Guns and pizza

I'm back on it now. Traveling the country with my 4x5 and I'm loving it. Needless to say I'm also scared shitless. Negatives? Trusting light meters? Not being able to see the outcome straight away? Am I stupid? Nope, just loving it! It such a delightful way of working. Coming to a location, pause for a while. Take a breath. Look around a bit confused. Another breath of air. Fresh air. Today it was even snowing. Find that thing you think is it. That spot, pile of dirt, cliff, track, bridge, window whatever it is. Walk towards where you think it's the best place to shoot it from and then look through whatever you have that will give you the impression of how it will look framed. Nod a few times. Keep that inner conversation going, that congratulates yourself for finding this nice shot. Then set up the tripod, mount the camera on it. Fold out the bellows and mount the lens. Pop the hood for the ground glass and look. Take a long thorough look, scratch your head again, sigh a bit then focus and realise that it's shit!

This is the delightful thing, now you get to think why it's shit. You just don't snap away. You actually have to think. Then you do whatever adjustments necessary to fix it. They might be major, such as going to another location, or they might just be minor like recomposing the shot a tad bit. And if you're doing this while it's snowing you'll get the added pleasure of freasing your fingers madly. And with large format photography there's a lot of nobs to be twisted and turned and you really want to feel your fingertips for that.

I just love it! It's the best thing ever. I'd turn my digital gear in anytime if it where not for that thing that is called money. I think that one shot of 4x5 here in Sweden will set you back aproximately €10 and then add another €6 per contact for every forth frame. So yeah, I get the digi thing in that regard.

Another really nice thing about jobs like the one I'm doing now is the lone time in the car. Ok, it really sucks from an CO2 perspective, but listening to public service radio (especially Swedish Radio P1) while driving around looking for the next spot is just bliss.

So what about the Guns and pizza thing? While I'm up here in the north shooting the final places for my latest assignment from Fokus I managed to sneak by one of the factories I still had to shoot for my story "Med ryggen mot kriget" (sorry the text is only in Swedish but if you want to see the English text just e-mail me or wait for me to put it up somewhere else....like my website that I'm never getting around to set up). So there I was again taking some long exposure shots of random shit close to an arms factory. Felt good. It felt good all the way back to the hotel and from there on to the pizza place. While deciding what pizza I should have I realized how ingrained in society arms manufacturing can become and to what degrees it can shape the local culture. There, right there on the cold yellow pages of the menu the final proof was, the pizza "Hägglunds".

And if you haven't already had a look at the magnificent job on the Swedish arms trade by the wonderful photographer Moa Karlberg accompanied by the journalist Christopher Holmbäck, well you just should.





Aimpoint, Malmö ©petter cohen
More than 500 000 redpoint sights produced by Aimpoint in Malmö are today
being used by the US military. The last order to them was for 163 000 new
units.