A. Aronsson's WeBOLLog

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!

Back in March, the 25th, I implemented a contact form on this blog, namely Contact Form 7. A splendid plugin I have to say. I did not expect it to get used much, but I had always missed that specific feature myself, as it is what I look for at a site when I want to contact the author.

About ten days later, 5th of April, I got a message through the form from Paul Baars of Paul Baars Design in the Netherlands. It was a request for using my art in a calendar project! The calendar would contain a separate piece of art for each day of the year (2010), with the art being optical illusions. Among the artists whose work was already included were M.C.Escher, Ars et Mathesis, Oscar Reutersvärd, Dmitry  Rakov, Sandro del-Prete, David Macdonalds, Istvan Orosz, Scott Kim, Jos de Mey, Mathieu Hamaekers, Norman Parker, Igor Achkasov, Zenon Kulpa, Peter Raedschelders, Hop David, Jeroen Henneman, Vlad Alexeev, Bruno Ernst, Ken Knowlton and Vicente Meavilla Segui, which is quite a respectable list… I was intrigued.

After a bit more communication I happily accepted the request, prepared the high resolution images needed and credit information to go with them, and that was it!

As compensation I would receive a couple of calendars for free; which suited me perfect as just the opportunity to get published in any way at all is reward enough :)

This Wednesday I picked up a package at the post office, and was happily surprised to find four calendars in it! The print quality sure is spectacular, and I eventually found my own pieces in there. They are at May 1st, Juli 26th, August 17th, September 22nd and November 20th, 2010.

I will have to mark down those dates to check if the link included in the calendar affects blog traffic, it will be interesting!

Very awesome :) Thank you Paul, for including me in this project!

If you want an ILLUSIES & OPTISCHE FENOMENEN SCHEURKALENDER 2010 of your own, you can access the order form at Paul Baars Design directly, if you live in the Netherlands or Belgium that is; here is a PDF (in Dutch) with detailed information. Or, you could look for a Dutch book store, not sure if they ship world wide though.

While looking for a good mike to record my voice with for videos (still getting there) I bumped into a Youtube clip where a similar mike was mounted on a swimg-arm desktop light. Of course I had to do the same thing when I got mine, the Samson C01U. A few weeks back I finally visited IKEA and picked up the very cheap TERTIAL lamp. To get it to do what I wanted I did the following:

1. I unscrewed and removed the light socket and casing.
2. I cut the cable at the top and pulled it out of the arm.
3. I filed down the plastic retainer for the lamp head so the mike holder could fit instead.
4. I mounted the mike holder and cable to the arm.

Done!

Actually there was a bit more work to it than what I listed, but that was mostly because I did not know how go at it at first. In the beginning I tried to remove the light by dismantling it with the cables intact but as I could not figure out how they were attached to the light socket, without breaking it apart, I ended up cutting them anyway. Then I tried to file down the plastic retainer bit, but it took forever, and finally I resorted to a power drill which worked almost too well. The end result did not look very nice, but when mounted it is hardly visible. Below are pictures from the short process and the final result!

This is a weird tradition of the local Lions Club to generate charity funds. I have never watched it before, only heard of it, but I took my time to accompany a few friends there to see the spectacle and of course snap a few pictures.

As the title says, it is a race between rubber ducks, 2000 rubber ducks to be precise. Duck certificates which grants you the prize if your numbered duck finishes amongst the seven first were 50 SEK each. I bought one but did not win, no surprise there! Prizes were as follows:

• 1st prize: Travel checks for 20k SEK
• 2nd prize: Travel checks for 10k SEK
• 3rd – 7th prize: Travel or food checks for 2k SEK

Below is a selection of photos from the event:

And a video! At the event there was a human gyro which I just had to try. I have dreamed about riding one since reading about the hardware in some magazine, ages ago. I just had not gotten around to it, or bumped into one for that matter, but there it was! And I sure enjoyed it :)

A little more than a year go I decided to enhance the experience of music video games, they mostly being DDR and Guitar Hero, which I am really fond of. It all started when I randomly bought colored LED strips at IKEA, just to try them out, and I installed them under my TV bench for epic underground pimpage. Below is a short list of what I purchased for this project, in chronological order. The links are mostly to Svebry, an enthusiast  store in a neighbor town with really good prices!

• Colored LED strips
• Half mirror ball with included motor mount
• Two spotlights for the mirror ball and the actual bulbs
• Two three color light organs (responds to sound)
• Stroboscope with color filters
• Smoke machine, smoke liquid and maintenance fluid
• Blacklight tube including fixture

Not everything was in stock, so it took a while to get everything in ready. In addition to the actual hardware I bought extra remote power switches to accommodate for all the new lights, power cables and cable holders, hooks and chains for the light organs. Oh, and a can of black spray paint for the remote.

All of the lights except the stroboscope are on separate remote power switches. The stroboscope is used alone for the best effect, so when I want to use it I just switch off everything on the remote, which only has four channels, and manually turn on the strobe. I have one original white remote for my normal lights and one painted black for the disco effects.

The smoke machine is not permanently fixed somewhere, but something I bring out when the situation calls for it. In addition to increasing the fun you can have with a laser pointer smoke also helps you test out your optical fire alarm!

My original plan was to quickly write a blog post about it all, perhaps with a video, but as you can tell that never happened, until now that is. The pictures included in this post are what got me working on this post and are from last Friday when I happened to get a bunch of people invading my home for some Guitar Hero World Tour action. I had setup my E-410 with an RF shutter so I could take random shots. It really looks like I am living in a box, no?

In these pictures all of the gear is active except the strobe, naturally. You can see the light organs with their red, green and yellow bulbs in the corners, the blacklight tube top center behind my normal ceiling lamp, the mirror ball is pretty obvious, the LED strips beneath the TV bench and of course some smoke in the air :)