So I get home from a weary day and my lovely wife-to-be hands me a surprise. She’s signed me up for and paied for me to go off on a nature and landscape photographic course this Weekend. I was originally looking at this course several months ago but decided I did not presently have the budget to do it and here I come home to one of the best surprises in my life.
As usual the course holders Janne Hägerholm (email, homepage) and Laszlo Incze (email, homepage) was doing a splendid job and we had such good fortune with the weather. Yesterday was a bit cloudy and here are the pictures from this day, good light definitely and wonderful in many ways.
Day 1 pictures
Today we had brilliant sunshine instead and that was great too, for a different kind of photography where we could concentrate on the autumn colours and forget a little about the broad sweeping landscapes that are more difficult in these light conditions.
There are many historical grounds not ver far from where I live. One such place is a Peninsula called ”Sko” in Swedish which means ”shoe” in English. The name probably comes from that the peninsula resembles a shoe from the air, or when viewed on a map. Check out the google map of the area and you will see what I mean.
The weather was not very nice for photography, a thick cloud layer making all the photos very dull and bland, to the point of being completely ”flat”. Sometimes I use a flash as a tool to fix this, if you have a dull landscape in the background, place a person in the foreground and use a flash properly you can get a very nice effect. Especially with some gels that gives yellow color. When you compensate the white balance for that yellow colour you get a very nice blue cast on the sky even if it was completely dull when you shot the picture.
But today was different, I decided to work with contrasts and black & white photos instead to the point of almost making them cartoonish. Here is the result of today’s little excursion…
Swedish Air Force DC-3 on display. Originating from flotilla F13M "Malmslätt" in Linköping. Last time it was flown was in 1983 when it was flown from Bromma to Skå-Eneby airfield. The day after there was an unnamed civil pilot flying it without any military or civilian designations to the current location, landing in a nearby field. The authorities are about to move it to a different place."Idealbyn", the "ideal village" was created in the early nineties as a kind of haven for people adhering to the teachings of Transcendental Meditation (TM). The photograph shows the school in the village.Part of the insignia on the DC-3 at Skokloster. This is a close-up of the first picture from a slightly different angle. It says "Swedish Air Force" and "Air Support Command F13M" which relates to the F13 flotilla in Malmslätt, Linköping. The motto was "Volare necesse est". I leave you to look that one up yourself!Typical "uppland" (the county) where this peninsula resides. To the left in the picture is a rune stone from around year 1000. The flat agricultural landscape are broken by roads that are usually built on very very old roads travelled by foot and then by horsemen probably from the stone age and forth. Runestones where almost always placed at the side of the roads where people traveled at the time they were erected and in these parts there are usually newer roads built on top of these ancient paths. Like in this case.
The Solna Badlands is a term created jokingly when we went there to photograph the industrial decay in the area that was partly due to that all companies had to leave the place in order to make room for the new national arena.
Me in front of some chucked away coucht. Camera on tripod with 18-200mm. B&W and square crop in post-processing
Several companies dealing in scrap metal and other such businesses were more or less abandoned over the day and this resulted in an interesting place where we set off to document it before everything was torn down to make room for ”Swedbank Arena” the new national arena here.
So we set off on a cloudy overcast day to the Solna Badlands. Some of us had been there before and for some it was the first time. We found several interesting motifs to photograph and here is a collection of my own personal favourites from the expedition. Fortsätt läsa Solna Badlands→
