A Friday night undermybed.dk

Photoblog on how an U.S. soldier is created, but it is just as much an account of life in contemporary America. A bit sad, actually, but take a look for yourself.

This is cool! 172 photos of people taken at the same location in Berlin over 20 days, stiched together to a 100 meter long slide of history, faces, expressions, clothes, bodies, gestures, haircuts. Where are they going and why do they look like that?

Can be seen at Kongens Nytorv in Copenhagen from early May.

The photographic museum in Amsterdam - FOAM - has some nice pictures of Amsterdam on their site. The pictures are part of an exhibition FOAM is giving from May to August 2009 in celebration of the anniversary of the relationship between New York and Amsterdam. The photographs are taken by NYC-photographers.  

I’m going to see it. 

By now I must have shot my first 30 rolls of film with my Cosina Voigtländer 35mm single-coated (very old school, but I mainly shoot BW) f1.4. I’m happy with the lens: it’s very fast, the bokeh is nice, I don’t have to get as close to people as I did with my 28mm, it’s inexpensive (half the price of a Zeiss, one quarter the price of a Summicron).

I’ve tried different film with the lens:

1. Kodak TriX 400 BW negative: what the lens is made/bought for. Most of the time the result is great. See the images above. But sometimes the contrast is off. Don’t know if it is a mistake in development, or if it is my scanner. I’ll post some examples soon. Another problem is the flare, but I’ve only experienced that a few times.

2. Kodak VC 400 colour negative: surreal sixtes pastel colors. Perhaps a feature of the single coating. I don’t know, but I like it.

3. Fuji Asti 100 colour positive (pending development)

Den nye præsident i Amerika (har glemt hans navn - en kortklippet, solbrændt fyr) har givet den arbejdende befolkning 8USD ekstra om ugen, at hygge sig for. Det er ca. en flad dansk halvtredskroneseddel. Formålet er, naturligvis, at sætte lidt skub i økonomien. Forbilledet er næppe Nyrup og Jelveds 10 milliarder kroner store (lille) kickstart af den danske økonomi i midten af halvfemserne, men målet er sikkert det sammen: At sætte gang i hjulene (undskyld klichéen) - skabe nye arbejdspladser, øge efterspørgslen og alt det der. Nå, men så kan man jo spørge ‘eksperterne’ (dvs. de medieudnævnte økonomiske eksperter - som ikke forkaster/fornægter titlen - og får økonomi til at fremstå som om det var en eksakt videnskab) hvad der er bedst at bruge disse 8 dollar på for at øge efterspørgslen. Det har Wall Street Journal gjort og fået svar som lyder: 

O My advice, both for the economy and your personal financial success, is if you’re not putting a little money into stocks each month, start today. 

O They [forbrugerne] will recognize that this is temporary and will use it to pay down debt or add to their liquid assets.

O […] spending $8 on improving insulation and energy efficiency of my home would be my priority. It would also be good for the construction industry that is being hammered by the recession.

O Save it for three weeks and get a $24 meal, which will directly help restaurants avoid layoffs and closures.

O […] if you can afford to lose the money, go to a large bank (more likely to be insolvent), find their most overpriced service, and buy as much of it as you can.

O Find a cash-strapped soup kitchen. The $8 you spend helping the hungry really can have a big bang-for-the-buck at a time when food spending is plummeting and unemployment rising.

O […] buy $8 of cupcakes at the PTA bake sale; attend a lecture at a community college ($8 admission); purchase a book on personal finance or retraining.

O give an extra-generous tip to taxi drivers.

O replace a leaky skylight window in our house.

O Get a haircut.

 Anyway, det jeg vil frem til er, at jeg har taget glæden på forskud af en eventuel Dansk ekspansiv finanspolitik og købt mig en ny skoletaske. Jeg har godt nok købt den i Holland, så det vil ikke gøre meget gavn i Danmark. Men: Tasken er eksporteret til Holland fra England, og i England spiser de vistnok Dansk bacon og de sætter Danske vinduer i deres huse (ved jeg fra en kammerat i vinduesbranchen). Derfor hjælper mit taskekøb måske også i Danmark - forudsat at taskemageren spiser bacon og/eller kigger igennem Danske ruder… 

Today I had the (very) rare pleasure of having my photograph taken in large format. Imagine, a std. digital censor is 7×5 mm small, a normal negative is 24×36 mm, and this negativ is 4×5 inches big! That is huge! The amount of information on such a piece of film is just magnificent.

The proud owner of this fine piece of German engineering is Erik from Oslo. I took a snapshot of him and his wonderfull camera - a Linhof from the sixties.

So as you see, it is hard to imagine what an ordinary Friday at Vrije Universiteit will bring - I certainly did not expect this :-) 

Solveig og jeg var et par dage i Amsterdam i sommer. Ovenfor er et af billederne der kom ud af det. Taget på en af cafeerne omkring Prinsensgracht. Hyggelige steder, hvor folk åbenbart ikke kun bladrer, men faktisk læser indholdet i aviserne. Kaffen var også god husker jeg. Der ligger lidt flere billeder fra den tur på foto.undermybed.dk

48 photographs of what € 1 will buy you in an ordinary supermarket. Once you’ve seen the pictures, you’ll probably agree that DKR 7.4 would not buy many of those plates - certainly not in Copenhagen… 

…but that’s no surprise: Copenhagen moved up from 6th to 2nd place in one year on the list of the worlds cities with the highest cost of living.  Here is the top ten:

Read more here.

I just uploaded new photos to my flickr account. See it here.

All the shots are from scanned black and white negatives (Kodak Tri-X 400) taken with my Elmarit 28mm lens on my M6 body. Negatives are developed in T-Max at 20 degrees for 6 minutes, dryed and scanned on an Imacon Flextight 848.

 The guy at the piano on the photo above is Yul Anderson. He plays in Købmagergade here in Copenhagen during the summer.

You can see the winning World Press Photo photos here.The pictures does not look as ‘horrid’ as they did a few years ago (apart from the winner of the ‘best news’ category) - perhaps the world is becomning a better place? :-/ There is certainly nothing as tragical as this among this years winners.