The Leirdal Blog

I often bring along my little Canon G9 when I am out and about. Today there was -12 degrees Celsius and a few snowflakes were falling slowly down from the skies. Except that the building where my company has their office is built in such a way that there is a small draft coming from below. Thus the snowflakes were equally falling down and blowing up again. Some of these flakes even got stuck to the windows.

Anybody that have experienced a Norwegian winter knows that they are dark and cold, but compared to other countries at the same latitude we have fairly mild winters. Thus there are several birds that stay in Norway during the cold season, but when the temperatures drop below -20 degrees celcius they feel the pressure. Luckily some people feed them during their time of need. This weekend we witnessed a "few" mallards fighting for their bread in one of the few ice free areas near Oslo.

Their numbers were astonishing, and so were their ferocity. Another picture

While out walking with my girlfriend this weekend we found this cute little graffiti on a wall we were passing. The shadows of some twigs gave it an underwater feeling I have enhanced using duotones.

I am sorry my site have been a bit silent for a while. I have had a lot of things to do lately, but I have a lot of blog entries in my idea list so hopefully the site will awaken again next year. Until then. Merry christmas and a happy new year.

Last night I attended a project dinner in Oslo after a long day at work. On my way home I noticed a lot of people looking up. I did as they and was a bit shocked by this woman balancing on top of a very flexible pole about 40 meters above ground. (This number is a guesstimate on my part based on the height of the nearby buildings). She was standing on top of the pole, balancing, hanging by a leg and doing several other stunts. I admit that she was wearing a safety rope, but hey it looked pretty scary anyway. While she was up there it even started to rain a few drops as well.

In the picture below you can see her looking down at me. I have also included a video in the full blog entry (click on the title above to see the video). Please have a look at that to see how the pole and the acrobat was swinging beneath the clouds.
Continue reading "Fearless"

During my last London visit these cranes were greeting my arrival. At least that is what I felt when I spotted them on the horizon the evening we arrived.

My girlfriend celebrated her xx birthday on Friday, and we marked the event by visiting UK. We arrived in London Wednesday evening and jumped on a bus to Bath, Stonehenge and Salisbury the following day. These are a few of the pictures from Stonehenge. Other pictures will follow later.

• Alternative Stonehenge image 1


• Alternative Stonehenge image 2


• Alternative Stonehenge image 3

It has been quite mixed weather in Oslo today. It rained in the morning, then we had a few hours with beautiful sunshine. Then some thunder and lightning with heavy rain. And now the sun shines again. Kind of weird.
On my way to work I took a few pictures of my umbrella using my Canon G9 camera. I converted them to grayscale and then to duotone with a dark blue colour. There is another picture here.

My girlfriend and I went for a walk one evening during the Easter celebration with my family in Aure, Norway. This is one of the pictures I took using my Canon G9. This is a picture from the beach below the church and out towards open ocean. You can see "Aursund brua" or the bridge over Aursund.

I've been playing around with an attempt at wildlife photography this Easter holiday. I managed to get a lot of pictures, but few of them of decent quality. Here are a few of the ones I think might be adequate.

I did a little (=long) photo walk all by myself today. I hoped that the fog that was slowly disappearing would give me some nice effects, but as it turned out, the sun broke through quite early on my little walk. The best picture I got is probably this one. Notice how the sun reflects from the windows and onto the road.

I recently purchased a 100mm macro lens for my camera. I've not been able to test it in a great scale yet, but watch this space when life starts popping up outdoors in the next few weeks. While we are waiting you might like to have a look at these two as well. Leaf 2, leaf 3 (with extension ring).

On Saturday 14 March 2009 David Norheim can celebrate another birthday. Today the WWW can celebrate it's twentieth birthday. One of the creative girls (Terese Liadal) at work created this cake and we felt we just had to share it with all the rest of you out there in cyberspace as well.

David Norheim is one of the leading Semantic Web gurus in Norway and was extremely happy when he got this cake. The cake illustrates one version of the Semantic Web Layer Cake, an illustration that describes the different layers in the architecture stack. There are several versions of this layer cake available online.

You can find a close up of the cake here

I recently visited Estonia and it's capital Tallinn. Actually a very interesting town, with a lot of old buildings and sights. Though I expect it to be a bit warmer during summer. Estonia is one of the small baltic countries and have for large periods of the last centuries been subject to other larger nations. For most of the period since the second world war Estonia was a part of the Soviet union, but now they are an independent nation.

It was kind of cloudy when I was there so most of my pictures have a dull sky, thus I bring you two pictures that have no sky in them. The window is from what is left of the Dominican cloister in Tallinn.

It's the christmas season and I take a lot of pictures, the problem is that most of them is of family, and nothing I plan to add to this blog, but a little while ago I took this picture. It's from Løkken Verk in the middle of Norway (Sør-Trøndelag) and shows one of the old abandoned mining buildings there. The old mines were closed down in 1987, and the old buildings are slowly turning into ruins.