It is the ten years anniversary of this ground breaking film now. The release dates spans between March to June for various countries but for some reason I did not think it was actually ten years ago…
Kategoriarkiv: English
Hudson river landing
This is an animation together with the actual radio communication that took place in the famous hudson river landing where a commercial air liner set down after having a double engine failure due to bird strikes just after taking off.
It was the US Airwais flight 1549 leaving LaGuardia airport with 155 people on board. This is as close to a miracle that you may get really. I love how calm the pilots sounds during all this.
Swedish Intellectual Property law cuts Internet Traffic in Half
The recent enactment of the intellectual property law sometimes referred to as the ”IPRED-law” based on a European Union directive had an immediate effect on the Internet traffic. Hours after the law was put into effect the traffic load on the Swedish core network netnod was cut around 30%. A couple of days later it is down to 50% of what it was before the IPRED was put into effect.
The new law makes it possible for intellectual property owners to directly go to court to get who owns a certain IP at a certain time. This means that they may then prepare a law suit against the person that had the IP at the time of the copyright infringement and this has already been put into effect.
Only hours after the law was active several authors handed over a demand to the court in Solna to get who was using certain IP’s to download audio books from a server. This server has been pointed out as a main source for distributing copyrighted audio book material.
The anti-piracy lobby is clapping their hands. Personally I think that their victory will be a short one, traffic is already moving on to more secure systems such as OneSwarm or using anonymizers.
The Pirate Bay guys, recently also in court proceedings, have already set up a service where someone for about €5 can use their non-logging anonymizer in order to access material on the Internet in a fashion that makes it much more difficult for people to track.
They call the service the IPREDator. I’m pretty happy the Internet is fast again with the currently low traffic in and out of Sweden surfing is once again a rather pleasureable experience of course…
In some ways I don’t really see the great movement against it, I mean there is no human right to have access to pirated material on the Internet. I am personally much more worried about the current ongoing work to extend the copyright time to 95 years after the artists death which would once again – just like at the last extension when it was extended to 75 years – put severa open works once again under the yoke of being copyright.
Movements such as Project Gutenberg and Project Runeberg suffers because some of their works already published and allowed to be published ar suddenly not longer available because the extension of the copyright time works retroactively.
That’s madness. But we don’t see a hughe political movement against this madness…
Under the Bridge
This is my first under the bride picture. It is one of the bridges across Kungsgatan a very well known street here in Stockholm.
I liked the pattern here it looks a bit greek or perhaps even byzantine in origin but I don’t know who painted it or what the story behind this is really.
It does show however that it pays keeping a keen eye out for interesting angles when doing street photography. I would not have found this interesting subject otherwise, that is for sure.
Kungsgatan means The King’s Street and we also have of course Drottninggatan which means The Queen’s Street here in Stockholm. Kungsgatan and Drottninggatan cross each other very close to Hötorget, a city square where people sell things in an old fashion way still in the middle of the city. You can pick up pretty much anything from this street market, and there is a certairn word for the paintings generally sold here they are sometimes referred to as ”hötorgskonst” hötorget artworks and that generally means they are paintings done by not so good painters often copying classicl paintings or the every so popular crying children that was sold in the seventies and eighties.
The above bridges are two bridges that runs between slussen and the city center. These bridges are connecting the south end of Stockholm with the old town and with Riddarholmen. The first image is beneath the bridge built to carry the rails for the Stockholm Metro. Many people admire the view when they take the metro of the green or red line between Gamla Stan and Slussen, two very busy metro stations. There are ideas of making this a tunnel instead going beneath the water and getting rid of this bridge which has always been a bit troublesome. For one thing it is very tight and you can not work on it while trains are running.
The second bridge also carries rail but also road traffic into the city. On this bridge you see the commuter trains Pendeltåg and the trains going to more far away destinations south of Stockholm. This bridge has been called the wasp waist of the train traffic in Stockholm. Right now there is a great project to tunnel the railroad and increase the capacity further with a minimum of 2 new rails, this project is called Citybanan.
This bridge is also at Slussen and part of the mess of roads going around. The address is Sjöbergsplan 11 and it is not a very nice place, I’d avoid this place after hours in the dark since it is probable the place where you might meet some not so nice people.
Sometimes you will find a bit of really nice graphitti under the bridge. This is a road bridge out where I live in Kallhäll where someone painted a vegan message. ”Don’t eat my friend.” Incredibly enough this painting have been left alone for years on the bridge foundation although other parts of it seems to be repainted regularly by the local artists.
Learning from the masters
A little while ago I found this excellent blog on Nikonians by Martin Turner. He writes about how the classic potratit painters worked and how we can improved our portrait photography by learning from these masters. He has written several very interesting blog posts on this subjects and I felt like commenting on them myself.
In his first post also titled ”Learning about portraits from the masters” he discusses the context of the portrait more than the actual technique to pain or photograph. A portrait is supposed to say something about the person being portrayed and therefore it is important to not lose context and pay some attention to the surroundings of the person, the positioning of the subject, any other props or objects in the picture should have meaning and add to the portrait and not detract from the person being potrayed. I think this is an important lesson and something that is easily forgotten.
In his second post he speaks about differential focus something that has been used by painters for a long time and photographers using a telephoto lens, wide open aperture and focusing as close as possible to re-create. Of course post processing can also be used to achive this and there are more than one way of doing nice differential focussing on a subject.
For a portrait we want the eyes to be sharp, then the mouth and the hair are also important — putting too much fuzziness on the hair makes things look strange and the eyes and mouth are what we as humans focus mostly on when we are viewing a portrait of someone else. An excellent example about this is the painting of a Genoese nobleman painted by Bernardo Strozzi in oil on canvas.
Another thing that he notices are also that backgrounds in paintins are almost always very dark. Almost to the point of being black but never completely black there is always some texture to them but in a very subtle way and the idea of isolating the person from the background is very evident.
Today in photography we often use light backgrounds, even white overexposed so called high key shots which usually means you put 4 times as much light on the background as you do on the subject. Makes it easy to cut out in photoshop and re-arrange in a different background but I get a feeling there is a reason that portrait painters never used such backgrounds.
He also talkes a lot about skin details and softening of the skin in portrait. This was done by painters also using selective focussing techniques when painting but this is also likely down to that our minds generally don’t remember much skin details, we focus on the areas around the eyes and mouth and we tent not to remember too much on other details.
The rest of the posts are also interesting but his number 2 post was the best one so far in my opinion.
You can find Martin Turners Nikonian blog here if you want to read more, and I hope you will because it is very interesting to read his articles!
An amazing animation
A fantastic animation that really is great, especially if you love sci-fi movies and remember your Alien films… Animation by Henrik Bjerregaard Clause.
En fantastisk animation, särskilt om du gillar sci-fi film och minns dina Alien-filmer… Animationen gjort av Henrik Bjerregaard Clause.
Fotopromenad den 10 maj | Photo Walk, May 10
Plats: T-bana Slussen uppgång Södermalmstorg, vid strömmingsbilen kl 13.00 den 10 maj 2009.
Vi går runt södermälarstrand med avstickare efter eget behov och så slutar vi på lämplig krog med en bit mat och kanske en pilsner ca 17:00.
När mer information blir tillgänglig kommer jag uppdatera det här.
Välkomna!
Place: Metro station Slussen (2 stops south of T-Centralen on the red or green route) exit towards ”Södermalmstorg” it is the middle exit from the platform. Outside there is a cart that sells fried herring which is well known and that’s where we will meet. Time and date is 1pm on May 10, 2009.
We will be walking around the south shoreline of lake Mälaren with beautiful views over the Stockholm city and waters. We expect to end around 5pm for a meal and something to drink at some good restaurant in the cheaper range.
When more information becomes available I will be updating this post.
Welcome!
Danny Cowan Band
It was probably in 2002 or so when I first heard their music. I was listening to an internet radio station from Texas – the radio station has since long gone defunct, it was an underground radio station anyway with bad sound but good music.
All of a sudden they start playing a tune that really catches my attention and I really love the beat and the style not to mention the song, I frantically start trying to find out what the band is called and so I end up mailing the guy running the ShoutCast radio station and he actually came back to me and said ”They are called ’Danny Cowan Band’ and they are from just ’round the corner here.” The song that caught my attention was The Whip. Now go listen to it.
you know the whip’s coming down
coming down on you
we’re down in Texas land
you know heat’s on the rise
100 days of summer
So I set out to find their music on the net to hear more if possible and to buy their record. Turns out they got a small home page where you can listen to their tunes as MP3’s.
And then you can buy their record very cheaply paying through PayPal. Go buy it now. If you feel like some real texas blues you’ve come to the right place!
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Suunto Core Outdoor Watch
Some of you already know my fascination for wrist watches and therefore I thought I should share with you my latest aquisition, the Suunto Core outdoor wristwatch. Suunto is Finnish and means direction and this is a good name for these watches. There are many different models to chose from and I decided to get the Suunto Core model which seems to get you lots of functions for small money and the most all-round watch there was. Or, sorry, wristtop computer as these watches are sometimes referred to.
I am a guy who like walking in the woods, hiking, trekking and just generally being outdoor when possible especially in the summer time. I try to make at least a few day trips and if possible an overnight in a tent as well every summer as a minimum, it is something special when you are cooking in the wilderness, sleeping in a tent and generally having to struggle a little more than you normally do every day to and from work. If nothing else you appreciate a nice bed when you come home again :)
On top of that I am an unchangeable gadget-guy, and I really enjoy knowing the altitude I am on right now, the bearing I am walking in, my position, the time, when the sun rises and sets on the latitude that I am right now and many other things. So my latest addition to things I won’t leave home without now is a Suunto Core wristwatch.
This little gem can do a lot of things and it is a watch specially designed for outdoorsmanship more than anything else. This is not the first ”trekker’s watch” I have owned, I also have an ”Origo” watch but after a particularly rough outing in the United Arab Emirates a couple of years ago the altimeter broke on that one. So I have decided to get myself a new watch and now I recently bought it.
The Suunto Core watch keeps two times, good for traveling and it has what you expect from a modern digital watch, countdown (99 min max) and works wel as a stopwatch (24 h max). On top of that you can program it with the closest city and it will show the time the sun rises and sets for the date, something that changes drastically right now, the day becomes longer with about 6 minutes every day now and the nights shorter here in Stockholm.
The watch also contains three interesting functions for the hiker not normally found on wrist watches and they are altimeter that shows how high over the sea you are at the moment, barometer showing the air pressure (sea level equivalent) and an electronic compass.
The altimeter and barometer are actually two faces of the same coin here. You can select the profile yourself, if you want the watch to be in altimeter mode when you climb, then you can set it to barometric mode when you stop for the night and the watch will tell you the air pressure and assume that you are staying on the same level. You can not get both at the same time though because both the barometer and the altimeter works from the same air pressure sensor. If you climb a mountain the air pressure lowers with every meter you climb, the watch senses this change in air pressure and can therefore know how many meters you have scaled. In barometric mode you fix the altitude and the watch instead registers the changes in air pressure that preceeds an oncoming storm or weather front.
The watch can automatically shift between altimeter and barometer mode, it understands when you start climbing because the air pressure shifts too fast and then it switches to altimeter. If you stay it will after 12 minutes of no change in the altitude (or very small changes) shift back to barometric mode. Brilliant. Over a full days walking around I generally don’t have to recalibrate it for more than 20-40 meters error by the end of the day.
In barometric mode it can also tell you if there is a sudden drop in air pressure. This might signify an oncoming sqall or storm and you can set an audible and visible alarm on the watch to go off if this happens. There is also a 24 hour trend graph that will show you the changes in barometric pressure over the last day and night. There is also an arrow indicator showing you if the air pressure is stable, tends to rise, tends to drop and the attitude for the last 3 and 6 hours. Great for checking if the current weather is stable. I have observed the barometric pressure alarm go off twice. In both accounts it started snowing heavily hours later so I believe it is working pretty well!
The last function of the pressure gauge is the ”snorkeling feature” where it can tell you when you snorcle in the hot waters of the Maldives or some other nice place how deep you have been as maximum and how deep you are now. Not quite a diving instrument (watch should not be submerged more than 10 meters really) but it is still a pretty fun feature.
A logging function can be used to keep track of your climbing and descending over time if you want. It will log the altitude and the current time as often as you want and you may also save the log for a later review. You can also set a reference altitude and the watch will show you how much above or below your reference you currenly are.
You can also have it show accumulated inclines declines, something that I thought was pretty neat in a ski slope…
There is also a temperature measurement but since the watch is warmed by your arm it generally does not show air temperature. If you take your watch of and leave it for 30 minutes or so it should give you a pretty good temperature reading though. The temperature is also necessary for the accuracy of the air pressure measurement.
The compass is great, works well but uses battery more than other thngs and because of this the watch will turn it off after one minute of operation; you will then have to press a button to turn it on again for another minute. If you have the backlight lit during compas operation it will flash as it goes dark for each measurement that is done – about 2 per second. The compass can be set to try to stay in a certain direction, it will show with arrows how much in error your current direction is and point you in the right direction and the precision is actually pretty good in the woods. Calibration is simple, turn it on, slowly spin a full circle clockwise and it will recalibrate itself. In urban environment there are sometimes problems where there are heavy electrical machinery and other ferro-magnetic materials at work that will confuse it – try looking at it while a metro train in the underground drives past… but most of the time it can be used there as well.
All in all I really love this watch. I recommend it for everyone who loves to be outdoors, hiking, fishing, hunting, climbing, skiing… this is for you!
I rate it 5/5.
Odenplan Metro Station
Odenplan metro station in the heart of the green line that is the oldest metro line in Stockholm is one of the most busy stations. During the peak-hours the traffic runs every three minutes or even faster some times, the trains are virtually tail to nose as they pass by.
The above photo was inspired by Stina’s similar photograph of the same station.
I kind of like these older stations in the metro they are very fifties in a way and they have a very special feeling to them.
Check out Hötorget, S:t Eriksplan and Odenplan.