Less photography at the moment

Since my wedding is closing in, the photography is almost completely put aside. This weekend I got even more evidence of the coming of my marriageas I was kidnapped for my bachleor party. Just before breakfast on saturday morning I was dragged out of the house for a sailing weekend with some of my friends. We had strong wind, nice weather and good food and drink. Really a memorable weekend.

Anyway, for the few of you reading my blog, I do have some topics brewing in the back. Recently I swapped a print with Doug Stockdale, which I plan to write some words about. Doug is, by the way, a really nice and polite person to talk with (or write), so don’t be afraid to drop some lines on his blog. That’s what started the print swap for me. And his almost complete series “Bad trip – Sad trip” is well worth a closer lock. You’ll find some of it on his web site

I got some thoughts on printing that hopefully will turn into writing, and I guess there will be more images as soon as life goes back to normal.

In he mean time I would encourage you to visit some of the blogs in my blogroll on the right. At the moment, I enjoy Dispatches, Singular Images, and Doonster most.

Some difficult highlights

This one has been a struggle for a while now. Last night, I finally nailed it. Or at least I think so. The problem with this image is the combination of very high contrasts due to the direct sunlight, and the very subtle tones in feathers. There was no blown highlights at all, far from, but it was a real challenge to get the right definition.

I haven’t managed to get it to print on any matte paper, so Fine Art Pearl seems to be the only option for printing.

man I hate those captchas

One of the downsides of having a blog that people link to is that it attracts spam. To cope with this I first tried to install a comment spam filter, but it didn’t convince me. I still had to check many messages to see if they were real messages marked as spam. In comes the captcha, you know those distorted letters you have to figure out and type in. Thinking how much I hate that stuff, it still amazes me that I installed it on my own blog. It must have been a weak moment. It proved effective on the spam though.

I actually forgot the whole thing until today, when I tried answer a comment. By chance I had forgotten to log on which forced my to type the captcha. It was almost impossible to get it right, not unlike how I experience commenting on other blogs using this kind of moderation. This isn’t something I want to expose my reader to, so now I changed it to a simple math question instead.

So, if you’re smart enough to solve a math question like 3+1 = ?, I trust you to post sensible comment on my blog. I wonder if the spambots can detect, and solve the math solution. Time will show.

The new Canon dSLRs (40D and 1Ds III)

It seems that Canon is about to release two new models, and now that I read the specs, there is about what I expected. Funny though is the new feature concerning the CF card compartment door.

Should the user inadvertently open the compact flash card door while the camera is writing to the card, a warning will pop up on the LCD screen and an open door “alarm” will sound, but the image(s) will continue writing to the memory card without interruption.

When I was in the market for dSLR, almost every review I read started off by complaining about how Canon handled the situation where the CF slot door was opened during write. It seems like Canon, after many years of ignorance, finally gave in and fixed the problem. It won’t go unnoticed in the reviews.

If I was about to buy my first dSLR right now, I guess I would wait for the 40D, but as it is, my 5D is still holding up very well. I guess the 5D is the next in the lineup to be upgraded. Probably a 16MP full frame camera within the next year.

Too much to do right now

As I expected, no one did my work for me while I was on vacation, so it’s quite busy at the moment. In addition to that, I’m getting married in exactly one month. The wedding planning is actually going very well, but it really takes my focus. The inspiration to make photographs are hitting bottom right now. Or maybe not the inspiration as I am a bit frustrated about it, but the energy to execute is not there. Well, It’ll probably come back in while.

The ambigrams is a nice diversion, and even if Doug commented that they are a bit off topic, they’re still I kind of visual art. I enjoy it very much, like I also enjoy drawing.

I guess there will be fewer blog posts the next month or two as well due to the wedding. After the wedding we’re going to Mauritius 🙂

Another ambigram

I have worked on my fiancé’s name for a while, and it proved to be much more difficult, but finally I found a solution that looked quite cool. Her name is Mia-Maria.

Completely different style this time.

Ambigrams

Last year we went for a weekend trip to London, and as you might expect, the return plane was delayed. To pass some time I went to the store to look for a book, and came out with Angels and Demons by Dan Brown. The book sucked, and I wouldn’t reccomend it to anyone, but there was one interesting topic there; ambigrams.

An ambigram is a word written in a way that it may be read two or more directions. It may take different meanings, or the same when you turn it around. The ambigrams presented in the book were symetrical, so when you turned it upside down, the same word appeared. In the book, this was presented as a very difficult art, close to magic, but a couple of days ago I stumbled accross some web pages about the subject. It appears that quit many people either entertain themselves, or make a living out of creating ambigrams.

Fueled by the inspiration from these web pages, I decided to create an ambigram of my own first name, Kjell. It wasn’t too difficult. The result can be viewed below, and being my first attempt at this artform, I’m very pleased with the result.