Baldur Bjarnason

We’re still in 2018 in my personal history of amateur photography and I’m about to try my hand at photographing in Iceland.

Turns, sometimes, pictures just work better in color.

A photo taken in Árbæjarsafn which is a museum dedicated to Iceland’s architectural history. The chickens are “landnámshænur” which is said to be the original viking breed of chicken. This was taken in Viðey, a historically important location in Iceland and, as such, had generally very few tourists. A photographer in Reykjavík harbour taking pictures of Viðey that’s out off to the side.

“Why do companies become hostile to their customers? – On my Om”

Software companies are particularly prone to this.

“ChatGPT, Ethics & Careers in Computational Linguistics”

I did learn though that some pictures just plain have to be in colour. This here is probably my favourite colour photo that I took in Parc Jarry

And colour is kind of essential for taking pictures in Iceland. But that]s a story for another day.

The sun sets behind the trees as a woman walks towards the grove where the rest of the party is waiting for her.

I’ve always favoured black and white, although I keep experimenting with colour.

The issue here is that I simply have different tastes from everybody around me. For example, I strongly prefer the b&w version of this photo.

The shadows in the park are so sharp they’re almost geometric shapes. A man sits in a chair in the middle of the park.

Early on I decided to focus on Parc Jarry. It was close to where I lived and I made documenting it my project, catching things like a gull almost killed by ducks, and a sparrow in flight that I now use as the icon for my website.

We see out-of-focus trees through a row of tall grass. Looking through the grass, we see a duck swimming. A bloodied gull flees. The silhouette of a sparrow caught mid-flight.

I also decided to be more proactive in going out and looking for things to photograph. It was one of the ways I dealt with Montreal. Even though I didn’t particularly enjoy living there, it sure is picturesque. These are from walks I took to Mont Royal and the surrounding park

Somebody is reading a book in the shade in the park. In the distance, we see a man sit under a tree. People gather in the park.

We’re up to 2018 and I was feeling limited by the phone camera for a simple reason: I’m just not a wide-angle shooter

50mm-equiv. on a phone is a luxury and anything longer is unheard of. Elsewhere, it’s an affordable normal lens. So, I got myself a Fuji X-T20

A view down the underpass under a railway bridge. We see the silhouette of a person on the other side A scruffy discarded chair was left under a bridge in Montreal. It really did have that venomous green look. Concrete blocks and barbwire along a bridge.

“How to add syntax highlighting to code as a user types in realtime with vanilla JavaScript | Go Make Things”

“A lot of stuff is just fine. - Chris Coyier”

True. One major wrinkle, tho. Just how fine any given content website is is generally inversely proportional to how much time a web dev has worked on it

Granted, they’re generally implementing other people’s bad ideas, but still

“AI Startups Are Already Running Into Some Serious Problems”

“siderea | I Blame the W3C’s HTML Standard for Ordered Lists”

That thing where a community fork of a project, by most of the core contributors, makes you feel optimistic that the new fork is more sustainable

“Announcing Biome”

I began to feel stifled by the iPhone’s camera and realised I really did enjoy photography so I might as well pursue it as a hobby

Because I’d been using the iPhone I had a pretty clear idea of what I wanted from a dedicated camera

But that’s a story for another day

Ahead we see a couple walking along the sidewalk in a Montréal street.

Then I moved to Montréal in 2016. In hindsight, this was a mistake, for reasons that have nothing to do with photography, but it did give me the opportunity to finally take a picture of Habitat 67 in person, which has always been my favourite bit of architecture, even as a kid

Habitat 67 in all its glory. One of the greatest piece of brutalist architecture ever built It’s snowing and somebody is walking through an underpass under a railway bridge. A view down a busy roadway in Montréal.

The high point in my iPhone photography is probably the trip we took to the top of Snæfellsjökull.

(The company that sold these trips is since defunct as the owner died suddenly, IIRC.)

Hard to go wrong with this view.

A view of the horizon around Snæfellsjökull. Mountains. Lots of mountains. A group of people walk up the peak of Snæfellsjökull. People walk down the peak of Snæfellsjökull.

We’re up to 2015 in my amateur photography and I’ve discovered that, in good light, iPhones had become pretty good cameras. They do a decent job and will be all you need for many photographers

A tourist stands on a ridge next to a geothermally active area. A group of tourists walk along a ridge, appearing in silhouette A black and white picture of a leafless tree. A photo of the side of a house, a bench, and a table. The words “Íslensk matarhefð” are stencilled on the side of the house, which translates as “Icelandic food culture.”

“How often do you get to rewrite and rethink?”

😁

“Book Notes: “Out of the Software Crisis” by Baldur Bjarnason - Jim Nielsen’s Blog”

😁

“milen.me — Premature Optimization: Universally Misunderstood”

“Money Is Pouring Into AI. Skeptics Say It’s a ‘Grift Shift.’”

Tech is inflating a new financial bubble just in time.

“You Are Not The Man In The Arena”

Much like cryptocurrency, the AI conversation almost always discusses what might happen rather than what is happening,

“Safari Un-Intelligent Tracking Prevention: Data loss by design”

Experiment of the day: turns out deno run --allow-all npm:@11ty/eleventy works. At least for the simple preexisting project that I tried. --serve doesn’t work, but since deno comes with a file server in the standard lib that’s not a deal-breaker.

So, this looks like a very interesting module github.com/WebReflec…