I even got this pixelcollector, right here!

I brought a few cameras this trip, just in case I may manage to get some good use of them in some way. You know, it's this time of year and all. There could be things to snap, for all we know. 
I even brought a tiny pixelshooter, just in case. It's a Fujifilm something-pro, just because I can use my japaneese AND german lenses on the thing. How cool is that, tell me?! 
Nope, not that I'm going to really go wild and through the roof and snap a horsedung of pixels, believe me, but more because I have owned the thing for a couple of years now without having felt eager to give it a good test. Not until now, anyway. And who knows... tomorrow I might not feel like doing it, after all. We'll find out soon enough, I bet.

An oldish filmsnap from the ship docked in Orkney, just where we are located as I write this. And oh, yes... there are dust to be found, as there usually is. Don't remember which film, nor the camera. Probably german stuff... oldish.

There it is... a lot of my headache compressed into one small image. The crane, it is!

Some day last summer, or some time. Leaving Orkney, heading homewards. Snapped from the taxi, as I'm prone to do at times.

It's the same, but a little bit different

Well, here I am back at work again. The thing is we're totally stuck alongside, as the weather out at sea is just to bad for us to do any work in. Which means we got to stay here, alongside the pier in Kirkwall for a wee while. A few days, maybe. Or at least until the weather decides to calm down a bit, which can take weeks at this time of year. As you all know a lot about, of course.
They managed to beat the heli-deck to pieces a few weeks ago, you might remember. Or, actually the sea did that work, very fast indeed. It looks nothing good out there, I tell you. 

This is nothing new, but a scan of a rather oldish negative snapped with the help of a german camera some time ago. It's from a hotel lobby in Bergen as we were stuck here for a few days during a real snow storm when trying to get to work. It was the only one I had on some stick here... as I could not find my hard drive in the bag. I need to go take a closer look!!

And the days fly by...

Struggling with the last small things to get done before I go off to the northern isles for work again. I leave thursday morning, heading for Kirkwall, Orkney. Finally going there again. It's been too long now, so it's going to be good to get back there. Nothing much wrong with Lerwick and Shetland, but it's a bit more quiet in Kirkwall. It's just a fact and the way things are.

Some old oil rig north-west of Shetland somewhere. I got no clue from which camera it came, other than it's definitely a 135 size film. Some old Nikon, I guess.

There is still a few things on that list of things to do, though. I will never get everything done, but at least I hope to get a couple of pictures framed up and mounted before I go. That's for tomorrow.

Emilie, one of the mess crew on board my ship. The most fantastic and positive person you will find. She's from Sweden and all, you know. And she's got a nice tattoo right there on her right hand, you see. I can tell she's thinking about her boyfriend by the look in her eyes :)

Winter is here, it seems. It really started to snow a few hours ago, and before I could spell "snow showel" there was a 15 cm layer outside. Not that it came as any surprise or anything but I would rather like this sort of weather coming a wee bit later, to be honest. Like when I'm away and don't have to deal with it. 
I'll be away for yule as well this year, and probably also for the new year party. Guess I'll be home on the 2nd of january, or thereabout. 
That kind of reminds me that I got a few presents to get before I fly off... another thing to get added to the list. Not that we usually buy a great lot of presents, but still there is always a few. 

I will soon see this familiar lighthouse then. Right there on the entrance if you go the sea way to Kirkwall and Orkney you'll find it. Helliar Holm Lighthouse. Typical Stevenson construction. They built a bunch of lovely lighthouses those guys.

I also need to find out which camera, or cameras, to take over to the UK this time. It's always a question if you want to travel light or if it feels OK to bring a few kilos extra. I seem to get more lazy as I get older, which usually means I carry a small bag with a couple of german rangefinders. They are manageable in size and weight, and still are great cameras. 
A couple of Nikon SLRs are great as well. Same size as the german ones, more or less, and they seem to last forever. Or I might take one of each this time... who knows?!

And this lump of steel... and rust. I can inform you that it's still out there, and still working as well. It might look like something from another time and place, and it sort of is just that, but I think (and hope) it works a bit better than the look of things. It's the Petrojarl Foinhaven... you know the thing that bring loads of mooney ashore.

I'm back out, into the daylight

Well, not daylight as such, since in only a months time we will reach winter solstice. At this latitude that means no daylight unless we get something like a clear day. You know, blue sky and stuff like that. Nothing we see too much of, to say it as is. 
The weather has been really bad the last week. Yesterday was a true winner in that respect with huge loads of rain accompanied by a strong gale. No daylight, needless to say. Landslides and misery all over the county. The road dissolved into it's single parts and threw itself into the sea, but that was on the other side of the fjord. You know the place where the real mountains are. I have probably posted snaps of the area before, but since you ask I'll do it again.

Over here, you know. No wonder things slide away when the rain has been pouring down for weeks, and you live around mountains like these?!

I made some good use of the dark days, dug myself down into the darkroom to make a good print or ten. A few scraps as well, as you do, but all together a good bunch of nice prints. Nothing fancy, mind you. That's for another day if creativity should throw itself at me. 
At least there will be snaps for presents for the few who's got such on their wish-list. Today I got some spot work to do, then framing, and they will be ready to go. 

And over here, as well... they got some issues with heavy stuff coming down the mountain side from time to time. This is a scan of a print I made a long time ago, btw. Proper fiber paper and all! OK, it's not great, maybe, but I just wanted to show you anyway :)

My son came over yesterday evening. Then he went home with a real great and fully functioning Nikon D300. Pixel shooter, you know. The kind of thing I don't use to often, if ever. The cool thing with those semi professional digital Nikons is that they take the old lenses, those from the late 50's and onwards up until nowadays models. How great is that? 
I still got a smallish Fujifilm pixel collector. That's more than enough for my use, since I have not snapped a single digisnap the last couple of years on anything bigger than my phone. 

Another print scan. Looks horrible here, I see. The print does not look to good either, so that could be why. I need to go back here on some gray and dull day, which should be easy enough, to try snap this from a wee bit different angle. 

I found a couple of old cameras when I was going through my drawers to dig out all the bits and pieces for that digital Nikon. Nothing fancy, of course, but still they are cameras I either have not tested or need to use a bit more. Among them this mighty cool Kodak Colorsnap 35 thing from the mid 50's some time. There's a film loaded and all, but I can't remember what's exactly inside. Probably Tri-X, or maybe some Fomapan stuff. I'll run through it and get it developed some day just to make sure the thing works as intended. 
I also tested an old Voigtländer Vitomatic on one of the longer shutter times. Looks like it got the same issue as the other Voigtländer I got. Shutter totally stuck giving totally random results. That's OK, as long as I know what's going on.
And I found this crappy, all plastic, Nikon F401 from the early eighties. I remember this one quite well, as it was the first SLR I bought for my own money. I just loaded a film into it, and it seems to work. I might even use it now and again, for all I know. I need to manipulate it if I want to load film without DX coding, which I just did. I think it automatically switch to 100 or 200 ASA if there's no coding on the canister. That will have to do for this test, as I have no idea what's inside the bloody thing anyway. The roll came to me in the mail a few weeks back from someone who did some self-rolled film some time back in the 80's. It's probably some old FP4 or HP5... at least that's my wildest and best guess.

No idea what happened here with that vignetting and such. Probably a dodgy filter used on a half-wide lens on the Mamiya RZ. It's an old snap from Ona I just found. The object snapped was a bit old, as well.

Nah... I better go find some good lamp and my small bottle of Marshalls Neutral Black and get started the spot check, and fix, on those prints I told you about. 

One done, one to go

I spent the day in the darkroom. Well, it's usually not a darkroom as it's main function is like a toilet/bathroom for the whole family. Nevertheless I spent the day in there, and will have to do the same tomorrow as well. I can't wait, to be honest.

FB prints drying. I know, I know... they don't look too great when you see them through the pixelated Low-Fi lens of an iPhone. Low light and all... but you get some kind of idea, I guess.

Had a couple on order, which will be delivered soonish. Then a few made for fun, and maybe one or two to hang on one of our walls. I think they need some adjustments, so that's the work to be done tomorrow then. 

The small 5"x7" prints. Great paper, the Ilford FB range! Sorry, of course, for the d*g* snaps!!

Prints are 50x60 (Ilford warm tone FB paper) 30x40 (Ilford classic FB) and a few "just for fun" 5"x7" also on Ilford classic FB. A great day in miserable weather.

Wintery light

It's early morning. I'm sitting here in the cabin down by the sea looking out the window, coffee in the cup, watching the daylight slowly trying to take over from the pinch black wintery night that was present a few hours ago. The snow already lay deep on the mountains on the south side of the fjord. It's the same on this side, but I'm down by the sea, not up on the mountain located straight behind me. There's almost no snow left down here, consider the quite massive snowfall we had during the weekend. 

From this summer. German camera from 1960. You all know the brand which today is making all sorts of stuff to a price which no one I know can't even consider to pay for anything like a camera, or not even a car. They were mighty expensive back in the days of 1960 as well. I got one, or two, and love them, but they are still just cameras... I got a lot of cameras I like!

We got terrain here, in this part of the world. Rough terrain spanning from sea level to peaks over 1500 meters, then straight back to sea level in just a few hundred meters if you take a closer look at it on a map. 
The dialect people speak varies a lot from one small settlement or village, to the next. It's not exactly anything to wonder too much about if you try to figure how distant they were from each other up to just a few decades ago. 

Nothing special, but I still like those pylons and poles disturbing the view all over these small islands. It's like they are more visible here than anywhere else, for some reason. Same old german camera, same old german lens. Probably.

I'm on my way out. Got a small outbuilding that needs to get finished before winter really starts getting the grip on the world outside. Not much left now. I had the door mounted and the last few wooden planks on the cladding mounted a few days ago. Now there's only minor details left to get the underside of the roof done on the outside left to do, then I can go inside to finish it off. The work inside is no hurry. I can get that done without having to consider weather and such. 

Inside an old office from some time around the 1950's era. There was nothing much in here, but the old letters on that window caught my curiosity from the outside, so I had to go in to have a quick look and steal a quick snap. Same camera, wider german lens.

Tomorrow I hope to get the last prints done before I leave for work some time next week. There's the one I need to ship away, and there's a couple of others I planned to print and probably or maybe hang on a wall or two inside the cabin. I'm not sure which ones yet, but I thought I would just print a few good ones. Try them out before I decide which ones will live to see another day, and which will not.

Alex on his way to work, or maybe most likely home from work considered the state of his eyes and the fact that he's on night shift. The plane is the same either way, so it's a bit hard to tell. I think this was done inside the M3 as well. Most likely a Summicron 35mm lens. 

The light around here is just absolutely fantastic at this time of year. Not that there's a lot of it, mind you. And not that it last for long, by any standard. It changes from one minute to the next, and is an ever changing matter. It's good for me, I think. The dark wintery northern lights. 
Did you know that some people are actually getting sick of it? The light, that is. Or the lack of light, to be more precise. I mean physically sick, as in having to go see the doctor and all. 
I have never had that issue, which is good, as I like this time of year even though we got all the hassle with the snow from now until around the middle or end of april. 

1'st engineer checking manuals, TRA's, TBT's or something else important written on a piece of paper. Probably snapped with a german M6 camera. Definitely a 35mm Summicron lens.

As usual the photos have absolutely no connection to the text. They are all from the archive, some old and some more recent. I need to start plan these posts a bit more, probably...

Thoughts on B&W and such...

Black and white is my thing, as you might have figured out by now. At least when it comes to photography and such. It has been that way since I snapped my first photos with my own camera back in 1974, and I have now grown old enough to see that it will most likely stay that way until the day I for some reason stop taking photos. 

A late afternoon on the small island of Ona. It was unusually warm, and suddenly a cold front came in, fast. An interesting sight for sure. 

The temperature dropped, of course, immediately like 10 degrees. Mamiya RZ67.

It's not like I don't like to see my life, or other peoples lives, in color. I like colors a lot, but usually not in a good artistic photo. OK, I admit that there will be a few situations where colors definitely is better, but they are not many, in my opinion. 

Weather again. Clouds. Sometimes they are interesting, other times not so. I like the fact that we got different weather around this area. All four seasons and all. I just like it. Mamiya RZ67.

I am not too sure why I feel this way about B&W photos, but I think it has to do with simplicity and the fact that I usually more easily find myself getting drawn towards a B&W snap instead of the colored one. There's just to much information and too much stuff cluttering things up when colors come into play. It's like the scene is so easily getting lost in there, for some reason.

We are not exactly spoiled with beaches in the true sense of the word around this parish. Still, we got the area between the high and the low tide which we call "fjøre", and there's a lot to see and a lot to find there. This spot is just a few minutes walk away from the cabin by the sea. Nice, huh? Nikon FM2 and Nikkor 50mm f/1.4 lens. 

I let small portions of light fall onto some color film from time to time. I am not to sure why I still load my cameras with that stuff though, because I never had any real interest in them. Like right now I know I got quite a few rolls just waiting for a good wash in some developer stuff, and here I am not bothering at all. Well, it's going to be great to see those snaps I did a long time ago, of course, but I still know that they will not be good enough for any serious use. You know, put up on someones wall or anything. And then there's the printing hassle, as you all know. You can't even use a darkish room when you print color. Pinch black, or do something completely else. Like B&W... or something completely else.

Another exciting formation made by the sea during millions of years battering the stones and mother earth. I'm standing inside looking towards the entrance of the cave. There's no roof on top, but it's a great one anyway. I love the shapes created here. Nikon FM2, Nikkor 50mm.

It's like this, good people, that the joy of printing B&W in a darkroom will never go away. You find yourself kind of having unlimited possibilities with each negative. Loads of different chemicals all doing a little bit different job, you can work with different degrees of contrast, and you can choose between different papers. Which is great, believe me!  Paper is not just paper, mind you! I can write a lot about that stuff if I get started. Here and now I just wanted to say that the Ilford range is a good starting point, and that there's a lot of great things coming in from Bohemia in Czech Republic these days. Foma is the company name, and they make film and paper. Good paper, as it happens. At least the couple of types I have tested has turned out on the real bright side of life. I even heard someone saying that one or two of the Foma papers was the only papers on the market today dealing with the Lith process in a good way. I don't know anything much about Lith, mind you, so don't take my word for it. Ask someone else! But I know it's great paper.

Just a kind of nostalgic snap, for me anyway. I grew up with these plants growing all over the place. They tend to grow willingly close to the sea, and they have to be used to take a punch or three due to the ever changing weather around here. Mamiya RZ67.

I just had a bunch of 30x40 cm (12"x16") Ilford paper shipped over to me. It's that good old Classic fiber based, matte surface, paper. You know, the one you can't go wrong with. Inside the same package there were also a 50 sheets box of the great warm tone paper from Ilford, in 40x50 cm (16"x20"). 
I got an order in for a nice print of around that size, so the plan was to try get that one done over the weekend and to do it on the warm tone paper. 
It's a sea and mountain scene, snow and granite you know. And it's going to hang on a wall in the big city of Oslo, where people stuck a long way from home seem to live.