I år håller Tommy Lund igen i denna fotopromenad i Stockholm. Jag tänker gå med och här är några bilder från det året jag var med tidigare när den ordnades för första gången.

Anmälan kan göras här >>>

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Now the Sälen Highlands is not a very remote place, actually it is smack in the middle of one of the most touristy parts in Sweden (for outdoorsy tourism that is) and therefore all the trails are well marked and some are even properly paved with blacktop to minimise the wear on the sensitive terrain. But even so, the last time I was there it was breath taking beautiful and the trip is just a long trip of nicely shifting landscape.

I am therefore planning a nice and not to strenous trip where slow walking, stopping to admire the view or taking a photograph or even just sitting in the sun is well planned. And of course, after setting camp it would be very much possible to go on a night hike to one of the peaks, I have planned this for day 2.

All days have been divided into two stages of about 2-3 hours of walking, suitable between breakfast and lunch or lunch to dinner. But I think we will actually make good time the first stages so there will definitely be time to get the binoculars out and view the surroundings.

Expect altitude cooking about 1 km MSL which should not really have that much impact on the cooking temperature. Water boils at 96°C at this altitude.

Route guide

We are starting on the south end and walking north the first day, then west the second day and north again the third day. We are passing the following peaks:

• Köarskarlsfjället 870 m
• Östsfsjället 840 m
• Källfjället 903 m
• Synddalskläppen 880 m
• Lägerdalsfjället 890 m
• Stornärfjället 920 m
• Östra granfjället 940 m

Not all peaks are climed to the top, but these are: Köarkarsfjället, Källfjället and optionally Stor-Närfjället.

Day 1: Högfjällshotellet to Källfjället summer farms

The entrance is well marked with a portal and information sign about Kungsleden (the King’s trail). It starts here and ends up in Abiso in Lapland, a thousand kilometers from this place… it is a grand trail and not a lot of people have walked the whole thing.

We start by walking the well paved road up the Köarskarlsfjället (grouse mountain) 1.5 km where we will pause and perhaps make tea and coffee and admire the view. Best view is to the east and to the North. After that there is a descent towards Östfjällsdalen (east mountain valley) and the Östfjällstjärn (East mountain tarn) where there is a hut that can shield us from wind and rain if necessary. This is a good place for lunch and a good place to refill water for the second stage.

The second stage starts by taking us west 1 km through a more wet area and then takes us through a birch forest up again on the peak of Källfjället 900 meters above sea. Again if not too windy a good place for a snack and a beverage before descending down to the old Källfjället summer farm. A number of scattered old houses here. We will set up camp here likely tent is the best option, the hut open for wanderers can be a bit crowded this time of year.

Day 2: Källfjället summer farms to Närfjällstugan

First stage is going through Synddalen (sin valley), crossing Syndalsån (the sin valley river) on a small bridge. The river sinks down in a large ravine called Lördagsgraven (the saturday grave) but we are taking the other route,  preparing to ascend the Syndalskläppen mountain.  Just before the ascent is a wind shelter which could work for lunching in, but if we want to lunch out we can give it another hour and ascend to the top of the mountain before doing lunch. I say it depends on the weather. Some spectacular views from the top is guaranteed if it is not too cloudy.

Second stage is a descent again into the next valley called Lägerdalen (Camp valley) but we will not set up camp here but walk through the valley and then ascend about 100 m or half-way up the Stor-Närfjället. Here is another hut and a good place to make camp. Plenty of water both in the valleys and in on the mountain here.

After setting camp in a suitable spot we might want to do some evening hiking shedding the backpacks and just get straight up to the peak. It is about 1,5 km so it is not that far.

Day 3: Närfjällsstugan to Görälvstugan

Fiurst a small ascent but we will miss the peak of Granfjället (Spruce tree mountain) mountain and just pass by on the east side. Then we will follow the ridge to the north and start the descent down to Granfjällsätern where there is a nice hut we can stop for lunch. This is probably one of the most beautiful parts nature wise.

Second stage after lunch is passing through the forest until we meet and cross Görälven river. There is a place we can stay there as well waiting to be picked up.

Map

Use terrain or satellite image for more details.

View larger map

Until 2005 we actually did not have a proper national day. We had the day of the Swedish flag. However a proposition was made and put in front of the government stating that many people who came to Sweden found it strange we did not have a national day and so it was made into a national day, a national bank holiday, remains the day of the Swedish flag as well.

To give it a proper holiday the Swedish unions and the merchant associations sat down to discuss how to make it without losing too much money on it. It was not possible to create a new holiday said the merchant associations and so a trade was proposed, changing the Whitmonday into an ordinary day and instead making the 6th of June a proper bank holiday, which it wasn’t before.

The day has been called the “Gustaf Vasa day” when Gustav Vasa was elected king of Sweden and the Kalmar union finally ceased and Sweden became a sovereign state. This was 6 june 1523. The Kalmar Union was a union between the kingdoms of Sweden, Norway and Denmark, established in 1397. It allso encompassed Finland (part of Sweden at the time), Greenland, Faroe Islands, the Orkney islands and the Shetlands. After Sweden left the Union Denmark and Norway remained until 1536 when it was finally dissolved. The union was formed in Kalmar in Sweden and thus the name.

The connection with the day is fairly loose. Most Swedes enjoy it as a day off mainly, it’s not celebrated by far as much as the norwegians do on their 17th of May. I have never been very nationalistic so I am not very bothered about this.

It was however cold in the water, barely 13 C and it was not something you wanted to stay in for an extended time. In fact it felt a bit like ice was still on the lake…

The picture is from this winter when I went on a photo trip to Ängsjö. I realized I did not have any summer pictures so I will have to remedy that next time I go.

Usually the water temperature is fine this time of year. But this spring has been really cold and not sunny enough, some years the temperature is fine even at the beginning of May. But it’s been a mostly miserable spring though it has had its advantages. It’s much easier to go running when the air is a little cool. Heat is a bit of a problem for me really so taking a dip in 13 degrees water is quite refreshing…

I love Swedish summer, nature and everything about it really!

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.

Today I believe they started melting again because the temperature has gone from sub-zero to just above now and just walking down the street is really a perilous business these days…

The photos below are not taken with my ordinary camera but with my work cam which is a Panasonic Lumix DMC-LX3:

Basically this means an alternate theory about how the planet’s oil reserves came to be. The generally accepted theory is that biomatter have transformed over time in the bedrock with heat and pressure into petrochemical compounds that we today are pumping (crude oil) and then refining into gasoline, diesel, kerosene, grease and so on.

But the alternate theroy says that there are coal deposists down in the earth that in the lower parts of the mantle are subjected to high temperature and pressure in the absence of oxygene and that all the necessary compounds are there to form oil in large quantities that are then pressed upwards through cracks in the earths crust to the oil deposists we today are tapping in to.

The interesting with this theory is that if it is true then we will probably not have much problem finding and using oil in the future. We may however not chose to do so for other reasons.

Looking around on the internet it seems that this abiogenetic theory of petroleum formation is not so new after all, it has been popular among certain scientists in the Soviet union from the fifties and the scientists here att KTH who do this reasearch are also of russian heritage.

Frontal figure here is professor Vladimir Kutcherov som tillsammans med Anton Kolesnikov och Alexander Goncharov that have shown a process in a laboratory where oil may form without the biomatter compounds that most mainstream scientist believe must be present.

View large...

]]> http://www.ichimusai.org/2009/10/04/troll-forest/feed/ 2 http://www.ichimusai.org/2009/07/22/shoddy-balsta/ http://www.ichimusai.org/2009/07/22/shoddy-balsta/#comments Wed, 22 Jul 2009 20:54:52 +0000 Ichimusai http://www.ichimusai.org/?p=2700 Bålsta is about 25 minutes from where I live by car or by the commuter train. Parts of it really should be just torn down and re-built…

Lotsen means "the tug boat", I guess it is a name chosen that they are supposed to help people through unemployment and to find new work but the area seems everything but helpful. In fact there where quite a few strange loiterers about that I did not want to strike up a conversation with so I moved on quickly.

Storage silos in Bålsta. Shot straight from the road, hand-helt at 200 mm.

Large facilities, cheap rentals and a Ju-Jutsu club.

]]> http://www.ichimusai.org/2009/07/22/shoddy-balsta/feed/ 0 http://www.ichimusai.org/2009/06/16/pubrec2/ http://www.ichimusai.org/2009/06/16/pubrec2/#comments Tue, 16 Jun 2009 18:50:45 +0000 Ichimusai http://www.ichimusai.org/?p=2528 I had the grand fortune to be able to re-visit the old public records building. I found when I came home from the first time that I had unfortunately missed many details that I remembered and I also did not find the basement with the elevator machine room and the attic where I think some nice pictures could be made.

Therefore – here is my re-visit to the Public Records Office here in Stockholm. If you have not seen the first article then you should read that one first.

Now you are welcome to follow me into this fantastic place. The building is bein re-made into a place for children, which I think will be really great – very Harry Potter-ish in many ways. So welcome into the magic world of designed offices from the 1880:s.

Corner stairs again. This time the sun was shining right outside and I wanted to get a special effect from the light to show the relative strength of the sunlight. I think I got it where I wanted to. It looks like an H-bomb just went off outside...

This is the lock and handle on the doors that separates the different archive rooms from eachother. They are built in very sturdy boiler plate stell to provide safety from fire. Most doors also have signs telling people to keep them closed to make it harder for a fire to spread through the archives.

This is a detail from a window frame where the Swedish compandy ATLAS here in Stockholm can be made out.

An adjusteable ventilator. There are ventilation shafts within the walls of the building in some room to provide for fresh air to circulate.

Some of the old binders and collectors remain, but they are empty. I wonder why they have been left here when everything has been removed from all of the other shelves. Perhaps as a reminder of what it might have once looked like when the shelves where full of these things...

A stair case leading down into the basement. We found this when we went exploring the darker and more dungeon-like parts of the archive and had to go back and get the camera and tripod. Was looking for the engine room for the elevator.

This is the last level of the archive before we actually get to the attic of the building and it has a different design. Here there are no big windows letting light in and there is a large wooden cupboard at the end that used to hold some special volumes. I am guessing that not everyone had access to this part of the archive. Maybe here is where the dark secret magic books where kept?

This is a part of the attic, the wall and the roof and concrete supports. I just liked the various textures here. It was really hot up here even if the temperature outside was not so high but the sunshine on the roof made it easy 30-35 degrees in here. Hot and dusty.

I believe this is part of the heating system in the building, the expansion tank. As you can see it is designed in such a way that a small leak here would lead the water away over the floor to an outlet that would let it drain through the wall without harm. I don't think this part is being used any more, the wood looks old and cracked and not in use.

This radiator looks like something out of a Russian movie. Perhaps somethingt from the battleship "Potemkin" but in fact it is another type of radiator used to heat the building. This one is located in the attic of the public records building and the design is modular. It is apparently so that you can put more of these modules together if you need more heating power.

This place looks like something out of a computer game such as "Unreal" or similar. I am just expecting someone to enter with a rocket gun, circle strafing around me firing rockets high and low. A really strange feeling. Imagine what fun you might have with some paint ball gear around here...

Here is another shot from the same room as in the previous picture.

Some nice patterns of light and shadow on the floor of one of the upper levels here.

This is the details on the base of one of the column radiators. Again it is the ATLAS company here in Stockholm that delivered these.

Details of the iron support pillars. These pillars are very nice and you find them pretty much everywhere in the third floor with the offices.

The state archivist's office. This is the grand office in the building with doorways to the left and right to study rooms and secretary rooms. Two huge windows for letting the light in and a very nicely decorated ceiling designed in a way to provide a natural attenuation of sounds in the room. The electrical light is not typical for the times but added later, perhaps in the 1940s or so. The same for the radiators which is a much more modern type of radiators compared to the ones found in other places in the building. I really like this photograph myself, one of those I will always remember shooting. I have corrected lens distortion in photoshop and used three different exposures at 14 bit RAW before combining them to this image.

The entrance to the archivists office. The offset in colour temperatures between the outside and the indoor lamp light is rather obvious here.

The ceiling in the archivist's room. I was laid flat on my back when taking this photograph.

I love these stairs that are build in several places in this building. They are also made by the ATLAS company and actually I saw one exactly like this in a coffee shop on Ringvägen close to Skanstull metro station when I went in there for a cup of coffee a couple of days ago. I did not ask if they had put their stair case in or where they got it from but the design was exactly like this one although the rail was a little bit different I think.

A close-up shot of the stairs of the stair case in the previous picture. Complete with the company name.

This is the window above the entrance to the building with that yellow light that seems to be always shining. You can see the letters RIKSARKIVET but mirrored.

A painted arch above the doorway on the third floor of the building. These paintings are pretty much everywhere in the "nicer" part of the building.

This is the entrance to the machine room for the elevator in the building. Originally the building had no electricity but then it also seems to be proud over that it was the first public bulding in Sweden that did have an electrical elevator. I am not sure when it was installed but they installed it in a separate room with a boiler plate steel door in order to be able to contain any electrical fire that might result from it.

The elevator engine, drum and controller. I believe the engine was modernized in the 1950s, it does not by far look as old as the rest of the machinery and probably the wire has been replaced as well. However the controlling mechanism seems to be original.

All these three pictures from the elevator machine room was taken in darkness shot with a hand-held flash light used to light paint the room into the right mood. I really like this technique.

Corridor in the basement.

Three toilet stalls. On the middle one it says "Tryckeri" which means printing but there is also a second more litteral meaning in Swedish and it means "a place where something is pushed". Suiteable for a toilet. Lit by a key chain diode lamp and long exposure.

Part of the court yard and gate into the back side of the public records building.

Just look at the iron works of this gate...

An interesting solution here. Especially in the winter time condensation on the windows was a common problem and the solution here was to catch the water before it could drip onto the floor and instead lead it onto the radiator where it would be evaporated. Nice solution!

Strolling through the empty halls that used to hold all the stat public records and books was a strange feeling, I had never been there, some of the others had been on a guided tour and quickly went to photograph what they knew to be well worth taking a look at.

This building is called “Riksarkivet” in Swedish and was built around 1880 with the intention of being able to withstand a fire. From the beginning the archive was only open during the light hours of the day because they did not want open flames or even electricity inside. Therefore it has huge windows to let enough light in for people to be able to work there with reasearch or book keeping tasks of various kinds.

The facade of the wondeful building is made from a special type of engineering brick in red and black. The architecture is referred to as neo-renaissance. It was the building of the Swedish publick records from 1890 ca and forward into modern times when it was moved to a new building. This house has been empty since then and is a wonderful place to visit.

This is the entrance of the old public records building here in Stockholm. It is a grand design and quite impressive when you are standing outside it. Notice the word "RIKSARKIVET" on top of the door? There is also a light on inside that shows through the stained glass window.

The grand entrance is well known and famous!

Floor

At first they did not want electricity in the building at all. That is why they went for such big beautiful windows. But in the end they still had problems with soot on the windows from the near by train track and decided that some electricity was okay for lights and reading lamps.

Elevator. Once no electricity at all because of the fire hazard but still this elevator was installed. The engine for it was compartmentalized in a fire proof encasing in the basement of the building. The elevator was delivered by a company called "Allmänna svenska elektriska aktiebolaget" which is today better known as ASEA - one of the biggest companies in Sweden...

Archive room. Notice the plastic skeleton someone has hung in the leftmost window?

The Book Slide or "bokstörten" as it is called in Swedish. This invention was added to the stair case in the days of the second world war. The idea being that should Sweden become attacked by an aggressor in the war, then the archives and books here could be loaded onto ships fast using this book slide to slide them down to the water front and then they could be sailed off to some secure location.

Another shot of the famous book slide, this time from beneath.

Elevator indicator indicating which floor the elevator is located at. The readings indicates "top floors 1-3" where the actual indicator is located on top floor 1 and then middle floor I guess some would call that the Mezzanine and then the two bottom floors in the building. Strange way to give names to the floors but since this was the first elevator installed in a public building in Sweden I guess they found a better way later on.

Heating water details. The plumbing is quite cool here, craftmanship and artwork at the same time. I found myself having a bit of a problem with shooting details this time, something I need to work on I think because I came home with a lot of different rooms in my camera but not so many details and sometimes it is the details that really gives you the feeling for something. Or as the expression goes - the devil is in the details...

Column radiator - these radiators are quite fantastic being a design from the 1880:s. They are hollow inside and the cold air at the floor level enters through the grates at the bottom, gets heated and rises to exit at the top creating a chimney effect that will circulate the air in the room to avoid moisture and dampness. Of course the outside also radiates heat and aids in the convection. And on top of that they are rather beautiful to look at in my opinion.

Another of the famous archive rooms. That's me up on the balustrade there using the camera self timer.

The reading room / study / board room. I love the details in this room, look at the drawers in the table for temporarily putting away what you are not reading at the moment and look at the lamps integrated in the design to cast a nice reading light over the table when the huge windows are not sufficient for the light in the winter time. Look at the balustrade around the whole room where you can walk around it. This is one of the most fascinating rooms in this building.

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An attic light - I found this light in the attic and it seems a more modern design than many other lights, perhaps something put in in the seventies or eighties when these spaces where being used. I liked the radiosity of light on the beams and so I managed to make three separate exposures and combine them for this photograph which is a proper HDR photo.

The light on the floor again on one of the upper levels in the building. The huge windows served the purpose of providing enough light for working in the building before there was any electrical lights in here. Eventually the fear of fire subsided and electricity was installed and one of the reasons was that the windows was subjected to a lot of soot from the nearby railway where the steam engines went past hourly.

The hallway - I love the stone floor and the way the radiator is integrated into the wall of the stairwell like this, it is a really good design. Notice how they left space at the top for the air to move freely creating that "chimney effect" in order to make the heater much more efficient than conventional radiators.

The commode - one of the toilets with a good view out over the old town in Stockholm and wonderful light from the window. Notice the nice radiator from the heating system, all built in so you can't burn yourself on it even if it is really hot. The insulation was not that good so in the winter the heaters worked pretty hard to keep the moisture and dampness at bay.

One of the archive rooms with the shelves intact. All the papers, books and everything else is long gone from this place but here the shelves remains. Probably most of the archive rooms looked like this with narrow paths between the shelves where librarians and intendents could find the acts, protocols and other things that was requested perhaps by the government.

A splendid view through one of the magnificient windows. This is in the same archive room as the last picture was taken, just looking out the window. I think I could live here

Details from the elevator. It reads: "Instruction. Make sure doors and gates are closed properly after you have entered or exited the elevator. Use the buttons accordingly to their markings and then allow the lift after it has started to stop by itself. Never open the gates when the elevator is running. People under the age of majority are not allowed to operate this elevator alone."

A reading light with a classic design. Since light bulbs caused lots of heat there is a kind of "stick" where you can grab and angle the light even if it is too hot to touch directly.

What can you say other than this magnificient roof is just splendidly preserved.

Here is the reading room or board roam again, this time with the camera facing the windows.

Välkommen till den andra årliga Scott Kelby Photo Walk (kamerapromenad) här i stockholm. Om du har lust att vara med så kom med den 18 juli. Läs mer på länken ovan!

When the swine strikes back

But this time it is a little bit different. Out of 77 deaths in Mexico health officials have found only 2 deaths related to the actual Influenza A/H1N1 strain. In countries outside Mexico the infections does not seem to be that severe and although influenza is always a nasty business people are recovering and in many cases it seems to be no workse than the yearly influenza that hits us, usually from Asia and the type that the elderly and infirm is recommended to get influenza inoculation shots for.

The swine flu name is actually a misnomer since the current strain that everyone is watching is not normally found among pigs (but pigs may become infected just like humans may). It is a new strain and right now it is thought that “patient zero” has been found in Mexico a small boy who apparently got infected with more than one flu at the same time and the new hybrid was born, infecting people around him and so on.

People in different parts of the world are responding in different ways most of these more drastic actions are based in religious superstition and fear. In the Islamic faith the pig is viewed as an unclean animal. Most Muslims do therefore not eat pork in any form and even in the old testament it is written that pigs are not fit as food for people.

Recently in Egypt, a predominately Muslim country where 90% of the population are osbserving and confessing Sunni Muslims and the remaining population mainly Coptic Christians (and many observes the prohibition against eating the flesh of swine) and what happens?

The government decided to cull some 250 000 pigs as a response in an insane strike against – you guessed it – swine flu. It was not until WHO came out in the open and recommended everyone to stop using the name “swine flu” that officials in Egypt came forward and said they only used the swine flu as an excuse to rid the country of “disorderly pig rearing”.

Here in Sweden we see other responses equally based in fear and superstition as the Egyptian decision to cull all pigs, one is to spend money on starting to build vaccine factories and similar. The point here is that it takes between 3-9 months to find a effective vaccine and normally we have that kind of warning before influenza strikes, but this time a strain like this may be far more complex to beat and the influenza would be over us already before the vaccine could have been developed. And there are no “fit all” vaccines, they have to be tailored specifically for each strain. By the time the vaccine is out this scare is probably over already.

Sweden has a contract with one of the biggest makersof vaccine, Glaxo Smithkline that allow us access to 18 million doses of flu vaccine in case a world wide outbreak should hit us in the coming years.

Kungsträdgården

Kungsträdgården

Sakura cherry blossom

If there is any time of the year to visit the Kungsträdgården it is now. The Sakura cherry trees are in full bloom and it will soon be over. People have come out from their winter hidings and are having ice creams, sushis to go or why not a pizza straight from the carton sitting around enjoying the scenery and the lovely blooming trees.

I find this really interesting and I think it will be a good thing for the customers pricewise in the end since competition will start on several fronts at the same time. The differences between one operator and another will probably become more and more blurry as these cooperations proceeds.

Odenplan metro station. This shot was inspired by a similar shot from Stina's blog!

The above photo was inspired by Stina’s similar photograph of the same station.

I kind of like these older stations in the metro they are very fifties in a way and they have a very special feeling to them.

3 minute traffic and oncoming trains all the time...

Check out Hötorget, S:t Eriksplan and Odenplan.

Expressen has a weather site and the weather site links codes from many different parts on the net. In this case apparently there was code linked from a Chinese site that included a java-script based attack vector taking advantage of a known security hole in Adobe Reader.

I am not surprised really because of the way papers links to ads that contains flash animations, various types of scripts including java script, java code that runs on the client side and so on it is only a question of time before someone hacks into the ad site, replacing an ad with harmful code, thereby spreading it to thousands of visitors per hour visiting totally legitimate sites through perhaps hundreds of site linking ads from the hacked site. It is actually surprising that this is not more commonly happening than it is right now.

I see a surprisingly large amount of foreign sites delivering ads on Swedish news paper sites, perhaps there is nothing to do about this but it must be a nightmare to keep a tight security on a system like this.

For the user even more so – depending on the security model of your web reader and operating system the result from this could be devastating for the user who surf to any of these sites. The only way of being sure this does not happen is to have safely linked material, material that can not contain attack vectord that a third party may use to gain access to desktop computers all over the worls.

On the government’s site today new statistics on secret surveillance has been reported. The number of allowed bugging of phone calls have increased from 196 cases in 2007 to 1 315 cases for last year a whopping 670%.

Definitely a big brother warning here.

In the Swedish law we even had the following provision:

6 § Ingen får utarbeta konstruktionsritningar, beräkna kostnader, beställa utrustning eller vidta andra sådana förberedande åtgärder i syfte att inom landet uppföra en kärnkraftsreaktor. Lag (1987:3).

6 § No person is allowed to establish construction drawings, calculate costs, order material or equipment or in any other way in the country act to the end to construct a nuclear reactor. Law (1987:3)

Imagine that, almost a ban on thoughts this one. And the poll that was taken in 1980 was kind of strange these were the responses you could chose from:

1. To phase out nuclear power in a way that other energy sources are able to be used instead. Reactors that are already built or about to be built will be allowed to be used. No further reactors are allowed to be built.
2. Basically the same as 1 but the reactors about to be built should not be allowed.
3. Phase out the existing reactors within ten years, not allow any more to be built.

There was never a line for the people who wanted to continue or develop nuclear power further.

We still have those reactors and just recently have the politicians realized that they are quite absurdly old. Some of them are more than 25 years old and because of the ban on research competence in this area is severely lacking in Sweden today.

Compared with burning fossil fuels a nuclear reactor must be considered a better choice. Wind power will never be possible to use for the bulk of our energy for two reasons, one is that it would require an unimaginable construction of wind power farms along the coast lines of Sweden and the other is that the electrical grid actually won’t work effectively with this. The electricity grid needs to be “stiff” in that the frequency can’t change or there is some limit on reactive power that consumes resources in the transportation of electrical power from generator to consumer.

Tests with wind power shows that a traditional electrical grid can tolerate some 20% injection of non-stable power generation before this starts to become a serious engineering problem requiring a full redesign of the grid or perhaps using High Voltage Direct Current (HVDC) transmission on the backbone of the electrical grid.

Solar panels are not that feasible in this country where it is rather dark in the winter time (when we need the electricity the most) and the trials that were done in the eighties and nineties growing “energy forests” for bio-fuel turned out to be a disaster for both the farmland and the energy content was very low in it, it was just not worth it.

I think it is time to re-evaluate nuclear power. The technology exists for a reasonably safe use, we have the most stable rock bed in the world to store the waste in kilometres below the earth and the technology we have been using for the past 25 years have proven to be quite reliable when taken care of properly.

Or, we could buy brown coal electricity from Germany perhaps?

When I was down at the old Bolinder factories to take some pictures I walked over to the near-by marina as well and shot some pictures with a low sun in the sky. This is one of the pictures from that shoot.

Nikon D70s, Nikkor AF-S 18-70mm f/3.5-5.6G ED-IF, Adobe Lightroom

From the 12th century and forward the castle is standing close to the City of Borgholm and it is still one of the major attractions of northern Öland. A lovely place to stroll around and forget the modern life for a while.

]]> http://www.ichimusai.org/2008/09/22/borgholm-castle-oland/feed/ 0 http://www.ichimusai.org/2008/09/21/night-watch/ http://www.ichimusai.org/2008/09/21/night-watch/#comments Sun, 21 Sep 2008 12:17:22 +0000 Ichimusai http://www.ichimusai.org/?p=768

Taken in Kallhäll, Järfälla, Stockholm, Sweden. Using a Nikon D70s, Tamron SP Di 90mm f/2.8 Macro. Post processed in Adobe Lightroom

The night watch is the only thing that stands beteen the darkness and the light. Always vigilant, keeping the walking path safe for those who thread it between dusk and dawn. In the twilight the night watch is relieved by the day watch and they nod to eachother as they pass by — enemies by birth and choice but restricted by the ancient cease-fire between them.

They are old now, older than anyone can imagine and they are not easily seen unless they chose to reveal themselves. Unless you are a seer you may only once or twice in your life time catch a glimpse of the Watch as they move effortlessly through the night.

Taken during a walk a couple of years ago in Näsby Park. The sky looked far more dramatic than the weather actually became but it turned out to be one of those photos I come back to and really like.

Famous actress and singer in Sweden. This was shot during "skinnarspelet" in Malung.

Meta Roos and and Janne Åström.

Lots of pictures was taken and due to an unfortunate accident I lost some good pictures on a memory card that decided to fail of course. But since I regularly swap cards in the camera this did not affect too many pictures and most of the really good ones I liked was saved!

Check out mine and the other people’s photos in this Flickr group!

Stockholm from the South lake Mälaren coast line

Path in Infrared

Details of Church Wall

Window and Reflection

The Högalid Church in Infrared

A Resting Place

The Dead Bike

Instead of focusing on using the proper prime lens for the job I will be lugging my 18-200mm lens that can do almost any kind of shot. Although this lens is a bit on the soft side and I prefer a harder sharpness in my photos it is still a really nice all-round lens that can do many situations instantly. It is also equipped with the VR function to reduce shakiness when hand-held and that should be a great help today.

Here are some street shots that I have done earlier which are not half-bad but I don’t feel confident I can actually “make” the photos the way I really want them. So this will be a very interesting test for me.

"Rain and reflection" - Kingston Upon Hull, Yorkshire, United Kingdom

"Black Side - White Side", Kingston upon Hull, Yorkshire, United Kingdom

"Nightfall over Stockholm" - Shot from the roof of the highest building in Stockholm, the old tax office.

"The Light Comes In" - There is a crack in everything, that's how the light comes in, Leonard Cohen. Shot in Gamla Stanm, Stockholm

The walk starts at hornstull at Högalidskyrkan (the church) and then we are off in smaller groups. The walk ends at Mosebacke. I will of course post pictures as they are developed after the walk. The weather looks nice still and I hope we get a really nice evening in town!

I am also considering trying out IR photography in this setting. It could be difficult of course but I think it could be interesting. But this means I have to lugh around my tripod – something that has never been a problem before but it is of course time consuming to set it up to shoot when everyone else snaps a picture and moves on but I think that it would be cool.

So this is my plan equipment-wise:

• Camera D70s
• Lens: Zoom-Nikkor AF-S VR 18-200 f/3.5-5.6G ED-IF
• Micro-fibre lens cloth of course
• Circular polarizer Ø72mm
• IR filter Ø72mm
• Extra battery camera
• Memory cards
• Tripod with shoulder sling bag
• Towel to protect camera if there is rain

This was just a shot of the moment at a Cafe where we met and had a good cup of coffee.