Christmas decorations

The theme might seem a bit outdated already, but it is not until now that I've taken the time to upload the Christmas pics... (Yesterday, Thursday 13th, was "20-dag Knut", which is the old official Swedish "end of Christmas"-day, and still many people keep their Christmas Trees until then.)

These days handicrafts have become very popular. Everyday, everywhere you see people posting pictures of their creations. So in that sense, you could say I was some 15 years ahead of time. When I went to high school I was stubborn enough to create Christmas gifts myself, through embroidery. (And, as I wanted to be very exact, it was a rather slow work.) So the two below are photographed at the receiver site, my parents place. (I did start doing an embroidery work for myself at one time. Never finished it. Having a deadline really helped getting them done.)

God Jul


“God Jul” - Merry Christmas in Swedish. My own custom made font - I think I went through five checkered A3-papers before I was happy with the proportions. As is barely visible in the picture (nor, unfortunately, in reality) is that the rightmost stich in every letter is in another, darker red, colour. Every cross is just one thread wide, and there are plenty of threads... Original plan was to have some form of border pattern around the text, but time did not allow that, and I think the result was ok nevertheless.

Jultomten

Jultomten / Santa Claus. No prefab pattern but “my very own” design. So, it is in any case unique :)

Pepparkaksgubben

A surviver - Pepparkaksgubben / The Gingerbread Man. This is one of the very few Christmas decorations that have survived from my mother’s childhood, one that she made when she was a kid.

Christmas Tree Ball

The large red christmas tree balls are part of the essence of Christmas for me. They also make fun mirrors, making it a challenge to get both the ball itself and the reflection to be sufficiently sharp.

Gift wrappings

Shameless self-promotion. Yes, I confess I printed some of my pictures in size A5 and used as gift decorations. To be more exact, one from Strandvägen, an autumn photo from Järvafältet, a Christmas Tree from Skansen and two winter photos from Sollentuna.

Advent Candlestick

Included because I like the DOF (Depth of field). The candlestick has been around as long as I can remember. As a child living at home I saw it as a challenge to keep a steady burn-rate per week/per Sunday, to get the candles to form a nice slope.

As usual, larger sizes and more pics can be found over at flickr.

By now, Christmas 2010/2011 has ended. Now towards longer days with more daylight - yes please!

Cat and bird

I figured it would be nice to have a way of showing different subsets of my pictures that I post to flickr, and to have some more space for blablabla around them, in case I would want to.

Without further ado, I start with a small photo serie of a very friendly cat, and his interaction with a bird feeding outside the kitchen window of a friend's countryside house.

(Head over to flickr if you are interested in higher resolution or photo meta-data.)

As you might have noticed, the story-telling using these pictures is a construction, since the pictures were actually taken during two days. But this is how it happened, just that I couldn't capture it all at once ...! There was recently a good Swedish radio (P1) documentary about how much in nature programs that are staged that comes to mind (a pity I can't find the link now, I might be back with an update).

*Small update* The biggest challenge while shooting this was finding a reasonable balance between the brightness outside and the shaded room. As you can see from the picture where he tries to attack through the window, it is impossible to have a good exposure for both the cat and the bird at the same time. (Without more fancy time consuming post-production, of course...) But at least it was me who made the trade-off, not the camera, since they are all taken with manual settings.