Here we go!

So, it's yet another RC sail plane post. And yet another one from the film from back in time, as it happens. 
This time we are looking at my father, just to get a brief impression of how he looked this day up on that nice little low hill back in the late 70's some time.
It's the moment of truth, it seems. Seconds away from letting that plane off and into the air. I can calm you all down and tell you it all went very well. I don't think anyone could have managed to break that plane anyway. Not that it was unbreakable, but more the fact that this thing sailed smooth as a bird. No big surprises with this thing, as opposed to that other one I told you all about the other day. 
I don't even think that one lived long enough for anyone to take a decent photo of it. 

This thing lived more or less forever... as it happens. 
Take care, and fly carefully!

Another one I snapped with that old Minolta Hi-matic G back in the days.

Lots of fur on this one!

It's the cat I'm talking about. 
The old lady of the house, so to speak. Not talking about the woman holding the coffee cup, as she's not living inside the same building even though the cat has asked her to do so many times. Good friends they are, the two of them. One would be the angel bringing fish, the other one eats it more than willingly.
So yes, I'm talking about the grey fury one to the left. The fish eater who's seems to be asleep to a point where she's absolutely consiousless and oblivious to anything happening, just to jump up on four feet being very ready in a fraction of a sec. if anyone on two legs should make their move in the direction of the kitchen. 

Sorry for the very bad scan, the bit of underexposure and what have we all. Good friends they are!

She never used to do that earlier in life, but these days it's actually coming to a point where it's incredibly annoying. Have to get the cat out of the house before even thinking about pre-planning a meal. 
My wife seems to have found a very plausible explanation to why it suddenly has become an issue these days, as she some time ago found one of the girls inside the kitchen cutting cheese. The furry thing standing on two feet stretching to get her fair share of the food, as you would if you were a cat... obviously. And she likes cheese, this creature. 

The fur also seem to stick very well onto my drying film at times. But that's another story, of course.

She's a nice enough old cat, though.

We used to throw these things!

Never threw them very far, though. Just helped them getting airborne, so to say, then they more or less helped themselves the rest of the time. At least as long as the batteries for the remote control was still alive.
This was the usual sunday activity for some time during my childhood. We were a bunch of people, some young and some older, finding lots of fun in building aircraft models and throwing them into the air like this. Had to find a place with nice hang winds, usually that would mean climbing up some kind of more or less steep hill when the wind blew in the somewhat right direction. We could fly them for quite some time as long as the wind kept on pushing up that hillside. It was nice and quiet, and a bit interesting for a kid building a real airplane and make it fly. 

On the hang, Vigra sometime in the late 70's. Minolta Hi-matic G

More often than not they would also land softly into the sometimes high grass and heather up on that ridge, but sometimes they would also land in a bit less soft place. If the plane went a bit too far behind the ridge it would easily catch some quite bad downwinds, which usually meant we had to climb down the rocky backside to pick up the pieces. Small pieces, usually. Nothing much to start a rebuild on, but the electronics were expensive back then, so that would be the main task... to find all of that stuff. 

I think my father still have a few bits and pieces of a couple of airplanes from back in the days. I know for sure he got the RC bits, at least. I remember very well one of the last crashes with one of his old planes. The sound still ringing in my ear, kind of. I think he more or less quit after that. Could have killed someone, probably. It was during the norwegian championship of speedflying gliderplanes. He had built this horror machine that could be loaded with lead around the center of gravity to really speed up the thing. Wings up high to really add speed and aerobatic qualities. It was known under the name "Ridge Racer", and was a fantastic "machine". It only survived a few training passes and just almost one full competition round during that day. 
It was a very nervous plane to fly, and we all kind of knew it would not live for long anyway. 
I will never forget the last sound it made though, and that quite impressive pile of pulverized small bits and pieces coming flying up the hill towards me because of the quite strong wind being pushed against the hillside. 

Would be fun to give it a try again, but I don't know. Maybe I'm better off just keep it as a memory of days long gone...

I like the sea, always. I like details, sometimes

Sometimes we like to fish. And we also like to eat fish. We usually try to catch our own, but will normaly do it from a boat. No big reason for that when we're out there, visiting the island at the doorsteps of The North Sea. Very nice fish to catch just a two minutes walk away from the house. 
We catch what we need, and a couple of small ones for the grey cat, then we stroll back home. I like the idea of catching food that has been living wild in the ocean until the moment you catch it. It might not mean a lot in the big picture, but I still like it.

One of our better fishing spots. Rolleiflex 2.8E and some film. Probably Fomapan 100.

On our way back home we usually pass this point. I have seen this detail a lot. I don't think there's anyone else bothering to waste a film frame on the thing. After passing it enough times I just had to... Mamiya RZ67 on this one. 

These are things I see when at home. 

When I'm at work I see stuff like the thing below. And a lot of sea.

Today I spotted a huge, nice whale as well. I always like to watch the wales when I spot them. I'm not that much on deck or upstairs, so I probably miss a lot of them, of course. But today we had one very close to the ships side. Could hear it's breath and everything. Big lungs on those creatures, just saying. Great divers they are as well. It played a bit around and then went down, never to be seen again. At least not by me. 

Andrew, Block 16/28, UK sector, North Sea. Some 135 size film camera. 

These things are noisy bits out here, but the whales does not seem to mind them too much. They swim quite close to them, but then again there's food to be found around them, I would think. At least there seems to be a lot of whale food around these places. We dive, you know, with unmanned things with lots of cameras attached to them. We see things, down there. Some things installed by man, others have never been touched by anything at all, and will never be. 

Quite a big space, the oceans...

A few from the 70's

As you probably know by now I used to bring my camera, the old Minolta Hi-matic G, to school and to school trips during the few years from around 1976 to 1983 or thereabout. 
Here's a few from a trip we did to an island called Runde, some time around 1977 or 78. We stayed there for a full week, as it happens. It was great. Learned things, and all that.
I like Runde. It's an island Way out West, just around where I'm quite known to find some peace when I need it. I think I might had the same feeling back then. Some things never seem to change that much. 

I got no particular idea where this might be, but my guess is some place called Torvik. In that case it's the place where the boat came to pick us up. It may just as well be the place we had to go with a very small ferry. I see the old school ferry quay sitting in the middle of the picture more or less. It's just the way they used to be around these parts of the world at that time. Things have changed now, just saying. And there's an old Shell oil tank as well. It's a cool snap, actually, when you start look into it.

This is from the trip back home. Nowadays you can easily drive from my home town down and out to Runde in just a few hours. Tunnels and bridges and not too many ferries these days. Back in time when these snaps were taken you had to go by boat. Or, you didn't have to go by this particular boat, but there were a few ferries and stuff you had to take to get there. The service was quite poor, and there used to be a lot of time spent on quays like this one back then.
My father loaded a few films into me bag for this trip. Positive color stuff. Slides and such, you know. I think I might find them inside some kind of box some day. We will see. I might even know where to look...

Ah, and here she comes, the one we were all waiting for. The Hurtigruten, old "M/V Nordnorge". Black and white on the outside, full of nice polished wood and brass on the inside. They don't build them like this anymore, that's for sure. Lovely lines on these old ships, I must say. See, my class mate Ann Kristin used to have a real posh vintage 70's flight bag as well, back in the days. That's cool! At least I know for sure that this is Torvik, because that's where the Hurtigruten used to go to pick up a few passengers, and one or two cows, three hens, a basket of eggs and a cat or two to be shipped to relatives further up north. Or to the butcher or wherever such things ended up back in the days.

The Hurtigruten is still in traffic nowadays as well. They got a new fleet these days, mind you, and should be perfectly well suited for a nice cruise up north the norwegian coast should you have such a wish. They might still have one or two of the old ones in traffic, but I'm not quite sure. It will take you from Bergen and all the way up to Kirkenes, and back to Bergen if you like. I think that's something like 11 days on the boat, if my memory's still with me. It will not be cheap, believe me!

A close-up then, of the old one. The new "Nordnorge" looks quite different. The usual floating "brick" we're getting used to see nowadays. 

I might run into the darkroom when I get home and try to print these. I like to print old negatives. I probably took these snaps for a reason, so it might be worth to put them up somewhere, some day. 

Expensive fog (long and boring read, probably).

Fog, as we know it.

The good fellow Michael over in North Ireland posted a nice set of snaps from the West Lighthouse over there a bit more than a few days ago. One of them snaps were showing a nice device used to detect fog, and that led me to think of the old discussion going on for decades over here in Norway a few years ago now. It was all about where to put the new big airport, and I think the first political decision about the matters were done already back in 1972, then a second one in 1988 before they finally made a third and final decision in 1992.

You see, we were badly in need of a new and centrally located main airport in this old country, as the old one in the middle of Oslo were really getting too tiny to accommodate the rapidly increasing air traffic.  Discussions were going back and forth between the many politicians wanted to have their saying into the matters, and a lot of words were spoken from all corners of the country, in addition to old rich businessmen and maybe a few women as well for all I know. After all this was happening over a few decades, which would make it all add up to a lot of words.

Anyway, to make this extremely long story a bit shorter they came up with three different ways to get things done, and with three different locations to vote between. One suggestion was to do a nice makeover of the old one, which none of the folks in the position of deciding things really seemed to opt for. And then there was a suggestion to build out the existing military airport at gardermoen, and a third suggestion at a place where no airport existed from earlier. All three locations would be fit for the purpose in one way or the other.
And this is where the battle really came to stand. Between the "Gardermoen" and the "Hurum" locations, as the old Oslo Airport on Fornebu was out of the question more or less from the start.
A lot of strong reasons were put on the table suggesting that Hurum was the best choice and the location most suitable to put the new airport. If you look at the combined benefits for the country, that is. If you had a look at where the strongest politicians lived at the time around when the decision was about to be made, the answer would be Gardermoen.
The weather was an issue and something to really take into consideration, and the discussions went on for years about where they would have the overall best weather of the two locations still discussed.
After some time without getting any closer to an agreement, they decided to bring in experts from the National Norwegian Institute of Meteorology to actually do observations. Lots of stuff were measured, and fog was naturally a very interesting matter on both of the actual locations.

At some point, just before the final voting was about to take place, it became evident that the fog measurements had been really tampered with. I mean tampered with Big Time! Vaseline or something similar had been smeared onto the lens on the measuring device. The objective was to fool the desicionmakers, and probably the norwegian people as well, and lessons could and/or should be learned from this.
For some reason the foggy days in the area of Hurum had exploded to a level where it just had to be questioned, and people did just that. The whole country was led to believe that there was nothing like one day in the year without fog around the place, and somebody would have to answer for the measurements. 
A very well known engineer at the time were working to find evidences that someone had tampered with the instruments, and had therefore been doing a lot of digging into the matters. He claimed to have found the answers he had been looking for, and was determined to give away names on people trying to fool the government into choosing Gardermoen instead of Hurum, and also to give away the strong reasons they might have to set up the whole plot. 
Strange things happened in this case, and one morning he was found dead, naked in the street in Copenhagen having fallen through a closed window just a few days prior to be ready to tell the truth about who was acting like a mafia to make the decision process a bit easier for the government. The Danish Police were extremely quickly jumping to the conclusion that we were talking about a suicide, and did not want any more talk and chit-chat about the matters. A lot of others were thinking, and maybe rightful, that the dead engineer was not the kind of man you would suggest being able to commit suicide. In addition the circumstances were a bit suspicious, and maybe should call for a bit further digging into the matters.

Gardermoen, at the time, used to be the location of the biggest military airport in Norway. Some have suggested that someone wanting the Royal Norwegian Air Force to become weaker would have strong enough reasons to get the deed done, while others thought maybe business and money was the reason why the highly respected engineer Jan Wiborg ended up dead and naked in the backyard of a hotel in Copenhagen early in the morning on the 21st of June, 1994. 
We will probably never get the full answer to why all this happened, but a book came out in 2014 where the author seems to have very good reasons to believe that Jan Wiborg did not commit suicide. 

Anyway, this is not the full story by any means. There is probably a lot more out there on the web if you like to do a search. What we do know is that this was one of the biggest political questions in Norway throughout history, so there was a lot of political prestige into it as well. 
So, folks, stay away from a fog measuring instrument if you see one! It might do a lot more than you think it does... 

Then we went south

It's already well into another weekend on board, the second one out of four if everything goes well and according to all plans. We just moved from an area a bit north to way further south. 13 hours steaming straight south to get there, but I got no idea where we are at the moment. I just hope the guys responsible for navigation have a clue about that.
I might go upstairs and have a look outside a bit later to find out.

One day early this summer out there on Ona. You see the old beach down there and all, and the small chapel on the graveyard. It was a very quiet day, just the way I like them.

Oh, and as this is the digital age it means you can leave what you have written, hide it away for some time just to come back and find it saved for you somewhere out there in cyberspace. We happen to be in the middle of the Brae field, somewhere Central North Sea, as some navigator dude try to explain to me a few minutes ago. It was rather easy to find as well, he told me. Had to be, I would say, because even he managed to actually look it up all by himself.
You might even wonder what it looks like out here by now? Just relax and give me a few weeks to sort that out. You see I was just outside with both the nice little Olympus Mju-II P&S thing, and the Nikon, and also I brought my phone. The sorts that will give you pixels thrown onto a screen in more or less the right order. You know everything worth to know about just that, I guess.

Ona again. This time i snapped the somewhat smaller lighthouse standing just beside the bigger lump of steel up there on the hill. There never seems to be any snaps taken of this little thing.

I have been thinking about it for some time now, to maybe do something digital every now and then. If I want to move a bit along this route it has to be done in a certain way if I'm going to bother at all, so I have made myself a scetch with a few rules in that respect.
You see, I asked myself what the worst thing about them pixelcatchers is, and there are multiple issues to be found when you start thinking about it. I have been writing a lot about just that inside this place allready, but a few small things is probably worth saying again.
First of all it's all the time I feel I'm wasting when using digital. Not by actually snapping the snaps, but all the computerwork really scared me away from them last time I was known for using that format a bit more than I do nowadays.
Then you have the files themselves which is sharp and impersonal and cold and not very pleasing to look at in any way, at least not from the cameras I have used to own. And the colors I got out of them files also did help a lot to scare me away.
The bigger the sensors seem to grow, the more clinical sharp and ice cold the files seem to get these days. So I have been looking into the direction of the tiny phone, and I also got a smallish fujifilm digital shooter back home. I might put that one into some use when I feel like it, or have other reasons to snap some electronic images. Which we all do from time to time anyway.
On the positive side it's not exactly a secret that digital is both easy, and convenient, and that you still get snaps out of the things just as you get snaps out of any film camera. They are different in very many ways for sure, and the final way to use the two formats will be very different, but as for now I think I might try to run a test program just to see if I can get any answers out of it at all.
There will not be much printing done from my digital files, to put it very simply.

A fantastic very late evening on the beach at Alnes, Godøya. Oh yes, I was a bit shaky at the moment of truth, but then again I used quite a longish shuttertime on that old Rolleiflex, so keep that in mind.

So: all editing will be done on the iPhone only, and if it takes me more than half a minute to edit a file it will not be done. Period. I will NOT in any way once again in my life be found to have snapped the same thing a million times over, which means I will give myself one try and that's it. In other words I will try to behave like I do when snapping stuff onto film.
I will still concider myself a film snapper, analog geek, filmwaster or whatever you call them, but with the only difference I might start doing a bit more digital from now. I mean, I have almost not snapped a single digital photo since God knows when, with the only exeption of a very few on my phone for instagram use and that sort.
So that's the reason why I thought I might do a bit more of it this winter, and see where it takes me. But The Rules have to apply, and I will not move away from them. Small sensors, no new cameras, all editing on the phone, and only for posting in places these things can be posted which would be all around the interweb more or less.

Nothing close to home this one, but I really like this rusty lump of steel very well fastened onto the northern pier in the harbour of Peterhead, Scotland. I might get the chance again in just a few days to snap the thing with a somewhat decent camera. Maybe the light is a bit more in my favour then, for all we know...

But rest ashured folks; this place will still be a pixel free zone as long as there's not anything I feel I have to post to make my point clear, or need to post a snap of a nice old film camera or some other obvious reason to snap a digisnap and throw it out here.
For this reason I started another blog about a year ago. I have not touched it much at all since I started the thing, and have really been thinking back and forth if I should go for it or not, but today I posted my first digital post on there just to get the feeling. It was weird, to tell you the truth. Like doing something I should not have done, or something illegal... Strange feeling, and I kid you not!

You may like to have a quick look at it, or you may not like that at all. That's up to you, of course. It might be a strange thing to do, but I feel this might be the only way I can do it if I'm going to do it at all. 
After all this has been an all analog space all the time, and I just could not touch this place and do something I probably would regret at some point a bit later.
And another thing, this will still probably be The House of My Thoughts in more or less the same way it has been from day 1. The other place might function as an addition of some kind, in a stand alone way. I don't know yet. I even don't know if I'm able to run two blogs, but we will see. It depends a lot on how simple I can make the other one, I guess.
Take care, and really hope to see you all here in the days to come as well :)