This year is almost over, and it is time to look into the future and back in time. This year for me was uneventful, I did my work, maintained my relation, and saw some family. The only exiting personal thing is that I started writing again on a blog, like I did years ago. I f I look back at what happened worldwide in politics and society I can only be sad. I studied history enough to know that “the world” doesn’t really cares about what happens on its surface, but if you look at what goes on in the world sitting on a barge that floats along with time, so you just see what happens now…you should be sad at the level of stupidity and ignorance that was visible this year. In a thousand years historians will look back at this time and call it the adolescence stage of mankind. The world surface is full of pimples and someone like Trump is the puss that comes out of such a pimple if you try to get rid of an itch. These narrowminded leaders do a good job representing the teenagers we are as a society, hopefully they don’t burn down the house before they grow up. There are so many disagreements going on that deserve a real debate and should not be treated as if they were talking about the best collar of a car, where you can have a simple opinion over. Out of pure opportunistic reasons, leaders will say that there is, for instance, no climate change whiteout starting a real conversation about it, I like to hear honest arguments for or against. But there is no reasoning with a typical teenager, specially when there is no authority, the world is a summer camp without supervision.

Picture 1 – Made with Samsung S7, RAW file edited in Lightroom.

I made this picture today with my Samsung s7, using the raw setting. After some work in Lightroom and straighten it out in Photoshop it doesn’t look bad. I don’t’ think a large print would work with this file, just look at the 3: 1 enlargement. But as long as you watch it on a small screen it works fine. But these phone camera’s give the best results during daytime when there is enough lite. I will show some other pictures here taken over the years with different camera’s. Taking pictures with the old film camera’s is still something I miss but it is to expensive where I live now, even when I would develop my own film. But the digital cameras are getting better and better and I’m still the kind of photographer that takes pictures as if I have only 36 exposures, but I can’t help watching at the screen for the results, something you couldn’t do before. You just judge for yourself and let me know which picture you like the best.

3:1 enlargement.

This is how the RAW file looked like, remember that this is a compressed JPEG file you actually see here.

Picture 2 – Made with an other phone, the LG G4, 3 years old.

Picture 3 – Made with a Nikon D7100 around 4 years old.

Picture 4 – Made with a Nikon D40x around 10 years ago.

Picture 5 – Made with a Nikon F90x around 20 years ago, scanned from positives slides.

Picture 6 – Made with a Nikon F90x around 20 years ago, scanned from positives slides.

Picture 7 – Made with a Nikon F90x around 20 years ago, scanned from positives slides.

This time of year, many people take their time to think about peas. I care a lot about peas, but there are some disturbing trends. There are less peas produced the last few years¹ and with a higher demand for peas in upcoming markets² there is a higher chance that the markets will be over flooded with the approximate 2 150 000 tons of nuts (ca 150 000 nut-cases) that are overproduced worldwide.

The long-term decline in the demand for peas started roughly a 100 years ago when rich soil in France, that was producing 26% of the worldwide production, was used to test the new invention wherein men dig their own grave (trench in French) and let someone with a big bomb fil it with fresh soil. This did so much damage that the entire production of peas in that area stopped for good. The world peas organization, after this loss of fertile ground, has tried to catch-up but peas are slowly disappearing from the menu of modern man.

The loss of peas on the modern menu has caused a reduced intake of the important vitamin C^s (CMS or Com-Mon-Sense). A lack of C^s slowly degrades the areas in the human brain that produce the peas loving hormones CPS (Com-Peas-Sion). A loss of CPS will lower the tolerance for peas and heighten the change for the disease WAR (Weak-Ass-Reaction). This disease causes the subjects to sit on a chair that is in a safe place and then start telling others what to do and in the worst cases who they have to kill.  It can afflict any person, but it is most common with males, specially if any of the following symptoms is clearly noticeable: shortsighted ideas, indoctrinated thoughts, greed and selfishness. Everybody with symptoms like this should be banned from any responsible job and be schooled in the health benefits of eating peas.

¹ See here

² See here

The place where I now live is beautiful. There are rocks and hills all around me and many small islands. There is one small gravel road leading to this place and you can see electricity poles snaking its way to the house, for the rest you don’t see mush of civilization.  The place is part of the museum where I work for, almost a hundred years ago the farmer/entrepreneur that lived here started collecting historical objects and buildings and made it into a little museum. After his death in the 60^th they tried to restore it and in the 70^th most of the buildings were painted and restored where necessary. At the end of the 70^th the local government started a new museum with these building and specially his collection of farm and fishing tools and other things found in and around the house as a basis. The museum grew slowly and in the 90^th they made a little building here with warm and cold water, a modern kitchen, toilet and shower. The main building only has cold water and they wanted to rent out the place to tourist and therefore they needed to modernize. The main building is probably around 150 years old and besides some electric heaters hasn’t changed much. It was hard for the museum to maintain the place and that’s why I offered to go live here with my fiancé. I really like living in such an old building (in Norway that’s old, especially for a wooden structure) where there are not so many modern luxuries like isolation, central heating, a toilet or kitchen. We have reliable electricity and I installed an internet antenna on the hill behind the house, so we can catch some 4g signals, there is no cellphone coverage in the house. But living relative primitive fits good with my philosophy so I don’t mind not having a lot of things that you normal take for granted. The biggest thing I (and specially my fiancé) miss is a toilet in the house. In the summer I restore and maintain the building and we try to bring the garden back to how it was ones. The place where the house is, is special. There are several hills around us that block most of the wind and therefore it is relatively save living here. There are signs, specially some drawings on the rocks, that indicate that this place is used to come ashore and maybe settle for more than a thousand years.

But as I said before: I like living here, my fiancé is not always so enthusiastic, but we manage. The lack of some luxuries makes you appreciate them more when you have them again and you don’t really miss them in daily live. For me is the silence more of a luxury that I want now and that’s here in abundance.

This is a picture from some oil floating on the water, it is a visual reminder of our pollution but in this case, it also looks cool. It’s like the beautiful Christmas decorations you see everywhere, this happy holiday represents two of our most damaging behaviors: commercialism and religion. Like the oil spill it also leaves a nice picture but we all know where it comes from, something black and toxic that lubricates our society.  Yeah, I’m not the person you want to spend these days with. People say that I have to lighten up but for me it’s no joke. I rather pick one or two day’s with the whole world and use those day’s to think about our sins than use this western tradition that has come from a  set of beliefs that no one believes in and shouldn’t believe in.

I like taking pictures of old, weathered buildings. A long time ago someone was lying in bed thinking about the nice barn they had made that day, how he saved all the money needed to buy the materials and the many hours it took to build it. Now it is standing there, abandoned, and maybe thought of for a minute a year by the owners, if there are any. It is kind of sad, an object with out an owner or purpose is all alone, if it could be. It is just standing there, with all the marks of a rich life, slowly dissolving back into the earth while it ones was used and build with a purpose. If I look at this still image I realize that, that lock will never be used again and will sit there till the end, some of the paint will be washed away by heavy rain and loose its last grip in a storm, and the wood is slowly eaten molecule by molecule by time till it is all gone.