Google snowmobile, Photo: Pontus Johansson

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.

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:

I will go down to the gym at work on monday and see if there is some way to start jogging again. Outdoors is just too slippery right now although the cold is nit si much a problem for me.

Wish me luck…

But I shot using my 16-85 set somewhere around 30 mm focal length and handheld. This pano is composed of 6 stitched pictures, all done manually in Photoshop. If you really want to see the picture you must click on it and view it full size, the limits in width on this blog does in no way make it justice.

You are seeing the Stockholm south end shoreline on the left hand side and parts of the old town on the right hand side. The boat at the quay side is a night club actually. The bride in the middle of the picture is where the metro underground trains pass from station Gamla Stan to station Slussen.

I did not modify the picture in any way except that I worked a little bit with the contrast since it was a bit of a dull light in the air.

The tower in the far background is actually the city hall.

I passed by here last Monday and had the camera with me which was quite lucky because I got a picture that I have had in my head for some time now that we have finally gotten a bit of proper winter even here in Stockholm.

Fatbursparken in all it's winter glory. Click on the picture and then on the picture page you can find the map where this picture was taken. Like most of my pictures it is geotagged when published on the Internet.

The picture is a full colour picture but the whole world seemed very black and white at this moment. The park was full of people as well and tourists taking pictures of each other with their cameras. So I had to wait for the right moment before I could squeeze off a few pictures and this is the result.

At the left in the very far reach of the picture is part of the railway that goes under the city into the Central station. This part will be rebuilt and probably covered to the dismay of some of the train spotters who use this place to spot trains passing by. I just hope that they will preserve this park even if it is a park that has a bit of a drug problem going in the late summer evenings…

• Indian chai tea
• A nice haircut that’s not too expensive
• A nice salad lunch served after 14.30.

I was actually able to find all three and had a wonderful day walking around the city from Kungsholmen down to Södermalm and then taking the commuter train back home from Södra Station.

The previous times things have come up that have prevented me to go, and now I set out without telling anyone else and just went there. Of course I had some bad luck and killed one of my flashes so that one needs to go to the repair shop Always something. However the trip resulted in some pictures from a blistering cold January day in the south end of Stockholm at the woodland cemetery.

The wood chapel

Chapel of the holy cross.

The famous cross.

Remembrance Garden

Remembrance garden

Path to the chapel of resurrection

Greta Garbo

Chapel of Resurrection

Today at Regeringsgatan (regent’s str.) crossing the Kungsgatan street on the bridge overpass. I managed to take my firs a little more demanding photo using my new D300 camera. I used the 70-300 lens for this one which has performed excellently. I really like this lens after just using it a few times, it is great. I will review it later on when I have used it even more.

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The darkness can be a comforting friend and ally as well as an intimidating scary place. It is many times up to you what you will feel like and how you will react to it.

I like winters, when the temperature is reasonably, say -10 to -5°C or so, that’s lovely. A nice sun shining and that’s great. But to remind everyone that we do actually gett good winters now and then and avoid the “I don’t know when we had some realy snow last time” here is the winter of 2005-2006.

In a galaxy, far away…

Stockholm across Riddarfjärden

My street in the winter time.

Bench

Lake in Norberg

I am hoping for a winter with lots of snow because I want to test out IR photography in the winter time. I think it can be pretty awesome with the right light…

Example of an architecture referred to as "brutalism". This is in Grindtorp not far from Täby, Stockholm, Sweden

Frosty Neomodernism

Bench at the local train station in Kallhäll, Järfälla, Sweden.

Residents

Infrared photograph with a slight overlay of visible light colorization. Sundbyberg in morning light.

This was one of my first creative photos where I did lots of post-processing in order to get the effect I was looking for. The phot was taken a cold winter night, the structure you can see are the branches of a tree. The black mist is the smoke from me exhaling in front of the camera just as the photo was taken.

In post-process I have colorized it green then inverted the dark areas for the bright ones. The smoke and branches are therefore brightly lit by the flash in the original picture but turned dark in post-process.

Tools used for post processing was The GIMP, a free photo editing software that is also multi platform, works just as well under Linux as it does in Windows.

On the terms of the abstract, sometimes you can make interesting effects by breaking every rule in photography. Here is an example where I was indoors, used long shutter time and moved the camera around to create the effect.

(Should be filed under “things to do when bored at work: wave your camera around”)