Stuart's Soliloquy to the void

Reading and some lights

Tuesday, January 3rd, 2006 | Personal

The busy christmas vacation has been, the world is slowly starting up again after all the festivities, and everything is just looking cold, snowy and January again. Fortunately I had planned to take a bit of time off from my studies during the vacation so I wouldn’t go entirely insane over the next six months. This time off was spent pondering over the new books I got for christmas: Daniel Silva’s The Kill Artist and The English Assassin. I have earlier read the third in the series, The Confessor, and I must say that they are all good in each their own way. The series start off a bit weak with The Kill Artist, but Silva has cleaned up his writing style a lot in the two latter books about the art restorer Delveccio who is, in reality, the Israeli agent Gabriel Allon. So if you like a nice thriller with some fun plot twists, pick them up from someplace and read them.

Since it’s winter and I’m up here in the semi-north it has, of course, been snowing. A lot. Oh and don’t try to bike in the snow unless you know what you’re doing. It’s tough. But that wasn’t really what I was going to say.

By request and because it’s always nice to take pictures of the snow, I brought my camera with me to work yesterday and had planned to snap some photos on the way there and on my way home as well, but I was too rushed getting there and going home was too dark, so I had to settle with experimenting with a few shots of the rush hour traffic on the motorway.

The light streaks were done with about a two second exposure. Unfortunately I couldn’t hold the camera entirely steady so the streaks jump a bit more than they were supposed to. You can see how much my hand shook by looking at the light poles. It’s pretty decent for a first try of long exposure, but I will definitely have to try it again with our tripod.

The other picture came out a bit shaken as well, but you don’t notice it as much. It really is terribly hard to try to do panning photographs. In the dark. Without a viewfinder. Without any indication of whether your motive is still in the centre of your objective. So, considering all that, it turned out rather decently, I’d say.

I’ll have to remember to try a more classic panning photograph from the side of the objective someday as well. But the night photos have a fascinating quality to them that I have always liked. Perhaps it’s because at night the geeks prowl. Who knows?

Tags: book, book review, photography

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