A. Aronsson's WeBOLLog

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 :)

As we are now in springtime I took my time to pick out various photos from the last couple of winter months, basically from Christmas and onward. I should make these kind of unthemed photo collections a bit more often, as I do snap a few interesting things that never gets outside of my photo collection due to not being related to anything special.

These pictures are actually two months old, but it has escaped me to post anything about them as I’ve been rather busy with all kinds of real life things. Around then I had just gotten my Olympus E-410 DSLR, it’s an old model, but it was quite cheap even while including two lenses. I got it because I wanted a camera for planned photography with high quality, while I have my ultra compact for casual stuff.

It sure is different to handle a DSLR compared to a compact camera and I really need to spend much more time with it. Below are pictures of a burnt down old building.

I took these just a few days after cutting my fingers, so I wasn’t in the best shape, but I just had to try the camera out! Again, I should really try to learn more about how the camera works and general photography.

These pictures are from a month ago. I really need to post photos quicker, then again, I still have not posted anything from my summer vacation! I better get to that, soon…

When I arrived at work in the morning I noticed how the bushes had many white speckles of wet webs, spider webs. Of course I could not resist taking a few pictures.

A bit interesting to see something like this when I (quite naturally) had not seen the webs on the bushes before! The entire world is probably covered in webs; they are just normally hard to see.