Þorskafjarðarheiði

Þorskafjarðarheiði is a place where I spent a couple of hours this summer and took a few pictures. I was there with friends for a reason I can´t really tell (it was in no way illegal or negative). It is a heath by a mountain gravel road that lies between fjords in the Western Fjords region of Iceland. Better roads have been made in other places, resulting in very little traffic on this road. The only man made structures visible are the road itself, a rescue hut for those stranded in bad weather and a distant telegraphic mast. The landscape is best described by the pictures, it is rocky with a few small lakes. Vegetation is sparse and of a hardy kind, moss and small flowering plants.

Nobody comes here, there is nothing special to see, it is just an obstacle to be traversed. The only sounds are the constant wind in your ears and the incessant beeping of the plovers following you around, dutifully warning their kind of the intrusion. From the window of the car this looks like a desert but as soon you step out of the car you see that the place is filled with life of a special kind, even the stones are covered with lichen, drawing feeble nourishment from the sun.

This kind of landscape gets no love, neither from the locals who see no use in this land and no beauty as they drive past, nor from the ever increasing number of tourists who like things more spectacular. It is not protected in any way and it probably doesn´t need to be, there is no reason to build anything here, there are no rivers to dam or anything to mine. Long after the rest of the land will be parceled off and used for industry or agriculture or in some cases protected as national parks where tourists are led through on well marked paths, this will remain.

Old man standing

Some subjects seem to crop up again and again in my photos without me being conscious of seeking these out. I was looking through my Barcelona pictures and one subject that got repeated was pictures of old men standing alone. I also have pictures of old men walking but these are fewer. What is about this that draws me? There is something sad in these pictures, why are they alone and why are they standing like that? Perhaps they are waiting for their wives or children or friends but sometimes it seems they are just standing there without purpose. These pictures are often not very exciting and they elicit little response when I show them. The compositions are static and centralized. Is this the way I see myself in thirty years, standing alone in a city, waiting for something to happen? I don´t know but there you are.

Adventures in Holga

I got myself a Holga the other day. It was one of those why not purchases. I´ve been meaning to get into medium format one of these day and since the Holga costs next to nothing it seemed a good way to start. It´s a also a nice way to get away from the complications of photography. There´s little you can do to affect the outcome, you just load up the film, choose either the sun or the cloud in the way of exposure and approximate the focus by turning the lens toward one guy, three guys, seven guys or a mountain. Not that there is much in the way of focus anyway. So in that way it´s like a point and shoot with the exception that the point and shoot has a computer brain and does a lot of thinking for you, while the Holga has no brain at all. So all you can do is remember to take off the lens cap, point in the approximate direction of the subject, press the shutter and hope for the best. The Holga gives a very specific look, vaguely sharp in the center with blur and vignetting at the edges. It´s a bit of a novelty thing of course and I wouldn´t use it for everything but it´s a fun little contraption. Some examples:

The line road

Yesterday I went on an all too rare nature expedition. It was a perfect late fall/early winter day, clear and bright. A bit too perfect for photographic purposes, not a cloud to be seen and a pretty flat light which accentuates the rather monotonous colors of this time of year. I´m in a totally different mode on these trips than when I´m doing street work. I bring a lot of gear and shoot mostly digital with all the different lenses at my disposal. I tweak the pictures quite a bit in Lightroom but I don´t do any major Photoshop surgery. I´m fortunate in having a friend who shares my photographic interests and has a heavy duty 4WD as well. We drove on a rough track that follows some major electric lines. All in all a perfect day and here are some of the results.

Barcelona Garbage

Barcelona is a surprisingly neat city and it takes an army to keep it that way. Everywhere there are people sweeping, picking up, scrubbing and spraying. So this post isn´t about the garbage lying around randomly. It´s about the garbage in limbo, having been arranged but awaiting it´s final destination, be it a landfill, recycling, incineration or some other fate unknown to me. So at this stage it´s still garbage but it´s neat garbage and it takes on a new life, making for unexpected patterns and color combination. Sometimes it takes on the shape of a mysterious animal, more often it looks like installation art. Often it catches the light of the narrow alleys in interesting ways. I found myself taking quite a few garbage pictures, here are some examples.

Barcelona

I spent two weeks in Barcelona in August. I was there with family, the schedule was pretty loose and I was free to shoot pretty much as I wanted. I couldn´t quite go off on a tangent so I spent most of the time in the center where all the tourists are. Shot a couple of hundred digital photos which were mostly crap and about twelve rolls of film with a 2:1 ratio of b&w to color. I´m pretty happy with the film shots, it´s a mix of street action with some more quiet pictures focusing on light and color. I didn´t have the problems with exposure that I had on my New York trip earlier this year. I´ve learned to err on the side of overexposure at the cost of speed and/or depth of field. Even in the labyrinths of the Barrio Gotico I was getting pretty decent exposures.

The city was very crowded with tourists and predictably many of the pictures are of tourists and the things they get up to, with a slight ironic twist. What was interesting to me in the midst of this touristic onslaught was the amount of old locals going about their business or even just sitting on a bench and watching life go by. Consequently I have my share of little old ladies/gentlemen shots. All in all I feel that my photos reflect pretty well my impression of the city which is pretty much all I can ask for from a tourist visit.

One thing I´ve been thinking pretty hard about after looking through my photos is the b&w vs. color question. I´m leaning towards focusing exclusively on color, although I have a hard time giving up b&w entirely. The best thing would be to get a second body but then I have to decide between getting a second Leica or perhaps going to medium format which is a dream I´ve been having. Decisions, decisions....

The weather is different these days. I remember summers here as cold and wet and windy with occasional nice days. This summer and the past few ones have been nice, warm and sunny and dry and not so windy. This seems like a positive development but inevitably one begins to think about global warming and looming catastrophe. People are fishing mackerel off the piers, this hasn´t happened before.