Days getting shorter

It’s late at night out here in the ocean. It’s getting dark quite early these days. Been rather dark all day, to tell you the truth. Gray day, foggy, rainy and not too nice weatherwise. I heard there’s a bit different weather on the land side both in Norway and over here in the good old UK the last couple of days. Sunny, with a heat wave and all. Way beyond summer temperatures and what have we.

I am more or less re-using a small bunch of snaps for this post. Not for any special reason, but they might fit the theme a bit, and they are not bad either. At least a couple of them isn't. I got no idea from where I snapped this, to be honest, but it could have been on a ferry on my way to Ona a few years back.

Well, out here in the middle of the North Sea it’s dark anyway, and 
cold, and we got no internet. Nothing at all. Stone dead. You see there was something happening last night that made all our puters totally useless. Some kind of disasterish virus has found it’s way through each and every fire wall built on shore, and further creeping into one or more of the typewriters connected to the interweb on board this floating piece of steel, and rust. 
Don’t look at me, as I was asleep at the time of the incident around 2 am last night. 
So, this means I’m writing this piece on my own private offline computer at the moment, hopefully able to transfere it to some other machine some time tomorrow and get it posted. If I feel there’s anything to post at all, that is. We will see…

It's from somewhere in Wales. It all looked more or less the same this day, so could be anywhere I suppose. I know for a fact it was somewhere north on Anglesey, but not the exact location. Snapped on some kind of Nikon, I think.

Did I tell you it’s dark outside? And we’re clearly heading for autumn and all? Well, we are! And when it’s getting dark outside and I feel like the first days and nights of autumn is here I usually start to play some music. I always seems to play the same stuff during these days, year after year. It’s like other people playing their Christmas stuff when we’re getting closer to yuletide. I kind of do that thing as well, but I seem to have a bit different approach to what I play around that time of year than most others. Enough about that… now we are talking about my «dark autumn nights music» and it will go on for a few days, I know that from experience. 
You might wonder exactly what we’re talking about, and it’s rather simple actually. It’s the absolutely fantastic jazz album made by Tom Waits decades ago, simply called The Asylum Years. 
But I need dark evenings to even concider putting that thing on, and I need everything to be quiet around me. If I were at home I would definately have poured myself a double whisky. I might not have completely emptied it, but I would have to have it standing there by my side while listening. And I would have closed my eyes and watched the movie on my inner eye as the album evolved and the stories went on. 
It’s not a movie as such, but rather a quite long series of stills snapped on some heavily over cooked and pushed Kodak Tri-X. You know the style from before; very grainy, extremely contrasty, dusty, unsharpish, deep black shadows and bright white streetlights. 
For there are streets, and people and cars, and there’s whisky and beer. There’s the wings from a dead magpie and one or two scarecrows. There are wheelchairs and broken bones, and quite a few broken hearts. And it rains. A lot. And the raindrops are creating «Diamonds on My Windshield, Tears from Heaven», and life is not exactly on the brighter side to any of the characters inside this long series of snaps. But then again, life is not always on the good side to all of us anyway, and sometimes we might need a reminder on just that fact. I don’t know why I seem to need it, this reminder, as my general mood is nothing like the stuff you hear on this record. Still I like to listen to these words being spoken from the deeps of the man himself every now and then, and I find the snaps I seem to attach to them to be extremely strong and make me think on serious stuff for a moment or five. 

You have seen this before as well. Snapped from the island of Godøya in the direction towards where I live these days. And yes, this was a gray day as well. Mamiya RZ67.

Well, nuff said about that I think. Let’s hope the weather is a bit on the brighter side tomorrow then :)
We are located very close to some oil rig at the moment, and I thought it would be about time to go outside to see if it seems to be any point in wasting a few frames of some HP5 I got loaded inside the Nikon. I threw it in yesterday as the Kentmere 100 was all done for during the baking session. I even cranked the ASA a few steps for this one just to see what kind of stuff that would give me. I guess we will find out soon enough.

OK, so I went out and snapped the big thing. I think it’s the Brent Bravo platform, but I need to get that confirmed some time tomorrow. It’s at the Brent field, anyway. I think I got a daytime snap of it done a bit earlier today as well, or yesterday. I don’t know, as the days more or less gets mixed up and blended into one another out here. But I know that daytime snap was done using the 105mm f/2.5 lens I found somewhere deep down my bag. Tonight it was a bit too cramped to use the 50mm, but I still snapped a few with it anyway, and more or less quite fine to use the 35mm to get all that steel inside the picture frame. But, I had to improvise bigtime with the shuttertimes as it’s pinch black and only some light from the rig itself. That means B setting and count to five, then to ten-ish on the next one and then we will see in about a month if it «comes out». I’m quite sure it will not, but you never know. It will be blurry. I know that much from experience. I mean handheld at around ten seconds isn’t the easiest thing to pull off in any situation, but on board a ship at sea there’s no point in putting your camera on anything sturdy to use as a tripod anyway, as the whole thing moves quite a bit, as you should know well enough. 
With some luck I get something flashy and stylish out of it. With the normal luck there’s nothing much to print anyway. I think my wife wanted a rig thing for one of the bedroom walls, so I have to give it a try. 

At least it was not raining.