A. Aronsson's WeBOLLog

In an attempt to win a Lumix GF1, which I had actually already bought, I spent quite some time taking night photographs for the contest over at Mintur.se with that very camera. I did not end up winning but I got a nice collection of random pictures collected over numerous late nights! The image titles explain what you are seeing :)

The equipment I used were different stroboscopes, flashlights, extension cords, LEDs soldered to batteries and various other things. The shots in the factory were done with my older brother, and as to not waste his time I was jumping around like crazy in many shots, retaking them repeatedly. Afterward I was drenched in sweat!

I have been really busy for quite some time now, which sure has affected my blogging performance. Personal projects has been put on hold and media gathers up on my machine, being photos and video recordings. Previously I have mentioned that I will try to post interesting pictures on a more regular basis, but evidently that plan failed. It was actually when I was sorting out pictures for this post that I managed to collect photos for a couple of events which had so many pictures themselves that I deemed them worthy of their own post, which delayed this publication instead.

The below collection consists of random pictures taken during the last seven months, from May this year until last week. Image titles will give you a good hint of what is going on in each picture. They are listed in a chronological order displaying the oldest first, naturally.

On a side note; it feels a bit funny that the previous post was a ton of text, while this post is… well, a ton of pictures. Cross-post content type balancing!

This is my graduation picture from 2002.

I made this after graduating from my gymnasium studies (senior high school). In Sweden it is a tradition to wear a white hat when ending your studies and escape into the free(?) world of grownups. Taking the photos involved carrying a whole car-full of furniture into a photo studio and close co-operation with the photographer.

Something I have been asked quite a few times is how we made the water pouring. It is really quite simple, I poured the water into a bucket and then held the glass where the photographer said I would. He compared the picture he just took with what he saw in the camera. In the end it looks like I held my glass under the stream of water.

This summer I was asked if I could help out with a graduation photo for a friend, and I was happy to oblige. The idea was to make something along the lines of my own graduation picture, seen above, with clones of oneself.

We spent some time sketching out a few concepts and quickly decided what to do. As she loves her car, and the fact she graduated in health care, a montage of her running over herself while trying to save herself with her own car seemed like a good idea.

To stop the car from leaning this way and the other, due to its’ suspension, we elevated it with three carjacks. She then posed for all the different characters while I snapped the pictures via a radio remote. People were constantly biking or walking past us, between the camera and the car, but we managed to take the last shot just before the clouds broke up and we had full sunshine. Phew!

The work in Photoshop went very smoothly. After correcting the gamma and position of all photos I simply cut her out from the different layers. There are hardly any overlays where she covers herself in another picture so it was a straight forward process. The slightly more challenging part was the heart massage, and the very funny part was to add the blood splatter… which surprisingly was accepted for the final version which was used for printing!

In the end all parties were happy with the result, I think :) hopefully this little project made the experience of graduating even more fun, I enjoyed it at least!

A few weeks ago my parents asked me if I wanted to head for the Hornborgar lake to watch the cranes as they had arrived with the spring, or the other way around. Apparently it was a crane record, with 18500 of them camping it out next to the lake. They munched away on grain that had been spread out the evening before, while the cranes slept in the shallow water a bit out into the lake to avoid predators. The feeding is financed by tax money, all 150 tons of grain per year, and is a way to keep the cranes in one place instead of having them ravaging the fields of farmers. I ended up posting a whole bunch of pictures, but then I also managed to snap about 350 of them while there.

In August 2004 I was about to fly to London with my cousin to try and get a bit of game time with Halo 2 before it was released. I sent pictures and descriptions to the people I was going to visit while there, so we could actually recognize each other. I had only chatted and socialized with them on a forum previously. One spontaneous reaction to my picture was…

<Stuntmutt> Boll – your head looks the same either way up!

I had sent the picture to my cousin as well, we had not met in eight years at that point so I wanted him to recognize me, we had only been chatting for a few years after finding each other on ICQ. I also sent him this quote as I thought it was quite funny. He promptly photohacked my picture so my head was indeed upside down! He had moved the mouth and nose so they were in my forehead and painted over my original mouth and nose.

Recently I remembered this and decided I would try to recreate it myself, just without moving the nose and mouth and with much higher quality pictures, a small photographic project. I present the result below!

The creation process was quite straight forward. I posed and took a number of pictures with with different hand postures, then I moved the main light source from the ceiling to the floor and angled my head in the opposite direction (both vertically and laterally) compared to the camera. Not meaning that I looked backwards, just as much down as I looked up, and right as I looked left.

In Photoshop I (relatively) simply rotated my second image 180°, extracted my head, put the hand on top, fixed the transition between my neck and head, adjusted the levels and voilá! Nightmares included!

A side note is that I did the actual photo shoot at 1:30AM the night to Sunday. This because I usually shave before going to church service Sunday mornings, and I needed the facial hair for the transition, but as I had a bunch of people at my place until midnight so I could not start earlier! It took me a while to set things up too, the camera, remote shutter, external viewfinder (14″ TV), lighting and positioning. I also took a shower before posing, so summed up it got kind of late! Even so I ended up quite satisfied with the result :)