Upload a day week 4, January 22 – 28

January 22nd
I went to a really holy place for Buddhist in Thailand it is called Kum Chanod and we had to walk on a bridge over some water to get to it. When I was walking on the path there I saw this snail crawling as fast as he could to cross the path and since I was in a holy place I had to be very careful where I was going to put me foot down because it is forbidden to kill any animal even the insects when you are in a place like this. There are not many photos from this place on the internet and almost no articles so I can’t read a about it as much as I wanted. First when I took this photo I thought to my self it would probably just look like a snapshot of a snail but when I was going through my photos in bridge and I saw this one I thought to my self that with a little help from camera raw I could make it so much batter and this is the final result. I would have gone closer but this is as close as my lens will focus but I think it would not have been as good if I had been closer because the wood around the snail makes a lot for this photo.

January 23rd
Finally I managed to go out and photograph and since there were so many auroras I decided to go out and experiment photographing them. After about 3 hours of driving around and trying several locations I decided to go to a place called Stoksnes because so many people photograph there during the day. Even though the road was covered with snow I took the chance of not getting stuck somewhere. When I was almost at the place I had thought of going to I saw this place and thought to my self that this would be a nice composition. The auroras were just perfect at that moment and shortly after they were almost gone or so weak that it was hard to photograph them. It is hard photographing landscape with a 50mm lens but I try my best since it’s the only one that works for my D700.

January 24th
I borrowed my in-laws car and went on a small trip out of town. Everywhere surrounding Wapipathum (town I was staying in) there are rice fields and on one of the fields there were two women working. They were reorganizing the rice, everybody does this. I am not sure why but I think it is so the rice will be in a straight line so it is easier to harvest or something like that.

January 25th
This is a photo of a street vendor in Bangkok.

January 26th
One night I was out with my girlfriend and her friends because they were studying together until really late at night and we were in a canteen when all of a sudden in started raining really heavily I tried to show the rain but since the internet has such a bad color profile it is not as clear. I thought it was a dramatic shot showing those bikes out there in the rain.

January 27th
This is from the same place as the photo on the 24th. I really enjoy photographing thai farming. Hopefully I get the opportunity to photograph it more, specially when they plant and harvest the rice.

January 28th
This is the same place as from 27th but a different angle

Well this is the last post in January more will come after this week. Until then ;)

Upload a day week 3, January 15 - 21

January 15th

This photo was taken at the same place as the two photos uploaded in 13th and 14th it shows the men looking at the sky trying to see how high the rockets go and another man taking bets. I think it is amazing how many people there love gambling, they love it so much that they did not even notice the foreigner that was walking around photographing everything that was happening there. Usually when I go to a place like this in the north east of Thailand everyone stare at me constantly and it can be fun to get this attention but sometimes it’s also a little scary to be watched like this. I try not to let it bother me anymore I just walk and pretend that I’m not different from the others.

January 16th

This is a photo of my friend Saxophone or Sax like she is usually called. She likes skateboarding and BMX biking and in many way’s she is acts like a boy. This photo was taken while on a trip with my girlfriend’s class, it had something to do with welcoming the new students into the major. We only went there for few hours and while I was there she asked me to photograph her with her skateboard. I uploaded a similar portrait of her last year and it was taken at the same time as this one. The only thing I don’t like about this photo is that for some reason I cut of her toe.

January 17th

Always when I see ants walking in a line like this I always imagine that some of them are calling “Hold the line!!” When I took this photo I was in a park that we stopped at just before I went to Laos to renew my visa.

January 18th

When I went to the paradise island Koh Larn in may with my girlfriend we first had to go to Pattaya to take a boat from there and on the docs I saw many interesting things and one of them was a many with his bucket searching for crabs on the beach. This was not the part of the beach that many people were sunbathing. Crabs are really popular seafood in Thailand even though not everyone knows how to eat them there for wont enjoy them as much.

January 19th

This photo is also taken on the docs in Pattaya on the way to Koh Larn and there you can see someone fishing in the sea. I think they use the bucket to keep what they catch in it. I wish I had seen some of the fishermen’s catch anything because I really wanted to see how the catch what they were hunting.

January 20th

When I was walking in the same park as where I shot the photo of the ants from the 17th I saw this floating in mid air but I could not see how, I just assumed it was attached to a spider web. I’m not exactly sure what this is but I think it is some kind of seed or something that came from a plant. I like the depth of field in this photo they way the focus is only on this tiny subject, but everything else is blurred.

January 21st

This photo was taken in July when I was photographing my sisters-in-law’s graduation days in Bangkok. We had to wait for her for few hours so I walked around and photographed something’s in the school and I saw this water lily and tried some macro by taking off my lens and screwing a reversal ring on the front of the lens then I could photograph by keeping the front end of the lens closer to the sensor than the back and that’s how the lens became a macro lens, it works the same way as looking through a binoculars the wrong way everything seems so far away and you can only focus really close. It was really hard focusing with the lens that way because I had to move forwards or backwards to get the right focus, I could not use the focus ring. After using this for a while I realized that I need to buy a macro lens some day, because taking macro photos is a lot of fun.

Upload a day week two 8 - 14 January

January 8th

This is a slide that I took on my way to Reykjavík, this is shot on the mountain road just before entering the capital. This was one of my first slide films and I had not shot much with my Olympus OM2 before. So when I think of it today I think the exposure is kind of good comparing to how little training I had had with this camera. Even it seems a bit dark in the bottom the film isn’t this dark but the color profile for the internet is just not batter than this.

January 9th

On day when I went out running I passed this place and I thought to my self that this would be a great place to photograph, I think the different color heat in this photo does a lot for the photo otherwise it would not have the same feeling to it. For me it is hard to describe what I think about this photo because I just don’t have any words that would describe it the way I feel. I just think it is so mystical.

January 10th

Close to the flat that I lived in last summer there was a night market, it was in a walking distance. We went there several times to buy some food. Most of the times we went to this vendor to buy some curry’s. I think it is so special to go out and buy a curry in a plastic bag. I guess that I’m just not used to that in Iceland. I usually bought Massaman because that’s my favorite curry, specially with chicken and rice.

January 11th

This photo was shot in late September and it was shot with my Olympus OM2 loaded with TX 400. I was in a sheep roundup with my uncle at a neighbors farm, we went there to help them out because that day we had not planed anything special. It was a lot of fun to be there with all these sheep’s, so much action. I started the day with my film camera but then unfortunately the battery was finished and for some reason I had forgotten to pack extras in my bag but I just started to shoot digital there after and some of the shot are in the farm collection in the sheep’s set.

January 12th

This photo was shot when I was just arriving to the paradise island Koh Larn close to Pattaya in Thailand. I saw this fishing boat just arriving home. I don’t have much to say about this photo but I just wanted to share it.

January 13-14th

I shot this while on a trip with my family, we had just gone to Laos because I had to renew my visa and when suddenly we saw a rocket fly up into the air. So of corse we wanted to go and check it out, my family already knew what was going on and I had a clue but it was something I had not seen before only heard of. There was a big group of farmers standing all around something made out of bamboo with blue rockets attached to it. I ran to it with my camera because this was something that I did not want to miss. There were mostly men standing there and looking up into the sky, they were betting on which rocket would go highest. This is a tradition in Thailand to shoot rockets at this time of year. It is a way for the farmers to remind the gods that they have already planted the rice and now they need rain. This has been done for hundreds of years and I was told that NASA used they same methods when they started shooting spacecrafts into space. I don’t know if it was because of these rockets but when we had just entered the car to go back home, it started raining.

Upload a day 1-7 January

Since on 1st of January I have been uploading a photo each day, most of them are photos from last year but since I have not been active enough to upload I thought I would try to upload more so this year I am going to upload a photo every day and try each week to upload at least one new. Even tough one day I would fail to upload an image I not going to stop, I guess I will just upload two the next day.

January 1st
The Year started with a photo of fireworks which was the following day stolen by a web page for MS organization in Norway. I know it is an organization for a really bad disease but still they should not post a photo without asking for permission, I would probably have allowed it if they had asked. So after this incident I started putting a brush over my photos with my web address on it. I really don’t like putting copyright notice over my photo because I usually put it in the metadata and in the description but now since I found out that some other photos have been stolen I am going to start putting my web address across the images.

January 2nd
This photo I took two years ago but I saw it while I was organizing some old photos. This was shot in the north of Thailand just after I had slept in a tent up on a mountain that was a part of one of the great national parks in Thailand. We were driving of the mountain when suddenly I saw this amazing landscape and mystic color so I asked if we could stop so I could take some photos. This is a view over a rice field and there is a small hut in the field where the workers rest on their breaks.

January 3rd
This photo was taken in my fiancées home town actually it is her grandmother preparing for the morning market the next day. I think she is really amazing because even though see does not need to do any work she still sells things at the market just so she has something to do. She likes to do it mostly because then she meets more people and has a purpose in life. She is a really interesting woman.

January 4th
This photo I took in July when I was leaving Bangkok to go back to Khon Kaen. We drove past this place and I thought to my self that it would have been nice to photograph them but I didn’t ask to stop the car, which I started to regret soon after but for some amazing my mother-in-law forgot something at her sisters house so we had to turn back and get is so when we were at this place I asked to be left outside because I wanted to take some photos and I started by photographing the field and then I moved closer to these women to photograph, then I moved closer to them holding my camera in one hand then I moved it closer to my face showing them that I wanted to take a photo and when they just smiled I knew it was ok to photograph them that photo you can see here but the photo below is the photo for this day.

January 5th
This photo was taken in May while I was still in Bangkok and I was walking to a market on my way to a mall and on my way I saw this vendor, preparing food on the street like so many others.

January 6th
This photo is taken while I was on a road trip with my girlfriend and we were driving from Húsavík on our way to the east part of Iceland. I was going quickly through some old photos. I saw this photo and I decided to post it only thing bad about it is the way the internet messes up the colors even thought the color profile is srgb.

January 7th
This photo was taken with an Olympus OM2 with Kodak TX 400 film using Zukkor 50mm f 1.8. I was in a sheep roundup while I was a worker on my uncle’s farm. We went to help other farmers that live close by. It was a lot of fun to go there and my uncle told me to take photos of everything because it is a lot of action there and a lot of fun as well. I uploaded my digital photos from this day last year and they are all in a set called Sheep’s in the collection Farming, Her is a link to the set. That day I shot both digital and film because when I went inside I needed to shoot much higher iso than my film was and also I wanted some color digital photos.

I will try to write something about all of the photos and the next seven days will come soon.

New goals for a new year

Well finally its 2012 and like so many other I have set myself some goals for the new year, and of Corse the main goal is to take more photos but now I’m going to try to take photos every week and post on my flickr page, but I’m also go to try to post as much as I can. During the last few days I have been posting from my trip to Thailand last year and I have even been going through previous trips and found photos that I really like but did not see before.

Few days ago I found out that a photo I took during new years eve was being used on a Norwegian webpage which would have been ok if they had just asked me before but it made me realize that I have to put some kind of watermark over my photos, but I hade watermarked photos because sometimes it can ruin a good photo but I decide to give it a try. I have not watermarked all of the photos but I will start replacing them on flickr.

When I was in Thailand I took several photos of street vendors and I had this idea to make a small series out of it. I have always been a bit fascinated of these street vendors, selling food, sweet or even just small things on the street. For many of them it can be a hard way of life and they do it because they don’t have anything else to earn a living, but for others it is done to have something to aim at. Most of them stay at the same corner every day.

At new years I went out to take photos of the fireworks but instead I found this street in my town that was covered with ice and even thought there were fireworks shooting all around me I managed to stay clear of them in that photo. Well that’s it for now I will try to post something more this month.

Farmers

I started to work on my uncles farm this winter, he was starting to build a cow house for the big bulls that he has so he needed an extra hand. I have had an idea on my mind for the past year to photograph farmers and their work. The main reason is because I used to work on this farm when I was younger and after I started working somewhere else I realize that people that have worked on a farm are most of the times harder workers and not as carefree as many others. So I want to show the world how hard farmers work, so people realize that behind every meal is a lot of hard work, because the meat is not just manufactured in the store like so many think. I have just started with this serie so I have not formed it precisely but it is still in the making so it might change.

During the time I was a sheep's roundup on several farms in the valley and we went to help out some neighbors with their sheep's. It was a lot of fun because there were so many sheep's and so much action. I started with a film camera but then it ran out of battery and I forgot to bring extra, but I had my digital as well.

On this farm there are now women only two older brothers and two younger. The have 1000+ sheep's on the farm and so many dogs, which as they say don't even know their own name (because when you order them to do something they just don't do it). I think this was a fun start of the farmers serie and I honestly hope I can photograph different sorts of farming in the future.
Here is a set for sheep's on my flickr

 

An Icelandic sheep dog

Sheep's coming home

Getting tighter

Sorting the sheep's

Sorting out the unknown

My cheap still life studio

Today I just got a new window for my room, it used to be split in two pieces but now we put a new one in and now I have this good window with a lot of light. Today we harvested some vegetables and there was this big cabbage that I wanted to photograph some parts of. So i decided to make a small still life studio on my desk. Today I only took few shots but i will definitely do this again.


here is both a post of the set up as well as the outcome. I did not use a tripod because I have not been able to buy a batter one that I can put the camera directly above the subject.