It's great, actually!

Well into the last few days of preparation for crew change over here. Which is a good thing, mind you! This time however we need to stay an extra day in Brazil as we're in for visa renewal, which is a horrible venue all together. Takes precious time you see, and lots of the sorts I'm afraid. We even have to get into a van and have someone to drive us about 4 hours up the coast just to get to the right police station to get it all properly done. Crazy, but that's how it is. Oh, and the same four hours back down to Rio again the next day to hopefully catch our flights to Europe. And if we're late, well the next plane leaves 24 hrs later if we can get tickets on such short notice that is. 

Living at the Beach. Well, this might be to stretch the truth a wee bit, but we will be moving to this area a few months from now. It's a place where you can breath. Like really breath...

OK, rants over!
It's going to be great to get home. I got plans, you see. Plans for some darkroom work, and even plans for some snapping up of (hopefully rather) good stuff for all of you to see some day. It's about time I take the old van out and do some driving around the area just to try my take on a few scenes inside the fjords somewhere. 
I usually find myself somewhere on the coast line, and it must be years since I took some time and drove deep into the fjords land of this place. They are quite nice though, if you like this sort of thing. Steep mountain sides and some deep water, that's what it's all about in there. We are only talking about a couple of hours drive actually, so it's not that the task is completely impossible. It's just myself liking the open landscapes a lot better. I feel I can breathe out there on the coast. In the fjords you're constantly walking around with something blocking the means of breathing. Of course it's just a feeling, but anyway who would and should not listen to what your body is trying to tell you? My body usually tells me to pack my things and get home to where the wind is howling, the rain is hammering flat onto your windows and the sun is shining and no wind is blowing half an hour later. That's fresh air to me...
But I'll do it for you, of course... just to let you know what it looks like when looking through one of my cameras. It will be nothing like this or that, I'm absolutely sure! Not like this either, if you follow me the slightest little bit...?
I'll manage to get something though, probably with a bit plainer looks.

Those cameras... and an engineer cadet

Ship o'hoi all! Another busy day is slowly coming to an end and time to find the old bunk quite soon. 
Today it's been another day back to school, but as a teacher and eventually sensor and assessor this time. Part of my job is of course to train new sailors to take over this sort of profession in the years to come. Well, the engineers are the real trainers and teachers, but it's still the assessor who got the last word when it comes to letting the cadets through the needle eye or not. 
I have been the "headmaster" to quite a few of them up through the years, and most of them have become owners of the certificate in the end, but this one has been a bit different. 
Accurate, tedious but effective... and a really outstanding written test to round it all off. You see in addition to the practical side the cadets got a "Cadet Book" they need to fill in. Or it's not about "filling in" as such, but to really answer the questions in as good way as they can. I have seen a lot of cadet books up through the years, but I'm happy to say I've never seen anything like this one. The book has been worked on more or less every day for a full year, and the result is just something else. 
I just signed off her last written test, which from this moment makes her an engineer holding the M4 maritime certificate. She will not know it herself until tomorrow morning, but I'm happy to break the big news to all of you out there right now.

There! See that? Now that's a proper marine engineer for you right there. On top of one of his 2,4 MegaWatt lumps of cast iron and bits and bobs of steel and other sorts of metal. Snapped with an old Nikkormat, I think. You can never be quite sure, but I'm fairly certain about this one. 

Oh, and I almost forgot. 
I just bought that Pentax Spotmatic I told you about a few days ago over here. Had to get it actually, just because it was now or never. I will write words about it whenever I get my hands on it and have eventually fed a roll of film through it. 
I mean it had at least one great lens and a couple of other maybe not so great lenses on the side. A nice leather strap and everything, and it did actually come quite cheap (OK, not cheap as in more or less free, but you know...) after a very short discussion about the matters. 
I'll be happy with it, as long as it opens and shuts when needed. 

Sunday blues

Good evening! 
At least it's in the evening over here, so you just have to bear with it even though it's soon morning back home. 
I'm finally done with the most horrible Sunday at work in a very long time. 
As the master of everything technical on board the ship, you are more or less in charge of everything if you look away from knowing or being aware of where are, and/or where we're heading. Anything else is the engine dept. responsibility. 
It's basically like running a small miniature town with all it's support system. Including the sewage, and the waste lines from the mess. Sometimes food waste pipes are getting clogged and there will be a problem with the sewage plant... but (luckily) very rarely on the same day. 
I say no more about it other than mention that we just found ourselves in some very bad luck, from seven in the morning all the way around till six in the evening. That's eleven hours hard work with stuff you don't want to think about. 

It's from a beach in Scotland, of course. There's quite a few places like this over there, and they are great places to go for a walk. You will of course always walk with the wind into your face and get a lot of sand in your wellies and into your cameras and lenses, but it's worth it. Believe me!

Other than that, you might ask...? Nothing much, I'm afraid. Nothing at all, actually. 
I have not even had the time to take the old rangefinder out for a walk on deck. The sky was a bit more overcast today compared to most days, so it would be a nice day for it. Anyway, I'll get my chance again soon. And besides, I'm running out of film as well so might be a good idea to save it for crew change and traveling home days. 

I have just started working ever so lightly on collecting a few snaps to put op on a small exhibition later this year. I got a few prints made up already, and got a few more I need to print from my pile of existing negs... and then I probably need a few more to fill in the gaps. I'll get there though, as long as I can get my old Italian enlarger to work again after the rather serious rebuild to LEDs and new timers and LED controllers and what have we all. I am sure I'll get there, but it has taken a serious amount of time, I have to admit. But OK, at least I know how the thing works should it suddenly show signs of behaving weird. 
I'm looking forward to pinning these pictures up on the walls, because I'm probably going to mix them in between paintings, which will be a new experience all over. 
We have been talking about doing something together for something like 20 years or so, which should mean it's about time soon. Life has come in the way for something like a lifetime, but now it seems we can get something done... I hope. If not, we'll just put aside everything and work against next summer. At least we got a plan now. I've seen some of her paintings, and they look great even on a computer screen. 

I'll be back with more from the archive and a lot more talk soon. 

It's the ship I work on, while on dry land inside the dry dock in Curacao last summer. We had some of the anchor chain out for steel thickness measurements to be done, and a lot of work going on around the bottom of the thing. All thrusters were out for checks and engines were overhauled and a lot of things were going on all the time, day and night. You can even see a couple of guys inspecting something. One of them looking inside one of the thruster holes, and the other just looking at steel plates, whatever that would be good for...?

Just a very few words from downtown Rio de Janeiro

Good evening all, or whatever it is at this time of the day around the world. Over here in Rio it's about 21.30 or 9.30 pm as they rather like to say over here on this side of the Atlantic Ocean. It's OK, I know both terms well enough, so you can use whatever you're used to. 
I'm back again today as well, with a few rants and a couple of snaps that has nothing to do with anything being said. Which should mean everything is as it should be right now as I got nothing much to say about the photography part of it. 
One day I will though, so stay tuned folks!

We came in to town around four o'clock this morning, and it's been a darn long day ever since, I tell you. The client had some stuff to get done on one of their very stupid winches, which of course means we have to join them and go in to the shore either we like it or not. 
I like to go to in and see land and buildings and things, but honestly it's getting worse all the time due to the amount of work piling up that you have to try to get done during the very few hours you get alongside. 
You will have made ready a list of things to do of course, duly written on the door in the engine control room, and then you start on top and work your way down towards the end as far as you get before someone up on the bridge will call you and say "hi-ho" and heave them ropes aboard and fire up the steamers, and off we go again. 
Big trouble is you always only get about this far down your mentioned list before people start calling about all the things that has gone wrong around this old vessel. Winches that don't move, pumps not starting, valves not operating... and the one I never like to hear: the crane is not working!! Which was todays big happening, of course. The crane not working always means we have to drop whatever we're doing to shorten down our list, and jump onto that huge thing to try get it fixed ASAP. It means a world to have that crane working, as it's part of the ship and the ship will get off-hire as soon as it's not doing what it's supposed to do. No pounds, shilling or pence into the ship owners pockets, in other words. 
It's an old crane this one, made in 1998 in good old Holland. It's been great and has served us well, but it's also quite big and it's got a dreadful load of internal parts inside itself. 
About five years ago it was decided to have the thing a bit updated for about 5-6 million Euro, but due to the big crisis and bad things happening in the industry it was put on hold. I guess that's what we are paying for right now... with sleepless nights and a mighty lot of work to be done to keep the thing still working. 
Well, don't let me dwell into the matter too much. We finally found two tiny cables in contact with each other at a place where particularly these two cables should absolutely not be in contact with each other, and then stuff like this tends to sort itself out pretty quick after tearing them cables apart and have them secured that way. 
It's just a matter of finding the buried dog of course, in the middle of a million cables and sensors. It was well hidden this time, waaaay down in the lower and inner parts of the machinery inside everything. What most people seem to fail to understand is that the part you see of this crane is actually just a tiny bit of it. It also takes up quite a large space over five floors inside this old ship. Huge old yellow bastard it is!

 I'm really not sure what made me stop and waste a frame of film on this piece of warehouse somewhere at one of the piers on The Clyde in Glasgow a couple of years or so back in time. Looking at it now it could have been the positioning of things... and the brickwork maybe? I don't know, but there's been people working here some time back. That's for sure!

And not only that, but I even went around the corner to the opposite side of it and snapped that part of it up as well. This time it makes a bit more sense maybe. I think I thought about why they decided to put in a perfectly new and fine door into the hole where a rotten door probably used to stay a short time ago, but failed to see that the roof was about to fall into the building itself? I mean right now there will be a guy standing pushing against the door and wonder what on earth can possibly be blocking their rather new and perfect door from the inside? They can call me... I might be able to give them a clue.

Before all this maniac stuff happened we had a rather good time actually. At least part of the time. We were supposed to get some old sludge delivered to an on-shore lorry, and that part went well enough after we suddenly had a couple of hours extra work because of the fact that they were (for once in a lifetime) deciding that the port side of the ship was the best side to have alongside this time. That little detail created a total mess out of everything, but after that was sorted out it was great for about one hour... until the crane thing happened of course. I mean I even managed to take the black old Leica out on deck in the sunshine taking a few snaps. I even managed to get shouted at very loud because of pointing it into the direction of (obviously) the totally wrong man, and I could go on and on and on. 
All in all it's been a typical great day alongside in Rio, as you probably already have guessed.

And now I'm off to bed, just saying! 

Watch this wonderful thing!

See? It's the stairs inside the old lighthouse keepers house out on the island. It's been posted around this place before I think, but having a look at it again can only do you good, so here you are thank you very much. 

I think it must be the best snap of any stairs I ever snapped! Not that I have that many of them under my belt as such, but anyway. 
It was done using the huge and clunky old Mamiya RZ, and after passing through the 110mm lens the light disturbed some silver halides on a tiny piece of 120 size FP4+ film from Ilford and here's the result of that magic. You can't go wrong with a setup like that as long as you just manage to let enough light onto that little piece of film. The shutter could have stayed open twice as long of course, but then there would be issues with some other stuff, so I left it be right where it was and had the deed done. 
Had there been any dead ones around they would probably still be awake of course, as the mirror flip-flap on this thing is on the extreme side. 
Everything went well though, and off we went. 

Oh yes, I got it printed as well. On both Art 300 and some lovely warm tone Ilford paper. Looks great, no kidding! 
One of the mentioned prints, the one on the Art300 paper, would have showed up on this snap had this snap been taken today, if you see what I mean... OK, it's twisting my brains a bit, so I leave it right there. The relativity theory thing has never really been my force in life!

Damn rangefinder, or most likely my film...

I have been using some film this trip to sea. Or I'm not sure I've been taken a lot of snaps as such, but my state of the art black old rangefinder suddenly started playing tricks on me. I don't know what the issue is all about, but it feels to be something simple enough to be honest. At around frame 20-26 or thereabouts the film transport has suddenly locked up, and no more film wanted to be fed through the camera. It's stuck on the spool side of the thing to a point where I have managed to rip the perforated holes to pieces. This happened to three films in a row, and I was pretty furious about it. Then I decided to check again a few days ago, and this time everything went fine (with different type of film, read further on...)
After the two first lock-ups I actually wrote a short message to Ilford, just in case they might be able to shed some light into their making of them things. Their films, that is. The first two stopped funnily enough at around frame 24, and I started to think they might had 36 and 24 exp. length spools mixed up, or that something else might have happened to the films during production making them a bit shorter than they should be. Because that's the feeling you get when this happens. End of film like sort of thing, and when you have been through several hundreds of them you know that feeling well enough. 
I got a nice reply from Ilford. and deemed by the words to read there should be no reason to suspect any dodgy film from their side as this should have been picked up in several ways, but I will of course know a bit more about the issue when I get home and have them torn apart in the darkroom. Further I also had one roll spinning through the old Minolta Hi-matic, and this roll also stopped before it should, so I got a suspicion there is something weird going on with this batch of FP4+ to be honest. But again, nothing will be proved until the rolls have been through the developing process. 
My last roll was a Kentmere 400 which has been living inside the inner parts of my photo bag for years and probably got something like at least 50-60 X-ray treatments on it's neck. The main reason for sending it through the camera is just to check if it gets stuck at some point... I think not, to be honest. 
So, I have been wasting a lot of film lately... but if it's the films themselves that have a problem it's fair enough and no big deal other than loosing some frames I could have wasted on something else. If it's the camera having an issue I'm seeing a repair bill coming up in the future, but then again I can't see what might be wrong since there's only the damn winding tool axle going into the end of the film spool and that's it. And that part of the thing is working flawlessly. If it was the film winder that had a problem I would not be able to rip the film to pieces with it, I should think? 
Anyway, we will find out in a few weeks when I'm out of this place. At least the lady at the mailbox in the Ilford house like to know my findings when I get there, and if there's anything odd with the films she like to know the batch no. and a few other things. I'll send her a mail as soon as I know what the problem is. 

Todays snap was done a few years ago now. Maybe it's been posted before, but I'm not sure. I know another one from the same place has been posted, but this one I don't know. Bog Cotton on the moors of the island where my mother grew up... It's a lovely kind of grass, isn't it?

New cameras? Nah... don't think so!? Not today!

I was actually way too close to becoming the new owner of two old cameras today. One of them just because I have been thinking about getting a camera for parts at some point for my Mamiya RZ67 cameras I got laying around the house. The other one would more or less be had for pure nostalgic reasons, a Pentax Spotmatic. A lovely black painted one, as it happens. The Mamiya RZ seemed to be at the right price more or less, but the Spotmatic probably way beyond what it's actually worth. The thing is you will never know until you got it and have used it for a while. That's just the way it is with old cameras, and why it sometimes might not be the best idea to jump on the wagon and throw your hard earned cash around like a drunken sailor or something. 
I didn't buy any of them, at least not today... and there are in fact multiple reasons for just that, where the biggest one probably is the fact that I should rather get rid of a few cameras instead of dragging even more of them things inside the house. I got more than enough of them for lifetimes to come, and space is a bit limited and will continue to be so in the foreseeable future. 
I really want that spare parts camera for the RZ system, but knowing myself I can also see me receiving the thing in the mail and before you can say "screwdriver" I'm deep into a process where the end product is a lot closer to a fixed and repaired No.4 Mamiya RZ instead of a bunch of spare parts for my working cameras should one of them go bonkers. 
Nah... the cheapest way to do this is actually selling one of the three I got and use the two others until one of them fails, then use that one for parts and live happily ever after. There is no reason to get another one at all, and somewhere deep inside me I know that's the right thing to do.

Another small piece of the Fairy Glen snapped from the very point where I came out of the small woods from where I posted a snap in an earlier post. This is more like it, I guess you're saying to yourselves while nodding very lightly. A proper Glenscape it is, sort of.

What about the Spotmatic then, you might naturally wonder? I don't know yet, to be honest. There are two or three reasons why I'd like to have that one. First of all it's sporting a damn fine 50 mm lens in those pictures in the ad. Second I have been looking around for a M42 camera for a while, but should ideally have got one a few years back before "everyone" started to buy all sorts of M42 lenses on the market. The prices seem to be a bit different these days if you compare them to what they were when I first started to think about this. Third reason would be the nostalgic part of it, plus the way the thing looks. I mean it's one of the better looking cameras ever built, and this particular example are just up there at the very top! 
If I stick my finger well into the ground though and actually think about the matter using most of the good parts of my brain at once, I can easily see that I don't need this one either. I got a bunch of cameras doing exactly the same thing as this one would, and most likely they do it at least just as good as this old Spotmatic. They will not do it in the same style and with the same aura involved of course, but the end product will be no much different to anything else I'm able to produce today. 
That's the cold facts, but then again I sometimes just can't help myself making decisions a bit on the side of myself. 
On another sort of note I can't save them all either, and I might just as well get a 100 pack of 8x10 beautiful FB darkroom paper instead. 

This has nothing to do with the previous snap whatsoever, besides it's taken somewhere in Scotland probably. At least it was found on the same film in between some other snaps from over there. I got no idea at all where it is to be honest, but I remember stopping and at the same time doing this underexposure. 

We are still moving around this same part of the blue sea in rather straight lines, putting strange looking yellow computerized boxy things down to the sea bed using hefty remotely controlled and operated submarines to get the deed done. Then after a few days another vessel will be trotting over the same spot with air cannons blowing holes in the sea, and the sound waves from them things will at some point reach the bottom to knock more or less gently onto the face of the sea bed, and further travel far in towards the core of mother earth herself, and for each new layer of rock and stuff the sound wave hits some of the sound will return back towards the surrounding sea. Eventually after some time it hopefully will hit one of them yellow things and get picked up by fancy measuring cells or whatever lives inside them boxes. Then after a few days or weeks the subs will pick them things up and carry them gently on board our nice mother vessel for the data inside them to get downloaded onto some rather proper hard drive. The batteries inside the yellow things will then get charged, and over board they go again. We got thousands of them, apparently. 
Well, it's work... although ever so tedious. And nope, it's not very interesting at all since all we see would be yellow square boxes and the submarines. All the fancy information they dig out of the memory sticks or hole cards or whatever they store the data on will be sent directly to Houston of course. That's where the inside of Pandoras box will be revealed and someone will have a look at whatever information we managed to pick up from the bottom, well over 2000 meters below us. 
Just as well probably, as we simple sailors would not understand one bit of the stuff anyway. Not that I would care much either to be honest. I mean when you got the sort of money to take digital snaps of the sea bed and beyond, why do it in the absolutely most expensive way you could ever think of and in addition end up with a print most people would not understand a thing of anyway? 
Now you can very well sleep on that question, my friends...
See ya!