In Photography, Stuff on
2 October 2008 with no comments
Back in August a Twitterbuddy of mine, Tony Delgrosso, commissioned me to do a photograph. He was working on a novel he planned to release in serial form on the web and he needed a cover for the “book”. He offered me a little cash, a lot of pimping and told me what he wanted.
I’ve never before been commissioned to do a photograph. Writing this now makes it feel quite cool but I wouldn’t have done it if it hadn’t been for two factors: I think Tony is a cool guy and, since he’s a cool guy, what he wanted me to do was pretty cool.
It was also not easy. The photo needed to pass for a 1940s European street scene and I soon noticed that there aren’t many places in Falun where a modern street sign hasn’t managed to plant itself. Falun is in big part a collection of quaint wooden houses and much of the rest is quite modern even if there are old buildings in between.
In the end I managed to find what I considered the perfect spot. Cameron, Marie’s middle son, got to play model and wear my suit and fedora. This was the first time I photographed a model besides myself and I learned a lot from my mistakes.
A couple of photographs were basically pretty good but there was a ton of small errors I had done. Tony however was very pleased so I dashed any thoughts of torturing Cameron into doing a second shoot in downtown Falun all dressed up.
I can’t show you any of the photos because I don’t have the finished product and the raw materials I have aren’t that good. Tony did his own post-processing, thus mostly fixing my mistakes, so you should head over to the website for his novel, Mr. Abernathy, and download the first chapter.
I haven’t had a chance to read it yet but I’m pretty sure it’s better stuff than the cover photo – which you’ll get to see when you start reading the first chapter.
In Stuff on
1 October 2008 with 1 comment
Yesterday afternoon I noticed that the small hole in my last decent pair of jeans had turned into a head–sized hole. I’m still trying to convince myself that the hole had been as small when I put them on that morning as it had been the night before. Otherwise I must have displayed my colours, by which I mean the colour of my drawers, to refugees and immigrants from three continents at school yesterday.
The situation of not having one decent pair of jeans is an untenable one to any unemployed man besides Jeffrey Lebowski so off I went to Dressman to remedy it. Back in Iceland I would at most have walked through a Dressman store to briefly glance around and convince myself that no article of clothing in there was of any interest. Living in Falun, however, the choices for reasonably, or maybe rather cheap, men’s clothes are more limited.
I must admit, though, that given a bit of patience, driven by lack of money, it is possible to find entirely decent clothes in a Dressman shop. And not only if you happen to be a gentleman in his fifties or sixties with a penchant for dressing like fictional European detectives. I ask you; would that gentleman buy drainpipe jeans?
Now, I realise that this puts me about two years behind in fashion. I probably should have bought drainpipe jeans back when The Rakes’ Capture/Release album was more than just a memory from a rather interesting summer. But no, back then I probably didn’t have the courage, besides being lazy when it came to clothes purchases. Today I just can’t argue with a 70% discount at Dressman for a pair of jeans that fit me perfectly.
In Photography on
21 August 2008 with no comments
For some reason I’ve been incredibly disinterested in writing lately. I have however been very preoccupied with photography. So preoccupied that the only blog I’ve attempted to write lately was about photography and got terminated when I discovered just how boring it was turning out to be.
Another facet of this preoccupation is that I launched a photoblog a couple of weeks ago. I finally managed to pad it with a couple of older photos tonight so I think it’s time I announce it here. I call it Snapshots From Falun and I mean to post only the very best photographs I manage to make. Put it a bit differently; I intend to put only good photos there. Which explains why there are so few photos on the site.
As for the name the photoblog isn’t only for photos from Falun. You can drop by the site’s About page for an explanation of the title and contents.
In Sweden on
15 July 2008 with 2 comments
As blogged by Marie the story is probably more interesting than my short posts about the move.
In Apple on
15 July 2008 with 1 comment
Seems it’s not all beer and pretzels with my Mac’s spell checking as Mail doesn’t seem to accept cocoAspell’s Icelandic dictionary. In fact I only see the Icelandic one of cocoAspell’s dictionaries but that’s not a real problem. Not now, anyway. TextEdit sees the Icelandic Dictionary and so does MarsEdit, which I’m writing this in, but not Mail. I noticed some remarks about Leopard’s mail having dictionary problems, as I was trying to solve my earlier problems, so I’m fantasising that this is a known issue that I’ll solve quickly. Anyway I hope that episode will be even less blog-worthy.
Update:
Oh, isn’t this awkward cake… Restarting Mail solved this. And I thought of it myself. Because I got tired of looking through Google for a solution. In my defence I thought I had done enough reboots before getting the spell checking to its current configuration.