Coffee at Öhrmans cafe
What’s left when the colour goes
First time out after a week of what I call the flu and everyone else calls a cold.
My legs weren’t really with me, but the camera came along anyway.
Grey, still, nobody in a hurry to get anywhere.
Exactly the kind of day that promises nothing.
Leica Camera News
Mari Amman is an American-Italian contemporary artist working across disciplines: photography, installation, video, poetry, painting, sculpture, textile and design.
She describes her own work as research-based, and uses terms such as Geological Empathy and Sublime Rheology to explore the relationship between people, nature, technology and built environments.
Young, Inspiring and International: LOBA Emerging Talent
The German photographer Serghei Duve won the 2025 Newcomer Award with his series “Bright Memory”.
In the project he explores his family’s connection to Transnistria.
📷 LEICA M11 Monochrom · Summilux-M 1:1.4/50 ASPH. · f/1.7 · 1/4000s · ISO 125 · 50mm · 2026-08-28
Coffee at Öhrmans cafe
The bench
She sat alone on the bench, looking out across the harbour basin.
The boats were all still there, every one in its berth, none of them going anywhere.
The season is nearly over, and you can see it.
I took the picture from a distance.
Then she turned around and saw me.
That gave me a second frame, and it became a different kind of picture.
The look straight into the camera, the arm over the backrest, the empty bench carrying on to the right.
Suddenly I’m in the picture too, even though you can’t see me.
Afterwards we talked for a while.
She takes photographs herself and paints watercolours, she told me, so I pointed her towards Bildgruppen Prisma.
That’s the sort of thing that happens when you go out with the camera even on a day you really ought to have stayed home.
The editing was simple: crop away the tarmac at the bottom, set a black point so the jacket gets some weight.
In flat grey weather nothing is truly black and nothing is truly white, and without those two the picture just looks dirty.
I first pulled Blacks down to −25 and lost all the detail in her trousers.
Back up to −12, Shadows raised, and then it sat right.
Coffee at Öhrmans cafe
The piles
Further out stand the remains of an old jetty in the water.
The jetty has been gone for years.
The piles are still there.
The problem here was that everything sat in the same grey: reeds, water, sky and piles all carried the same weight, and then the eye settles nowhere.
So I burned the reeds and the bush down towards black until they became a frame instead of a distraction, and put a radial filter over the piles to lift them out of the greyscale.
A gull is sitting on one of them, roughly in the middle of the row.
That small detail makes all the difference.
📷 iPhone 15 · iPhone 15 back dual wide camera 5.96mm f/1.6 · f/1.6 · 1/4000s · ISO 40 · 5.96mm · 2026-08-28
The geese
The geese
Björnö beach was packed.
A couple of geese is a note to self.
Two hundred is a photograph.
They lay along a diagonal by the shoreline, but in the original they were squeezed into a narrow band while empty sand took the bottom third and empty sky the top one.
A panoramic crop solved it.
Now the flock fills the frame and the diagonal gets to do its work.
Texture +20 gave both the plumage and the wet edge of the sand the structure that holds the whole thing together.
Daisy
Daisy
And then Hässlö, where Daisy stood out on the apron in her SAS livery with Fridtjof Viking painted on the nose.
Built in 1943.
Flew over Normandy.
Still airworthy.
She’s only resting between assignments, and that’s why the empty concrete around her doesn’t feel like decay but like waiting.
A graduated filter across the sky, tilted so it follows the line of the fuselage itself.
A radial one over the aircraft, Texture +15, just enough to wake up the rivets.
And Blacks back to −5, because on a silver aeroplane the underside is the best part there is.
It catches light reflected off the concrete.
Let it go coal black and you’ve got a paper cut-out standing on the apron.
Pictures from today’s outing
