[flickr]set:72157623803995142[/flickr]

My co-worker Jacob called me up right before 2 pm today to tip me off about a moose swimming in Sandefjord bay. I rushed out with camera in hand and just then it passed me. I was at work and our offices are located right next to the water, and so I snapped this shot.

Now, I didn’t even know these animals could swim, so I was quite surprised. As soon as I got back to my desk I Twittered the incident and uploaded the picture to TwitPic. My Tweet was Re-Tweeted I don’t know how many times, but the picture was viewed by 140 people within the first 15 minutes. And then the Norwegian TV station TV2 called and wanted to interview me and use the picture. The article can be found here.

So I made the news today. Me and a moose.

The Old Ship Hotel bar filled to the limit with beer-loving flash developers

Just wanted to say thank you to everyone who ran and attended Flash On The Beach ’08 in Brighton. I had a great time! Here’s a photo I wanted to share. It’s from the Old Ship Hotel bar tuesday night after The Honey Club ran out of beer in just one hour. It was taken with my camera phone, so please excuse the quality.

After the conference I got to kill a few hours in London, so I went to Hamleys to buy the mandatory travel gift for my son. And man do they have some fascinating stuff there. This is a 23 carat gold plated model of a Mercedes SLK which was explicitly stated “Not for sale”. Check it out:

Aron turned 6 months on december 27. He’s full of smiles and really interesting language interpretations. He’s just about to begin crawling around. He also wishes to thank you all for the humongous pile of presents he got for Cristmas.

Most of all he’s the cutest, loveliest and happiest little boy alive!

Mølen is quite a special looking place. It is a sort of beach made of millions of round rocks that were dragged by ice from the mountains of Norway during the meltdown of the ice age. The lengthy process of getting the rocks here also shaped and polished them. The types of rock you can find here are of large variation, but they all share the same basic shape with few sharp corners if any. According to an information plate the area took shape around 300 million years ago when Norway was situated near Equator. Imagine that..

For any photographer this is a rewarding trip and I wish I could have spent even more time there today. The landscape is quite unique and on an overcast day like today, the light can be in your favor.

The images here were developed roughly by the same process. Because of the harsh skylight I duplicated the base layer twice and applied a mask for the highlight and shadow areas respectively. The shadow layer’s blend mode was set to “Lighten” and the highlight’s to “Multiply”. Then the base layer was duplicated once more and given a gaussian blur of 20px and that layer’s blend mode set to overlay. Image flattened and last exposure adjustments applied. The image at the top was left untouched from camera by the way. I wanted a totally honest one there to show you exactly how the place looks. EXIF was roughly the same for all images so I’ll include the data for the first one here:

EXIF, Model: NIKON D200

EXIF, Lens focal length: 10.0 mm

EXIF, Exposure time: 1/125 s

EXIF, ISO speed rating: 400EXIF, White balance: Cloudy

EXIF, Flash: Flash did not fire.

EXIF, Exposure program: Normal program

EXIF, Exposure method: Auto exposure

EXIF, Exposure bias: 0.0

EXIF, Metering mode: Pattern

EXIF, Date and time of original data generation: 2007:11:18 14:03:16

File Format: JPEG/JFIF Rotation corrected (EXIF tag)

This is what happens when pharmaceutical companies aren’t being watched… The photo was taken at the inner harbour of Sandefjord and I don’t know what that in the water is, but it sure looks poisonous. If you live in Sandefjord an read the local paper on a regular basis you might have an idea who the culprit of this mess might be..

As for the photo, it has been adjusted for contrast, but that’s pretty much it. And since this is the first post in the photos category, I’ll let you know that I will try to make a point of including the relevant EXIF-data also in further posts.

EXIF, Model: NIKON D200

EXIF, Lens focal length: 16.0 mm

EXIF, F number: 6.7

EXIF, Exposure time: 1/180 s

EXIF, ISO speed rating: 100

EXIF, White balance: Manual white balance

EXIF, Flash: Flash did not fire.

EXIF, Exposure program: Normal program

EXIF, Exposure method: Auto exposure

EXIF, Exposure bias: 0.0

EXIF, Metering mode: Pattern

EXIF, Date and time of original data generation: 2007:10:23 10:53:47

File Format: JPEG/JFIF Rotation corrected (EXIF tag)