I’ll try to make it short and sweet. SoFoBoMo means I’ll make a photo book with at least 35 photos and I’ll have a “fuzzy” month to do it. That month will have to be 31 consecutive days sometime in May or June. The results only need to be posted on-line as a PDF book but I plan to have my book printed.

So, I’ve meant to blog about this for a while but it looks like tomorrow, Sunday the 10th of May, will be the day when I start. I plan to update you on the progress through this blog, where “update” means “ignore”. I don’t really mean to but I’m afraid that’s how it’s going to be.

Also, if you have an interest in what I’m doing for SoFoBoMo, you might want to visit my corner of SoFoBoMo.

But focusing manually need not mean squinting into an all too tiny viewfinder of a crop sensor DSLR and twisting the focus ring until that green light stays on. I’ve used my aforementioned Sigma 30, a modern lens that has autofocus, a lot in manual focus mode for street photography. But instead of focusing while looking through the viewfinder I prefocus.

This technique is a lot more enjoyable with my old Zorki-4 rangefinder camera, though. Its 1961 vintage Jupiter-8 50/2 lens not only has a proper distance scale but depth of field markings as well. Quick zone focusing¹ is child’s play when a glance down at your lens tells you where your depth of field lies. I usually prefocus to the hyperfocal distance when feasible, though.

I recently bought an old Nikkor-N 24mm f/2.8 lens as I fancied something wider than 30mm for street photography. Although not in league with the Jupiter-8 the Nikon 24mm has a better distance scale than the Sigma. It also has a rather basic depth of field scale but its use is somewhat limited as it’s marked for 35mm film cameras. Never mind that; I keep a set of laminated depth of field tables, for 18, 24 and 30mm, in my camera bag (see, I’m a nerd) so I can check what I’m doing. It’s also a good way of slowly memorising the various distances that matter for the apertures I use the most.

But the beauty of a wide angle lens such as the 24mm is that depth of field is comparatively huge. Even at f/5.6 you’ll hit hyperfocal a bit past 5m and everything from about 2.5m will be in focus. Using manual focus in this way makes street photography faster than with autofocus but also means that when I look in the viewfinder I have nothing to think about besides composition and framing.

So this is one reason I love manual focus but there are more. A nice bonus when using old manual focus lenses on my D40 is that I must control the aperture with the aperture ring on the lens. On any Nikon DSLR that has two control wheels, thus all but the D40, D40x and D60, this isn’t as big a thing but getting a dedicated aperture control on the D40 makes operation of the camera a lot more pleasant.

On the flip side the D40 won’t meter with my 24mm, nor most other Nikon manual focus lenses, and the camera will only work with it in manual mode. But that’s how I want to use it most of the time anyway and, besides, what do you expect for €47.50 including shipping? The 24/2.8 may not be the best lens I have but it’s also not the cheapest. That honour goes to my Nikon Series-E 75-150mm f/3.5, made in the early eighties, which I got for free from a total stranger.

The honour of which lens is my best probably also belongs to the E75-150 so old and cheap need not mean crappy image quality. Even if I hadn’t been lucky E75-150s are dirt cheap and especially so considering their optical quality. I’m a lot less fond of manual focusing when it comes to telephotos, though, as it is generally harder than with wide angles. But in my case I had only a limited need for a telephoto and a limited budget. The focus system of the D40 is also quite limited so for the purpose I originally got the lens, football photography, I’m not sure how much better off I would have been with an autofocus lens. Especially a cheap one which would potentially have had slow autofocus, small variable aperture and less image quality.

So old manual focus lenses can be a great option for those who have little to spend on gear but can devote some time to practice their manual focus skill. Not that all manual focus lenses are old and cheap as new ones are still being made for cameras that can use autofocus lenses. There may not be many today that choose to focus manually with their 21st century wündercameras but for some things it may just work better than autofocus.

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.

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.

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.

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.

My biggest problem with it started when I switched from an iBook G4, running Panther, to my current computer and OS back in 2005. One of Stafsetning’s biggest features, switching between Icelandic and the OS X Spell Checker’s language on the fly by a keyboard shortcut (or menu from Menu Bar if that’s how you roll), never functioned well after my switch to PowerBook and Tiger. A switch between languages would often mean I’d get an error message saying the Spell Checker couldn’t be contacted. Hardly a niggle but Stafsetning had its redeeming features and I’d have stuck with it if not for wanting to have Swedish spell checking as well.

I might have checked if my system already included a Swedish dictionary but instead decided straight off to try cocoAspell which is free and has a big selection of dictionaries. Removing Stafsetning from the list of Login Items didn’t remove its imprints from applications’ spelling menus but I (stupidly) installed cocoAspell anyway. Spell checking was, of course, borked. Uninstalling Stafsetning seemed the thing to do but the software makes no provisions for it nor could I find any instructions for doing so on Stafsetning’s website. I sent a mail to their support address¹ but as it was Saturday I expected no answer until next Monday at first.

Being an impatient man I ended up searching for components of Stafsetning, which by the way is an input manager, with Spotlight and then removed them by hand. Spell Checking was still borked. I uninstalled cocoAspell and that changed nothing. I found a new level to being frustrated and started pressing buttons. ⌘-⇧-. did the trick by bringing up this window:

No surprise I didn’t think of this as I never use it. Here I could switch from Stafsetning’s dictionary to one of a few included with the OS X’s native spell checking system. One of which is Swedish. You would think some text on some spell checking software would mention this little thing, though? I suggest something along the lines of “oh, and when you’ve finished removing our software by hand you might want to call up the Spelling menu for each app and change it from the dictionary you just removed.”

I also hope Apple has made changes to this system in Leopard and I should check to see if they have. Now that I have Icelandic through cocoAspell, along with the Swedish and English dictionaries included with Tiger, I want to find a way to change Spell Checker’s language with a keyboard shortcut. I’ve come as far as looking at Red Sweater Software’s FastScripts Lite but that option would mean I’d have to learn some AppleScript. There should be an easier way to do this.

Update:

Only fair to add that the developer of Stafsetning 2004 got back to me earlier today; Tuesday the 15th. Of course the matter was mostly fixed on my end, as I mentioned in the follow up to this post, but his response was very helpful.

As part of the ceremony I was kitted out with a sash in blue and yellow; the colours of the Swedish flag, a blue pea whistle with blue and yellow ribbon for a lanyard and a Swedish Football Association hat. In yellow and blue. Then I was presented with a gorgeous, piano black ukulele to congratulate me on having become a Swede.

Now I’ll have to start practice. Not sure if Sweden is as pleased to have me after hearing the first attempts at making musical sounds with my new instrument.

Me and Marie only managed a brief stop in her flat - my new home - yesterday, for dropping off suitcases, a shower each and a snack, before heading out to the birthday party. We ended up staying overnight so it was only this afternoon that I managed to empty my suitcases. I’m about as settled as I’ll get until the rest of my stuff arrives and I’m sitting in the living room, blogging, while Marie’s three sons lounge about watching the TV and playing video games.

Maybe it all feels so normal because I’m exhausted. I’m incredibly happy for how smoothly the move, and all the preparations for it, went but also for it to be over. Marie had gotten some special ales from Systembolaget, before flying out to Iceland, and I look forward to relaxing with a Sierra Nevada Bigfoot.

Tomorrow there’s paperwork to be done, I will need to get a Swedish phone number and do various other things that I can’t remember right now. But tonight it’s just relaxation. And perhaps I’ll try to sort through the few hundred photographs I’ve taken in the last couple of weeks. But only if I feel like it.

I’ve been going through my stuff lately, albeit mostly in my mind. I won’t be taking much of it with me to Sweden so a lot of stuff will have to be disposed of somehow. At the indoor flea market today I was reminded of my “collection” (are six albums a collection?) of Led Zeppelin albums. A couple of blokes were selling second hand vinyl records (one had a fair bit of The Smiths catalog) so I asked if they would buy my Led Zeppelin records.

Selling off stuff like this feels somehow wrong but I put that down to my pack rat tendencies. I was a rabid Led Zep fanboy a decade ago, or so, but now only listen to them rarely and certainly not the vinyl records. Someone else should have them. My feelings about selling off my comic book collection - no quotation marks needed - are quite different. The comic books were a big part of my childhood and I would love to get them out of their boxes and have a good read. I’m tempted to do so right now.

Still, the same applies to them as the Led Zep albums; someone else should have them. Even now I don’t have room for them and I can’t justify paying for shipping just so that I can not read them in Sweden. One or more of Marie’s lads would probably love them - if they could read Icelandic. Better that I get a little cash for the books to subsidize moving other stuff. They’re not just books, and in fact I’m not sure there’s any such thing as “just” books, but I have to pick carefully what I’ll bring.

This all may sound like a metaphor for settling the past but I think that’s incidental. It’s probably closer to being a metaphor for dealing with the future. After all I’m trying to pick the things that mean the most to me and will be most useful after the move. But that’s mostly incidental too although I could learn a lesson from seeing it that way.

Right now I’m contemplating whether to take the VHS tapes to Sweden. It’s an absurd notion in so many ways. VHS tapes have absolutely no merits today, unlike vinyl records which I am certain will outlive the already obsolescent, and very annoying, Compact Disc. But Marie has a VCR and I have a Blues Brothers tape.

It will probably be quite different from Reykjavík which often feels like a bonsai city. Of course different is relative in this case. If I’d move to, say, Kinshasa I’d experience profound differences unlike when moving from a small city in Iceland to a large town in Sweden. After all I’ll still be living in a Nordic country and there will be more similarities than differences.

Most of all I look forward to the move. I’ll be with Marie and get to know her three sons - which might be the biggest change for an only child with no offspring - and I’ll have an entire new world to discover in Dalarna province. This will be different from anything I’ve done before.