A. Aronsson’s WeBOLLog

This summer I was invited to join my parents and my brother to camp a week in their mobile home on Öland, an island outside the main land of Sweden. Hesitantly I accepted the offer, but I regret nothing as it was very nice to get away for a while!

While I was there I couldn’t help but spamming photographs with my camera, as well as videos, which I guess is my normal behavior. I tried out my underwater camera housing in the ocean, but the sub surface visibility was incredibly bad, and it was my first prolonged experience of swimming around with flippers and a diving mask, both very cheaply bought.

Instead of writing a ton of text to insert the images into I’ve added titles to the images themselves. My choice of picture viewer for WordPress is Shutter Reloaded, sadly it does not yet support using the title of the IMG tag as a caption, it takes the title from the A tag, but the default behavior of WordPress is to post the title in the IMG tag… I’ve requested it twice, but nothing yet. I relly like Shutter Reloaded except for this small issue.

Anyway, here comes the pictures! In chronologial order, even.

I was going to post just a few pictures, but apparently it turned into quite a lot… oh well. Beneath is the camera running while I soak it in fresh water to dissolve the sea salt which would otherwise store up in the underwater house making the buttons wonky.

Just a little late, but I still have more summer pictures! Not sure when the next batch will be posted, but that will most likely be the last for this years summer :)

A week ago I took a walk with a friend to scout out a track for running. While strolling along I snapped a few pictures of the wonderful vegetation. Below is a very small collection of five pictures, of which three are panoramas!

The last panorama was made up of more than 35 snaps! Original resolution is 8475×4817 pixels :) Not super-huge, but large enough to take up a lot of memory!

Last Friday I was out on a boat trip. It has been a tradition here at work to have a trip for the employees every year, before summer vacation, and this year we went out on the Göta Canal, again. Apparently it has happened a few times before, but each time different parts of it.

I have finally had time collect some of the images I took. Again, I usually post pictures without much people in them, as I wouldn’t want people to post pictures of me online without asking either.

We traveled down 16 flood gates, descending about 40 meters I believe.

There are lots of trees next to the canal, and some houses! You can also travel by bike along it.

We ended up in Sjötorp, where I found this wall full of bird houses, and later took a picture of the boat we had traveled with as it moved out. We were taking buses back.

While waiting for the buses to leave, I went out on a pier and found these old poles behind some rocks. I find it more interesting to photograph old worn things, than new and shiny things.

One of the rings you can attach your boat to when between flood gates.

I managed to make at least one sky panorama.

Next are pictures from when we had reach our final destination. First the boat, and then the small harbor, and lastly a building I happened to l see while walking to the buses.

Currently the plugin I use to display the pictures does not make a caption from the title of the link, which the Blog software adds, but the title of the image. I’ll try and mess with it to fix that myself if it isn’t included in the next version or so as I like to have descriptions in the title property.

That’s it for now!

Update: Apparently dragging images after adding them totally botches up the links, fixed that now! I wonder if any olds posts are broken as well…

The past weekend was three days long because of a national holiday, so I was out of town from Friday morning until Sunday evening. Good times!

I took a bunch of various pictures even though the weather was mostly gray with spots of rain, but some might be worth posting!

On the Friday I went to a conference called Nyhemsveckan, camping with my parents and my brother in a caravan. The pictures below are from the pine forest we were stationed in.

They’ve had a large tent for the meetings and concerts for ages, but this was supposedly the last time. After this they will build a large conference building instead. For this reason I made sure to take some pictures of the tent, and following is a panorama from one of the ends of the tent, which is where I sat.

The next day, Saturday, we went to a candy factory, which is traditional for us to visit. It was quite crowded, so the queue was stretching to the far end of the outlet area. While standing there I noticed what they had painted on a couple of doors (might have been there since always!), and it was a pair of illusionary corridors! I’ve been planning to make something like this on my apartment door for a while, though… I think it’ll have to be on the inside, as the landlord might not like if I modify the outside of the apartment.

After this me and my brother spent the evening and following day with a few friends living in a nearby city. While there we played some multiplayer Tetris on their projector. When you finish rows you send them to other players so their bottom row gets duplicated, or remove rows, etc, depending on what is shown below your playing area when you do so.

In the two pictures below you can see Player 2, which happens to be me, having a screen full of rows added by other players (or myself, you can do that too), but both times I happened to get a 1×4 bar to drop down the single collumn hole to the bottom!

Next is a picture I took while walking back after eating out, holding the camera on my outstretched arm taking random photos. It is my face that’s closest to the camera. When browsing for pictures to post I just couldn’t drop this one as I really like how the light just barely manages to hit the roofs of the buildings, which I still look like toy houses! :P

In general, a terrific weekend :) As a bonus, I’m adding a boxy sky panorama taken today while I was biking home for lunch!

These images are from last Thursday, loads of high altitude clouds, displaying a cloud landscape with an incredible depth. I managed to botch up the exposure between shots, so the images didn’t end up panorama friendly.

Next up are a few photos and panoramas from the weekend, where I spent time at a lake for a barbecue, and then at a villa to participate in a birthday celebration. I ended up staring at the sky at these occasions as well.

There two first panoramas are of the lake, in the evening. First a horizontal panorama, and then a vertical.

When walking back to the parking lot to ride home I couldn’t resist snapping a picture of the sun beams striking across the sky.

This is at the villa, first a panorama from the ground, and then a panorama where I rotated the camera 90° from a window on the second floor.

Lastly a picture of the three trees with the sunset behind them. Lots of sun/cloud/sky interaction recently, but it’s hard to resist when I think the colors are so fantastic, and the volumetric properties of the clouds in addition to their scale. A nice sky makes me take deep breaths and enjoy my existence.

Again, all these pictures and panoramas were taken with a pocket compact camera, an Isux 75. I should really get a DSLR, but then again, a DSLR would be hard to fit in my pocket and carry around all day long.

Why settle for a photo when it’s fairly easy and comfortable to stitch together panoramas nowadays! This is the sky I saw when walking home from a friend last night. It was pink at first, but as the sun set, the light rose up to color clouds further up in the sky burning orange. It harmonizes very well with the grayish blue metal sky.

The first picture is a vertical panorama, which rises up in the sky. The second is a more traditional horizontal panorama, showing the streak of orange. I display them as thumbs here because of their varying proportions, click to see the full versions!

This last weekend I was out hiking with the youth from the church. We went deep into the Swedish woods to walk a great (for me!) distance up and down the hilly forest landscape, and to complete tasks and challenges set for us. Below is a select few of the pictures I took, while denting my camera!

It was an exhausting experience as I packed a bit much unnecessary things in my backpack to compensate for me being older than the teenagers and because I was developing a cold, which really set in the second day when my nose started running. But it was a nice time, and I had fun :) Oh, and btw, nature is awesome, even if it’s comfortable in front of the monitor!

Yesterday I noticed something I hadn’t seen there before. In the storage space where various gardening and maintenance tools are located, where I also keep my bike safe from the decaying effects of wind and rain, there was the beginning of a wasp nest. First I thought it was old , broken and dead, but then to my horror I saw living moving icky larva inside!

Today I went there again to take some pictures and video, as I haven’t bumped into an infant nest before. There are ventilation holes above the door which the insects use to access the room. Guessing I’ll need to do something about this before they colonize the entire room. Below are pictures, and a short looping animation.

This is two months old, but as I’ve started to post photos I could just as well post a few more things. I’ve had these different barriers of what to post. First I was just going for the illusions, as that was one of the main things I wanted a blog for, but I had planned to post whatever I do, which I haven’t really been successful with. I will try to post more casual photos, doodles and other things! :)

Anyway, this panorama is from a crossing where I stood waiting to get picked up. I just took the shots by free hand (though manual settings), panning across the sky with the setting sun. It looked gorgeous IRL, and a bit of it is captured in the digital format! Original image size is 7570×2100 pixels generated by four shots, resized here to be web friendly, as with all my other pictures. I have added a higher-res clicky-linky below the image though. I have swapped out the Lightbox plugin for Shutter Reloaded, a much quicker and slicker solution. Currently it doesn’t display captions from the image title, but the link title, which is something WP 2.5.* doesn’t add, but WP 2.3.* did.

A while ago the weather was a bit funky. Small areas of raining clouds moved over the town with intensive beams of sunlight in between, and while I was visiting my parents I took a few pictures of the flowers on the lawn. Even if they’re snapped with a very cheap Canon Ixus 75 compact camera I’m quite happy with how well the images ended up, to me anyway, as a casual hobby photographer.