting using model lights and bouncers and everything else that goes with it.

Denna helg eller weekend som det heter på svenska har vi haft en fotokurs i studion. Här har vi Sally som kom över idag och hjälpte till som modell så att kursdeltagarna skulle ha något att fotografera.

The museum of nordic culture, or “Nordiska Museet”, is located on the south-west of the Djurgården island, not far from the Vasa museum. The entrance is from the south and we got there from the wrong direction at first but managed to get around to the right place.

The museum was not really what I expected it to be but it was still a nice day out. I had hoped for more clothes and fashion, but that whole department was closed off, they are curating a new display ready in the spring 2010 so we had to make do with what we got.

Architecture and the building itself is remarkable. It is worth a visit just for these things, the main hall being especially beautiful and with the larger than life statue of Gustav Vasa the king that joined all the warring fractions of Sweden to one nation is also quite impressive.

There was a fashion display but that was mainly a few photographs on a wall and a projector showing fashion photographs and that was it.

The impression I had from the museum was that it was difficult to see who they were aiming for, the exhibitions were trying to fit all different age groups and actually did not really do a good job in some cases. The Sápmi exhibition about the Sami people and their land in the north of Scandinavia felt a little misplaced. Not that I don’t think it should be here, it was just that it seemed very half-hearted. I would have expected far more photographs from the older days and there were some nice items and clothes here but everything seemed a bit devoid of context.

But we still had a really good day out and I got to see some stuff from my favourite epoch, the sixties:

The all Swedish site Fotonen.se has just launched. If you are Swedish you will find all the Swedish photography related articles there in a blitz…