I shot this dramatic storm front a few years ago. It hovered over our street for a few minutes and then moved on, dropping a torrential downpour just a few km north of us. I don’t think I’ve ever published the photo here on the site and as I’m soon about to rearrange our company’s domain structure a bit, I figured why not use it to illustrate some nostalgia.

I registered the domain www.raboff.com in 1998 without thinking too much about what I was doing. It just seemed like a good move to secure my last name before anyone else did. I’d bought an expensive network-enabled Macintosh Performa 630 a few years earlier and had found loads of uses for it. It allowed me to scan photos for art projects, research subjects I was lecturing on as an instructor at Gothenburg International Hospitality College and it helped me prepare for classes I taught as a substitute teacher at Vuxengymnasiet. I loved that little computer and it served me well for a few years. It was my second Mac after the portable but less useful Powerbook 100 that I’d bought six years earlier. If I had to guess, I’d say there have been at least 15 Apple branded computers since the Performa.

Anyway, back to the mid 1990s. This is when I collaborated a great deal with Johan, a Swedish-English fellow who was much more web savvy than I but both us felt super excited about all the possibilities the Internet could unleash. We weren’t visionaries by any stretch of the imagination, except perhaps in our own minds, but there was no doubt that we saw the seemingly unlimited potential of what could be accomplished with so many people connected to each other.

Where most of the domains on the World Wide Web were still in a very primitive stage insofar that layout and design was terrible to look at and sites were clunky and unwieldily to navigate, Email was a powerful communication tool that was graphically mature, sleek almost, and most importantly, offered a user-friendly means of communicating to friends and family all over the world. After logging on via the modem’s blinks, blips and beeps, emailing someone felt relatively instantaneous and therefore tremendously gratifying. You couldn’t use your landline simultaneously once you were online, though.

I vividly remember how launching my dedicated email application Eudora and then watching new messages pop up in my inbox was hypnotically exciting stuff. And above all, when compared to message boards, an email could be made endlessly personal by attaching photos, illustrations and even dingbats. I could easily spend hours on end writing and editing emails and waiting for answers to arrive with Eudora’s tinny chime.

Somewhere in the depths of our storage room, I know Charlotte has archived a tidy collection of printed emails that I sent her in those early days of our relationship. And I’m sure Elle will love reading through a few of them sometime in the future. I think my very first email address was burp@pp.telia.se

Hard to believe that twenty years have passed since that email address meant anything.

Sadly, email seems to be heading towards the same pasture as the dodo bird. I’m sounding like a crumugeon now, but I can’t see how the various chat and messaging apps are worthy replacements for a well-crafted email. Which is likely exactly how folks feel that prefer handwritten letters over those written digitally.

Currently in Siem Reap in northern Cambodia. We experienced Phnom Penh a few years ago, but haven’t been to Siem Reap in over a decade. It’s cozy here, just as I remember it. Not much seems to have changed. Everything still feels scaled down and manageable, from a visitors perspective. No looming highrises like in the Cambodian capital. Yet now there’s even more of an abundance with really good, reasonably priced restaurants, pubs and cheap foot massage shops, hairdressers and spas.

If your into beer, several places here will pour you a tall glass of local draft for as little as $1. A tasty and almost filling Khmer dinner will only set you back about $4 and to enjoy an hour long foot massage, most places will charge just five buckaroos.

Why I’m referring to prices in US dollars, you ask? Well, because even if the local currency, the »riel«, is the official method of payment, the de facto and widely preferred unofficial second currency is for whatever reason the US dollar. Sad in way, but it makes paying (and tipping) here very simple and straightforward. Siem Reapians are easy-going, generous with their smiles and ever-so-polite, without being subserviant. It’s about as safe here as anywhere else I’ve been in Southeast Asia. Never feel unsafe in this part of the world – as I unfortunately do from time to time back home in Malmö.

We spent yesterday’s sunset and this morning’s sunrise climbing the steep steps of stupas, walking down long palatial corridors and wandering into enormous prayer halls at Angkor Wat and Phnom Bakheng. And today, we explored the giant trees that have reclaimed the temple of Ta Prohm. What should of been a fairly serene visit to this ancient and sacred buddhist site, was anything but. We shared most of our excursions with some of the most rowdy, loud-mouthed, flag-waving, selfie-taking, ill-dressed tourists I’ve ever had the displeasure of rubbing elbows with. Not all, but most were from the Middle Kingdom. A forebearer of things to come?

I’ve been shooting travel photos professionally for close to 20 years now and have had hundreds (if not thousands) of my images published in dozens of magazines and newspapers in Scandinavia, Europe and the US. So I can say with some assertiveness that I don’t find it particularly hard to photograph temples here. Quite the opposite. With the right lens arsenal (primes, in my case), shooting at the optimum time of day for the best possible light (and perhaps lugging around a travel tripod), it should be hard to screw up. The only entirely uncontrollable, capricious factor that has ruffled my feathers, is with the many others I have to share the scenes with and how insensitive or uncooperative they turn out to be.

I totally get that there is no real reason for me to think I should have priority over anyone else. It’s not that which I am referring to. I’m talking about plain and simple politeness and a reasonable perception and consideration of what’s happening beyond the group’s tireless flag-waving. That’s all.

To say I’m not a huge fan of institutionalized religion would be a massive understatement. Don’t misunderstand me, though. I get that religion is important to many, many billions of people across the globe, and as long as the faith is personal and practiced unjudgmentally, I have zero problems respecting it.

Walking through Angkor Wat’s massive temple grounds made me think about religion again. How complex a role it has played in human history –  in a way that no other species on this planet could even begin to comprehend. Not even dolphins, I think. So, to see all the trees do there outmost to reclaim the temple ruins and expand the forrest around Angkor Wat, as if there actually were Ents from Tolkien’s ring saga doing the reclaiming, was somehow soothing.

I’ve loved sunflowers ever since attending art college in Visby, the capital of Gotland, a Swedish island in the Baltic Sea. While there, I read a few books about Vincent Van Gogh and was – like so many others – completely mesmarized by his series of earthy hued paintings and thick, rough sketches inspired by sunflowers from around the town of Arles in Provence, France.

I discovered these sunflowers just the other day in Benjasiri Park, one of Bangkok’s most beautiful urban oasis.

I used Moment’s wide angle lens attached to my iPhone for the majority of the shots and was blown away by how close I could get to the flowers and the shallow depth of field the puny albeit sharm glass provided.

Taking street portraits of random, everyday folks I meet during walks in any part of the world, is inspiring but can also certainly be a multi-level challenge. To be able to capture a series of unstaged, authentic portraits, I need to be prepared on a technical, emotional and creative level.

Let me explain.

Technically. Since I don’t possess Spiderman’s lightning speed and can switch setting and dial in optimal settings on the fly, I have to prep the camera before approaching my subject. Sneaky style, if you know what I mean. Often I’ll recognize someone I want to photograph, make a 180 degree turn so I can get all my stuff in order before he or she notices me and then turn back around again and start working the shot.

If you’re shooting with autofocus and auto ISO enabled, then all you’ll really need to decide on is depth of fied and how to compose the portrait. As long as the capture size in the camera’s preferences is set to a large enough size (JPEG or, even better, RAW), you should be provided with a big enough photo to allow for recomposing (by scaling up/cropping) in your preferred image editing software. All of the photos above were shot with an iPhone 7+ using Apple’s standard camera app. All of them have been cropped to bring forth what I felt was the best composition for each subject.

Emotionally. I try to be both humble and decisive when attempting to photograph interesting people – or, people in interesting situations – that I come across during a street walk. Above all, I always smile just before conjuring up my camera and looking ever-so unassuming as I ask to take a photo of them. The real trick is to startle folks a little and hope they feel charmed and flattered by the very thought that someone actually wants to take a photograph them. Hopefully, I’ll get the shot before they start analyzing the situation too much. If I can only get a subject to freeze physically (and intellectually) for just a few seconds, I’ll usually be able to capture a few frames. Subjects who are standing still are much, much easier to shoot than getting those on the move to stop in their tracks and let some stranger point a camera at them. I also find reading the mood to be a key variable. Statistically, about 70% of everyone I ask agrees to let me take their portrait. Especially if the camera I’m using is small and discreet. Like a cellphone…

I’ve just ordered the new iPhone Xs Max and though it comes with a bigger screen, the phones physical size isn’t bigger than my current, two year old iPhone. What has gotten much bigger, though, is the camera sensor. Apple’s camera team has increased the sensor size by a whopping 30%. In addition to all the benefits a larger sensor provides, like better lowlight sensitivity, better color rendering and wider dynamic range – thanks in part to larger pixels (Apple opted for larger pixels of higher quality instead of increasing the amount of pixels) – the new iPhone models have vastly improved optical image stabilization. To me, the latter is really interesting. See, if the camera sensor can move to counter-balance a hand’s shake, the shutter speed can be lowered without introducing blur in the photo or having to increase the ISO level – which inevitably adds noise to the portrait. Sure, I can always reduce noise during the editing process, but the cleaner the image is when captured, the more leeway I have to make adjustments after the fact. In short, shit in, shit out.

Creatively. Taking street portraits can at times be pretty stressful. Even if I’ve seduced the subject into letting me take his or her portrait and my camera’s ready to go, at best, I still have only but a few seconds to compose and make sure there’s not too much going on in the background or on either side of the subject. Unless of course it’s my objective to contextualize the portrait using the surroundings. As with the female motorcycle taxi driver pictured above (center).

Like many other photographers I’ve talked about this with, taking street portraits is a heck of a lot easier in Asia than most other places. Especially in the US and Europe where urbanites tend to be so abnormally self-concious about their “image”, they often freak out when I approach them for a street portrait. Where as in countries like Thailand, Indonesia, Cambodia and Laos, folks are generally un-shy and happy as can be to pose. And they’re also easy to get smiling, which is isn’t a prerequisite, but after all, a smile does make for a nicer portrait.

It’s been mostly fair weather since I arrived in Southeast Asia close to a month ago. A few monsoon showers, but no flooding or unbearable heatwaves, either.

I would perhaps not extend the meteorological description to include adjectives like cool or even pleasant, but from time to time, a soothing breeze sneaks its way through Bangkok’s myriad of skyscrapers and blows gently on your face. Excuse the double negative, but for a moment, the weather is not entirely disagreeable.

Meanwhile, in Malmö, one of autumns first storms arrived yesterday. The footage is from late August last year, when I storm rolled in to southern Sweden and Västra Hamnen where we live. More visuals from Malmö can be viewed here.