andreasviklund.com

I posted this image on the local Jokkmokk blog yesterday, and got an e-mail today asking about the background story of the image. Here it is:

The photos are taken in Nautijaur, a small village not very far from Jokkmokk. One photo is taken during the easter holiday 2004, the other in the end of July 2005. Johannas father owns a small house in the village, where we spend a couple of weekends every year. It is always relaxing and calm, and since there is no internet access, no phone, no traffic and no noise, it is possible to completely disconnect from the regular everyday life and just live…

The village is covered in snow during the winter and spring, making it perfect for snowmobile adventures. In the summer, Nautijaur is a paradise in green with huge flower-covered fields surrounded by the forest and a sea. And in the fall it is possible to find both cloudberries and the rare and delicious arctic raspberriy in the area.

If I ever launch an online photo gallery, there will be lots of photos from Nautijaur in it…

Here she is, our new family member. Her name is River, and she is a 10 weeks old Papillon girl. She is incredibly cute, but also incredibly dangerous. Her teeth are sharp, and she can make a surprise attack bite at anytime just for the fun of it. But that will get better soon, when she gets older…

River is the second dog in the family. The first one is Elven, 3,5 years old, also a Papillon girl. Elven has a buty time right now, since she also gets attacked sometimes when River is around. But while I walk away in pain, Elven gives River a solid education about how things work. It is usually very loud lessons and often very physical, but never violent. The two girls are already best friends! Elven has accepted River as a family member, and when they get tired from playing they often sleep side by side in the livingroom floor.

There are more photos of River on Johannas site. The language is Swedish, but if you are familiar with the andreas01 WordPress theme you will find your way around the site anyway.

I published my first online photo album in 1997. Back then, a lot of manual editing was needed to keep the gallery running. It was a lot of work, but it was worth it since it was incredibly fun to get feedback and comments for the photos and images! Since then, I've had a few different kinds of photo albums online. But all of them have been maintained manually. And now that I want to launch a new gallery for photos and images, I am looking for a good image gallery script.

I have tried many gallery scripts but never found anyone I felt was right for me. All the big scripts (Gallery2, Coppermine, Singapore and so on) have had too many features - and they have often been very hard to customize. And the smaller scripts (Minigal, Simple PHP Gallery, Lazy Gallery and so on) have just not worked as I wanted my gallery to work. But now I am trying ZenPhoto which seems to be pretty much what I want. It is small, light, based on PHP/MySQL and it gives a lot of options for the design and layout. It should be perfectly possible to build into my website, and there are even plugins that connects the gallery with WordPress. But the technical part is not very interesting right now. What I have in mind is the purpose of the gallery. Why do I want to add a gallery? What would it add to this site? Would it be useful for anyone?

I am not any photographer, but I take a lot of photos with my little digital camera. I have taken more than 8.000 images over the last couple of years. It would be fun to make a small part of these images available to others, because I am pretty sure that there are people who could use them in some way. So one of the features that the gallery would provide would be free stock photos. Not of professional quality, but still usable and of course in full resolution. I also have a lot of digital art that I have created over the last 10 years. Manipulated photos, graphics design, wallpapers, 3d renders, resource material, design patterns and other things that has been archived for years. With an image gallery, I could make a section for free desktop wallpapers and printable art as well. It could be usable for template designers that need background images as well. A third feature would be documentation. A realtime biography in images. Good for friends, family and anyone interested in my adventures. Looking back a few years, I could post concert and event photos from the time of TSEC and Lagoona, because I have a lot of that…

And finally, a gallery would give me a chance to show you something that I think everybody should see: The incredible beauty of the area where I live! It is everywhere… I can't explain it in words, because it just doesn't work. How can I possibly describe the feeling I get when I sit by the riverside a late evening in June, listening to the water hitting the stones on the beach - under the intensive light of the midnight sun? Or the excitement I feel when I look up at the dark sky a late december night, and see the arctic light dancing right above my head? Photos doesn't give it complete justice, but a single picture still says more than a thousand words.

But as always, it takes time for me to get it done. Writing this post is a try to force myself to speed things up a bit! Comments, suggestions and feedback is of course very welcome, as always. I will once again need a couple of betatesters for the gallery once I start uploading images to it. Currently, I have only added a few old wallpapers just to test the basic functionality. But it seems to work well. Next step is to customize the design. I won't post the url to the gallery here, because it is not a supported feature and the images are not free to download and use just yet. So if you find the gallery on my site (it is quite easy), please use it with care for now!

Photos:

1. Suorva, with the magnificent waterfalls - and the Sourva dam in the background.
2. Ice crystals on the grass and on the trees, on a cold winter day in Porjus.
3. Harsprångsfallet, once a major waterfall but now dried up because of the dam.
4. Midnight sun over the Lule River in Porjus.
5. The Akkats dam - with art by Bengt Lindström, Lars Pirak and Lars J:son Nutti.