World of Brinch

Today I had the pleasure to be a photographer on this very special photo-shoot. The Danish Special Forces have their 50 years aniversary and did a training mission at the Port of Aalborg.

One mission was to drop-off a sniper in the top of this 147 ft high building crane, by helicopter. I managed to keep calm in the top and took these shots of the sniper :-) Click on each picture for a larger version.

I've put a collection of my best (IMO) shots on 500px.com. Hope you like them too?

Just went out the other day to shoot at two spots. One is very know in here and the other one is a pretty new spot.

Check out my pictures on flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/bbcdk/sets/72157625835394831/

This time I catched the deadly "man cold", because our trip to the Danish island Fyn was cold and freezing. But anyway, we went to three different locations and it was fun as always.

First place was an abandoned amusement park that was closed a few years ago. Unfortunately, there was a duck-hunting going on when we were there. It's giving an extra thrill, to walk around in the bushes, knowing that there could be a hunter around the corner.... 

This is a picture from the amusement park. The roof of the bumper-car place

With the hunters in mind, we left the place af an hour and drove to the next place. First of all, we wanted to go and see an old sugar factory, but it didn't look abandoned at all. But next to the factory, we bumped into another place, that used to be som kind of enginge-warehouse / steel inventory. This was a nice place! 

These stairs were high, old and rusty. I didn't reach the top, but the other two guys did

The las place we visited was an abandoned hospital. Very very interesting place and we had to search a few minutes, before find a place to get in. Remeber that we never ruin anything, but use existing holes, open doors, windows, etc. to get in. Most interior had been removed, but it was a spooky and untouched place. 

This was an old lamp from the hospital 

Some of the empty hallways inside the hospital 

A view from one of the rooms

All pictures from he Danish photomarathon have been published now. You can see my contribution here: http://fotomarathon.dk/gallery/2010/galleri2010_2.php?deltagernr=78

My 2010 photo marathon has ended - 24 hours of finding interesting shots. And it was as tough as I expected and was not a "walk in the park". During the 24 hours I tried to sleep a few times, but with no luck. So 1 hour after deadline, I went to bed and took 3 hours of deep sleep before waking up again, in the middle of sunday afternoon.

But back to the photo marathon. I was much more satisfied with my resulting pictures than last year and guess that one year of photo marathon experience was helping me out this time. I used more time to think about all topics, before running out to look for random shots. On some topics I had to drop all plans and then go looking for random ideas. Actually I drove about 150 kilometers during the 24 hours.... So mabe my topics wasn't planned at all as I think? But one thing was planned and that was to use only primes for all 24 pictures. All my pictures were taken with Nikon 50mm 1.8 and Nikon 105mm macro lenses. They are both doing razor sharp pictures and I don't regret using these.

I can't show you my results yet, because it's not allowed to show them to public until 12th of september. So you have to wait to see my 24 shots. I have examined my pictures again after the photo marathon has ended and of course I'm not satisfied with all pictures, but I guess that I have 7 very good technical shots and 10-12 pictures that I'm very satisfied with. The rest is a result of stress, missing ideas and midnight crises and for sure I'm not the winner this year again, but I could have a few shots that could win one of the individual topic prizes.

And as mentioned earlier, I contributed to this photo marathon with a Windows program that read and copy a contestants pictures and validates them, accordingly to the photo marathon rules. Before the photo marathon started, I was awarded with an honor for contributing with this software and this was a huge surprise! And acutally the program worked - it copied, validated and created web-galleries of more than 6000 pictures without any problems. I haven't heard of any problems anyway  Maybe they will show up later? But hope not of course.

2nd of October will be the date of results and I cross my fingers that I can win a prize, but with more than 300 other amazing and good contestants I need to have luck. But lets see about that in October.

If you would like to see more pictures and in a better resolution, zoom into my flick account here:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/bbcdk/

An old colleague wanted to go to Germany and shoot some abandoned places and of course I wanted to go too :-) We left Aalborg friday afternoon and reached the hotel many hours later in Germany. Checking in, dropping the luggage and then out to find the place... Our pre-googling was not the best and we had to ask a local guy.

Our German language was not that good and his English skills was not existing. But we did find the place when the dark started to reach the place.

The place is an old hotel that closed down some years ago. Very trashed place and dangerous to walk around on upper floors.

Next day we drowe apx. 100 kilometers to find our other destination. This was an easy place to find and we parked the car to find a place to get in. It was a huge building with 4 or 5 floors and thousands of square-meters to investigate.

I think we've been walking around for 5 minutes and of course the place had two security guys walking around. Damn they scared the hell out of us and we had to get out in the heavy rain again.

We walked around outside to check the place out and later we decided to get in again to shoot some pictures before heading back to Denmark.

This time we could hear someone walking on some glass and we were prepared to meet "somebody" in there. And we did! There was a strange man, almost having a heart attack, when we entered the same room where he was in the middle of stealing copper from the electric installations. No wonder why they have security in there. We agreed with him to be quiet and we took some pictures before getting out again. The damn camera shutter is incredible loud when you are in so big empty buildings and want to be invisible. I have to admit that i wasn't too proud of the situation.

But here is one of the pictures that I shot, before running out again :-)

I guess that we all are googling ourself now and then. Some people are more exposed than others and I'm not. But this time, I've found an article on the homepage for "Danmarks Radio" who is the Danish public service radio and TV channel, where they use one of my pictures.

http://www.dr.dk/Regioner/Nord/Nyheder/Aalborg/2010/04/07/145730.htm

I recall that I did send this picture to a competition some years ago. A good example, how important it is to read the terms for attending a competition and how they can use the picture in the future. For me it's ok. I'm not a PRO photographer and is just happy to see my pictures around.

So go google your self, maybe you will find something interesting

Two other guys and my self, went out to shoot some photos last night in some abandoned places we have in the area. I did this self-portrait, down in a 20 meters deep basement we found in one of the buildings

My camera in front of me on a tripod and a Nikon SB-600 on the ground, to my left.