About one month ago João Paulo Casagrande Bertoldo finished his internship at Kelda. He started in June 2018 and worked with the Bivrost data portal in his time here. The main outcome of his stay at Kelda was an important extension of the Bivrost to describe phases and operations in the field data. This tool will be a vital part of the continued development of the Bivrost product for reports of the progress of an operation.
Hi Joao, could you tell us a bit about yourself?
I’m 24 years old and come from Paraná in Brazil. In 2013 I started at the university in Brazil and originally I planned to finish in 2018. However, I got some great opportunities during my studies that I had to go for. Halfway through my studies I was able to go to France for an 1 year internship. To do this I had to pause my Brazilian studies. In France I learnt about the school Mines Paris Tech and when I got back to Brazil I applied for this school where I was approved after a general test and interview. When I finish my education I will have a double master degree, one in France and one in Brazil.
What are your main interests and what directions have you chosen in your education?
When I first stated at the university in Brazil I studied mechatronics, but during a summer job in a Brazilian company I realized that computer science was an even more interesting field for me. When I applied to the internship in France I was able to chose computer science.
What about outside school, what do you like to do? I’ve understood that you are learning to play piano.
Yes, I’m learning the piano now. By chance my housing in Norway had a piano when I arrived. I’ve though about learning to play an instrument before and now I had the chance. At youtube I found an online course that I follow.
Are you the typical millennial, where youtube is one of the main sources of information?
Haha! Yes, that is true. I spend a lot of time on youtube and learn very much there.
How did you hear about Kelda, and what made you want to come here?
The first I heard from Kelda was through an association at school, where Kelda is a partner. I got a t-shirt from them with the Kelda logo on. Later, Kelda had a presentation at our school. I didn’t have the chance to go but heard of the Company from some other students. I decided to apply for an internship at Kelda after getting an email from a former Kelda intern. In the interview process, I got really interested and I had no doubt that Kelda was the right choice for an internship.
Your main task at Kelda was to design the add-on to Bivrost. This add-on we’ve come to call Mivrost. How has the work process been?
This is the first time I did such a complete work process. Kelda didn’t pose a specific solution so I had the opportunity to design the solution myself. I started planning and through discussions with Kelda employees we decided what was needed. The process was successful, but we didn’t achieve the final goal which was to use an automated machine learning algorithm to analyze and tag field operations.
Our impression of you is that you’re extremely organized and a very good planner. Are these skills something you focus on, or does it come more natural to you?
In general it comes natural to me. I usually plan in advance because it makes my work easier and more efficient. I fear to forget stuff, therefore I make notes. When these notes get messy I try to organize them and then I end up with a plan.
Do you feel that your ideas and suggestions are taken into account in the product development?
Definitively yes. Especially within the Bivrost team and when we were many people we had the chance to have good discussions. I also though the sprint reviews and retrospects were really good because they offered a proper space and time to discuss progress and process that is not that easy to discuss every day.
The last weeks of your internship you have spent a lot of time and effort to share your knowledge and teaching the new Bivrost team about the product. How did you plan this process and how has it gone?
I knew in advance that it would be my responsibility to pass the knowledge. I noticed what could be better from the beginning (In my own learning phase). To improve this I created som ‘proof of concept’ (POC) tasks that is really good to ensure that you learn things correctly, for instance using the correct frameworks.
Another this we realized is that doing code reviews are really good. I made the new Bivrost team present the already existing code. This forced them to really make an effort learning and understanding the code.
Thanks for taking the time to talk to the Kelda Blog editorial office. Before we let you go, can you tell us a little bit about what you plan for your next internship?
I will go to a company in New York called Data Dog. I heard about it at the same time I heard about Kelda.
On a side note, what do you think of the Norwegian winter?
Actually, this is the best winter I’ve experienced in Europe! For the first time I really enjoyed the winter. It is very cool to have snow.
Louis working in the Server Rack where he makes sure Bivrost runs as it should
As yet another internship student get ready to leave Kelda for new internship opportunities we managed to do an interview with Louis Meyrat before it got too late. Louis has, like Thomas, been a part of the Bivrost product and an ever-growing list of interns from Mines ParisTech in France. Since he arrived at Kelda, Louis has constantly shown his dedication to the development of Bivrost. His feeling of responsibility to the product also shows in the interview below. We’re happy to present another interview in the interns-series of the Kelda blog, with what I think we could safely say is the most experienced coder we’ve had as an intern so far.
First of all, you’ve been here for nearly 6 months now, how has your overall stay been?
That’s a very general question, but I have to say it’s been good. Like Thomas, this is my first time in Norway and in any Nordic country actually. Kelda was my first internship and real work experience. I have done an internship at a factory to learn how it is to work, but that was much shorter and didn’t give the same kind of experience. My stay here at Kelda has been great. It’s a very small company where everyone is friendly. Even though I don’t have that much work experience I think I contribute more to the product by working in a small company than in a bigger one. We’ve still had sort of a top-down approach in the Bivrost project with a Product Owner that decided the next steps in the development, but our inputs were also listened to.
On a more personal level, can you tell us a little bit about yourself, your age, where are you from in France and how did you end up at your school?
I’m 21 years old from Toulon in southern France. A fun fact is that this city has one of the best rugby teams in France. After finishing high school I started preparation for engineering school at a school close to Versailles. Here we learned a lot of math and physics. I then started at Mines ParisTech two years ago were I’m studying Management of Information Systems. One of the reasons I wanted to do computer science is that it interested me greatly since high school when I started coding by myself. I’ve done some computer science courses at Mines, but I also enjoy physics which I want to be proficient in. To learn more coding languages I’ve done many small projects by myself and with others. From this, I’ve learned that planning is very important, even when you code by yourself since you easily end up with a very messy code if you don’t have a plan.
What about outside school, what do you like to do?
Sort of related to school, but in my spare time, I’ve been part of the robotics group at schools. I didn’t work very much with the automatics, but I made most of the logic in the code. Like I mentioned earlier, I’ve done code projects by myself and with others. Other than coding I like anime moves and Japanese culture and language. I know enough Japanese to be understood, but not the advanced stuff.
How did you hear about Kelda, and what made you want to go here?
Like Thomas, I heard of Kelda from Pierre-Nicolas. I wanted to do an internship that involved full-stack development and Kelda offered this opportunity. I was not very familiar with web development before coming here, which was another motivating factor for me. When I applied I expected to work on frontend and backend tasks in Bivrost and learn to use the newest architectures in web development. In hindsight, the internship was exactly how I expected it to be.
When you arrived in June, we had quite a large team working together on the Bivrost project. Due to this reason we started working with Scrum, how was it work in a big team and what did you like with the way we worked with Scrum?
I’ve just heard the word Scrum before starting at Kelda, so it was really new to me. It was interesting to have two weeks deadlines where we had to deliver running code in the end. Overall I think the Scrum process was great to work with and we got to do much work together as a team.
While you’ve been here we have quickly come to realize that you’re brilliant on Linux and you’ve become our go-to-Linux expert. Especially if our main servers need maintenance. You are a hardcore Linux user, right?
I don’t feel like I’m a Linux expert, but I chose to work in it because I think it’s the best platform to do development in Bivrost. I also did some maintenance of the Kelda servers that host Bivrost and ensured that they were updated and running. To me, this is a part of being a full-stack developer. Other than that, I don’t feel like I did too much in Linux while I was here. I got to learn more about Apache and Docker when deploying Bivrost to the servers, but still, I’m not too familiar with those frameworks.
Do you feel that your ideas and suggestions are taken into account in the Bivrost development and future tasks?
Yes, I would say so. Most of my suggestions were related to organization and optimization of the code. This are things the product owner does not directly notice since he is not inside the code himself. The suggestions I’ve posted shows up quite fast in the product backlog.
Since you arrived the Bivrost project has taken huge steps and is now being shipped out to our customers. How do you feel about other people (outside Kelda) now starting to use it, is it motivating?
I think it’s very rewarding to see the product in use by external users. It is good to have Kelda using employees the product, but it is even more interesting when we have external users. Of course, this gives much more responsibility to the developers to ensure the code works as it should. We need to be more careful when we deploy a new version of the Bivrost code and test it thoroughly before finalizing a deploy.
Throughout your internship, we’ve seen that you are quick to respond to bug reports on Bivrost. This has also happened in some weekends, where you have stepped in and fixed the problem with short notice.
I don’t like bugs and when I hear about something not working properly I want to fix the problem right away. I feel that when we have deployed some code that does not work as intended I need to take responsibility and fix them. This is especially true when we have external customers using the product.
After working with web development for almost half a year now, do you have a favorite framework? And what frameworks don’t you like working with?
For my favorite framework, I have to say React. It is a very nice way to make UI without templating. You can also add small logic in the rendering which is very convenient, but be careful it can easily get too much logic in the rendering and that is very bad. React is very nice since it can be used to create mobile and desktop applications as well as web applications. For instance, the new Skype application is written with React. Based on what I’ve learned in my internship I can absolutely see why javascript is getting bigger and bigger.
On the other hand, I can’t find a framework I dislike. I would rather say that I dislike the lack of framework. Some parts of the Bivrost code still don’t use all frameworks as they are intended to be used, which quickly becomes a bit frustrating.
Can you mention some of the main packages you’ve worked with?
The main packages/frameworks I’ve worked with are Material UI, React, D3, Redux, Meteor packages. Python and javascript. All these packages are used extensively in Bivrost.
What is the biggest challenge you’ve encountered in your internship, especially related to the development you have done here?
I think it’s really hard to write proper documentation. It should not be too long, but still descriptive. Someone not working with Bivrost should be able to understand the documentation without spending too much time. I think it is hard to be concise and give proper information at the same time.
What is the biggest outcome of your time as an intern here at Kelda?
When I got here I didn’t know any of the frameworks we use. In my six months stay, I learned a lot about all of them and are now quite proficient. I also learned about Scrum & Agile development which I think will be very useful in the future.
What do you think about Norway as a country? While you were here we had the warmest summer in 70 years. Did you notice the warm weather, or is it just a usual summer in France?
Well, for one thing, the summer was warmer than expected, but now it’s starting to get too cold and dark for me. I’m glad I can avoid the Norwegian winter. One thing that surprised me a bit is how nice the city is and how much nature it is close to the city. It might be because Porsgrunn is a small city, but it was really nice. I like the public transport system and bike trails which is really nice for the population. Many cities in France don’t have these things, even larger cities. The infrastructure in Norway is really nice I think.
Has this work been something you would return to?
The work has been very interesting, but if I get to chose I would like to work on more low-level programming. I think that debugging C/C++ code is very fun, especially when you have to find really challenging bugs. I miss bugs due to pointers and compilers, which we didn’t have much of in the Bivrost project.
Before we let you go, can you tell us a little bit about what you plan for your next internship? Also, where do you want to be in the future? Do you imagine yourself working as a developer or are there other career paths that interest you more?
I definitely want to be a developer, but maybe not web development. Of course, I’m open for web development if I can’t find anything else, but preferably I would work with more low-level coding. I would also like to do something with more users than we have in Bivrost now. I think it would be very rewarding to have 1000+ users, but of course, this comes with more responsibility.
I don’t know where my next internship will be yet, but I’ve applied to a company in Canada which does cloud computing on GPUs and also to a place in Japan. I’m considering to apply to UK or Germany as well. Maybe it is time to practice my German again?
Again, thanks for taking the time to talk to us. The Kelda Blog editorial office wish you all the best in your time ahead. Thanks for taking the time to talk to the Kelda Blog editorial office.
At Kelda we’ve had quite a few interns the last years. The last six months several students have been working with our online data portal Bivrost. This data portal stores and visualizes all our field data from drilling and provide a simple interface for analysis and downloading of data for our clients. Thomas is one of these interns which has been an important part of the development team the last six months when Bivrost went from being a somewhat immature product to a fully functional product we can license out to our clients. He studies at Mines ParisTech in Franceas most of our interns has done so far. Without further ado, I would like to introduce Thomas.
First of all, you’ve been here for nearly 6 months now, how has your overall stay been?
It’s been great! This is my first real working experience and it was very interesting doing it in Norway. My stay at Kelda was my first of two internships which I chose to do at my school. Actually, the last six months had many “firsts”. First job, first internship, first time I’ve done development and coding in large scale and also my first time in Norway.
Can you tell us a little bit about yourself, where are you from in France and how did you end up at your school?
I’m 21 years old and grew up in Arras in Northern France, quite close to Belgium. When I finished high school I knew I wanted to become an engineer and therefore I chose to start pre-engineering school. This is a school with a high focus on mathematics and preparing us for further engineering education later. After finishing this school I applied for several universities, but Mines was highest ranked and located in Paris. I really wanted to live somewhere central and therefore Mines was something I wanted. Seen in hindsight, I’m really happy with my choice and I’ve really enjoyed my education so far.
Can you tell us a little bit about your interests and the direction you have chosen at your school?
The direction of study I selected at Mines is called Engineering Design & Management. It is a wide topic but focuses mainly on finding and developing new concepts. The field of use is quite wide, and we learn that these skills can be utilized in many different fields.
How did you hear about Kelda, and what made you want to go here?
I first heard about Kelda from the president of ASTI, a student organization at our school. Kelda is a partner of ASTI and the president for the organization sent out an email about Kelda. Later, I received an email from Pierre-Nicolas, which were doing an internship at Kelda at the time. Pierre-Nicolas’ email described the work environment at Kelda and was inspiring. These emails triggered my interest and made me apply for an internship at Kelda.
When you arrived in June, we had quite a large team working together on the Bivrost project. Due to this reason we started working with Scrum, how was it work in a big team and what did you like with the way we worked with Scrum?
The big team we had, in the beginning, was fun and the first couple of weeks we did a workshop together to learn as much as possible before Pierre-Nicolas had to leave. We started using the different packages of Bivrost and doing some small bugfixes as an introduction to working with Bivrost. When we finished this introduction we started working using the Scrum technique. I’ve never used Scrum before, but as most work environments are new to me it was easy to adapt. Working as a team together and solving a specific problem was interesting and fun. It was both hard and motivating to have two weeks deadlines to finish the sprint goal. Especially in the beginning we often overestimated how much we could do in two weeks, but after a few sprints we learned and got better.
After one and a half month, our previous intern Pierre Nicolas left, and you took up the role of Scrum master for the rest of the team. How did you like that role, and how has it worked out do you think?
I liked the role of Scrum master very much. Especially the part of being more part of the planning of the tasks and communicating with the product owner. By doing this work I felt more invested in the product and also had a larger impact on the direction of development the product was going to take than I would have had as a pure developer. As a Scrum master, I had to do more administration to ensure that all tasks were up to date and help the product owner maintaining the backlog. This administration was interesting, but also hard as I often want to start doing the actual implementation.
Since you arrived the Bivrost project has taken huge steps and is now being shipped out to our customers. How do you feel about other people (outside Kelda) now starting to use it, is it motivating?
I feel that my internship here can be divided into two main parts. In the first half, we worked a lot with improving the Bivrost already existing Bivrost features to make it more user-friendly and robust. In this period, releasing the code to production was a really big step. Then, when we did the first major release we started having a lot of users, first from other Kelda employees, then external users. This resulted in a stream of feedbacks, from small bugs to minor features that would enhance the user experience. In this period we learned to do more rapid releases and hotfixes to make Bivrost more useful. I also noticed that testing is very hard, we don’t use the same features as the users of Bivrost, which we immediately saw when we got more users. What was really motivating with this period was the immediate feedback we got from the users and also seeing how our features were used right away.
Within your time here you have been part of a major database upgrade, a total redesign of the user interface and the implementation of several new features on the front and backend. For sure, we can call you a full-stack developer now, right?
Well… I guess. I actually think I did most frontend work during my internship, but still, I had to work with databases a lot on the backend. On the frontend, the main part of my work was the redesign of the user interface, which was very interesting. I had to really twist my head from the perspective of the developer and try to envision how a user would like to use Bivrost. In the process of redesigning the UI, we looked at many other websites, such as Facebook, Gmail, Bitbucket and Asana for inspiration. I feel that this exercise thought me a lot about thinking like a user.
Did you have much experience in web developing before arriving here, or have you learned most of it during your internship?
I actually feel I learned most of my development skills during this internship. For instance, we use many libraries in the Bivrost development that I’ve never used before. As I mentioned earlier, we had a workshop during the first two weeks where we worked together with Pierre-Nicolas that was here before us. In this period I learned really much. I also got a few tutorials before I arrived and I used them to learn the basics. Before I got to Kelda I’ve bearly used Javascript. I had some more experience using Python and quite much experience from Java. I feel that when you know one programming language it’s much easier to learn another one. Another part of the training was to learn how to write good code. The interns before us developed a style guide together with Kelda. We have used this style guide and continued to develop it.
After working with web development for almost half a year now, do you have a favorite framework? And what frameworks don’t you like working with?
What I find most fun is processing data and making code for displaying data on the frontend. React and Material UI is powerful frameworks for this. I also enjoy doing the logic behind the data processing. I think it’s very hard to find something I don’t like, but if I can avoid it I try not to do too much D3.js. This is a low-level framework for creating dynamic and interactive data visualization. If possible I would like someone else to work with D3, hehe. However, you can make some really beautiful things using D3.
Can you mention some of the main packages you’ve worked with?
The main packages/frameworks I’ve worked with are Material UI, React, D3, Redux, Meteor packages. Python and javascript. All these packages are used extensively in Bivrost.
What is the biggest challenge you’ve encountered in your internship, especially related to the development you have done here?
This was a hard question. What comes to mind is the module we have for exporting data from Bivrost. It was made a long time ago and has been modified by several people. It was really hard digging into and understanding the code. You sort of get a “WOW” feeling reading it, and thinks: “What is going on here”. The task itself was not the hardest, but making use and building upon what others have done when they are not here to explain was challenging.
What do you think about Norway as a country? While you were here we had the warmest summer in 70 years. Did you notice the warm weather, or is it just a usual summer in France?
I enjoyed the Norwegian summer really much. It was very warm, but not unusual compared to France. Now in November, it’s really getting cold and dark and it’s harder to be here. The summers are really different from France. I remember walking home at 2AM in the night during the summer and it was really light outside. We don’t have that in France. In the summer we also barbecued a lot and had a lot of fun outdoors. I’ve also had the chance to travel a bit while being in Norway. I went to Oslo, Copenhagen, and Stockholm, so I feel I’ve visited quite many of the Nordic countries. Porsgrunn is also a very nice city and we have a view of the fjord from our office space.
Has this work been something you would return to?
I really enjoyed the work and would absolutely want to do similar work in the future, especially frontend work. It’s very interesting working together with other people and getting feedback on what you’re doing. For my next internship, I want to stay in a bigger city. Even though Porsgrunn was really nice it’s fun being in a larger city also.
Thanks for taking the time to talk to the Kelda Blog editorial office. Before we let you go, can you tell us a little bit about what you plan for your next internship? Also, where do you want to be in the future? Do you imagine yourself working as a developer or are there other career paths that interest you more?
I haven’t found my next internship yet, however, I’m considering companies in London and Brussels. If I choose to go to London the work will be similar to what I’ve done here at Kelda, while in Brussels it would be directed more towards IoT and working with hardware.
Based on my experience from this internship I would absolutely like to stay an engineer, but not only do development. I really enjoyed being part in the decision making and being a scrum master. I hope to be able to do some work that includes planning, discussing and getting direct feedback. It’s motivating to know what we want to do and where we want to go with any development.
Again, thanks for taking the time to talk to us. Good luck in your time ahead!
When I started my internship in Kelda 6 month ago, I was mainly interested in modelling, whether dealing with thermodynamics or hydraulics issues. Here in Porsgrunn, I mainly worked on what would be called a PVT (standing for Pressure, Temperature and Volume) model, which is a tool that could for instance, calculate for a given fluid at a given Pressure/Temperature condition a quite accurate estimation of its density.
Mapping the density over P,T meshes
A big part of the job was thus to understand the advanced thermochemical behavior of the fluid, and then to implement it by using some well know Equation of State (EOS) -like Soave Redlich Kwong or Peng Robinson EOS- which bounds P,T and V.
Real gas vs Ideal Gas P(V) curves
What was exciting with this task was that it was both an academic and industry oriented project. On one side, we were looking for the accuracy and the understanding that you would expect from academic research, using thorough examples to push the model to its limits. But, on the other hand, we always kept in mind what would be the final usage of this tool, which is its integration to a tool developed by one of my co-worker: the Influx Management Envelop (IME).
At the very first sight, you could say that the IME is a tool which allows you, once you got an unpredicted gas influx in the well, to predict whether you are still within some safety operation boundaries. According to some key pressures on the rig (back pressure, mud at the inlet…), it will tell you how you should circulate this thorny influx to avoid leakage or explosions. In this context, an accurate prediction of the gas behavior is critical, and this is why having a PVT model behind those calculations is a tremendous boon.
Getting UI up&ready
Apart from the substance, the form was quite exciting as well. I had the opportunity to learn how to code on Matlab, the standard for academic numerical computation, but also a bit on C++ as speed was a crucial KPI. I even did some Python as we wanted to integrate our compiled libraries within an Open Source Language for sharing purposes.
Thus, this internship was definitely a very cool opportunity to dig further into programming while conducting thrilling thermochemistry researches!
On March 1st, the Kelda team left for 3 days of skiing in Hafjell. This station is located next to Lillehammer and the main track of the station was used at the Olympic Games in 1994.
After five hours of drive from Porsgrunn and from Trondheim, we discovered a large and cosy cabin. As soon as the suitcases were put down, the Norwegian people from Kelda prepared us a typical Norwegian dish: Tacos.
When we woke up the next morning, after putting on skis, snowboards or Telemark, we were ready to hurtle down the slopes of Hafjell, wrapped up in our coats, the temperature down to -20 °C.
We reached the heights of Hafjell with an amazing view of the surroundings:
All day long, we slided down the many slopes down to the bottom of the mountain to rest and have our lunch at Wendy’s, a nice English pub close-by. There were ranges of difficulties adapted to everyone, from multiple green/blue slopes for the beginners to a wide offer of snow-covered forest tracks or of bump slopes for the confirmed skiers on the Snow Park.
After this day rich in emotions, it was French students’ cooking time to prepare: different kinds of quiche and flammkuchen were prepared. After spending the rest of the evening playing chess, card games or even table tennis, we definitely needed to rest for the second skiing day.
After another full and exhausting day of ski, a good dinner was undeniably required. What a nice opportunity for the Kelda bosses to show their abilities out of the office! Baked potatoes, risotto or tender meat were following a chef salmon starter: everything we wish for that last evening in Hafjell.
Three days are a short time but have been very dense and an exceptional opportunity to meet the people working in Trondheim and to know each other better.
After two years of playing in the famous, outstanding, awesome Mines ParisTech’s football team, Minchester Paris, I was quite disappointed to leave to Norway… Will I be able to find a place to play there?
I knew that Norwegians were quite interested in football, and despite the fact that their national team is not among Europe’s best ones, I hoped to find there a good place to practice. And the least I can say is that I was not disappointed! Football is almost a religion here, even more than in France I would say. In every tiny town or village you are sure to find a perfect pitch, most of the time with artificial grass, and children playing on it! It is also much more mixed than in France, and a lot of young girls play football as their main sport.
Thus, trying to find a team to play with was one of the first thing I did after arriving in Norway. Football is everywhere in Norway… what about in Porsgrunn then? There are actually a lot of clubs around, and among them ODD in Skien, in the top division. Then I started to write emails to different clubs… After a first refusal from Pors Grenland Fotball (“Unfortunately, we have a full squad for 2017”, true story) I contacted Urræd, another club in Porsgrunn, and had a first training with their U19 (under 19 years old) team. To be honest, their level was a bit higher than the one we had in Minchester ^^ Then the coach told me that for the first time he planned to create a student team with the university, and that I was very welcome to join them. However today, six months later, I am still waiting for this team to be born!
Where to play then? I joined several times people just playing for fun on weekends, but I was looking for real matches and competition… That is when I discovered the Kelda Vikings.
Kelda Vikings!
Kelda Vikings is Kelda’s football team formed by at least 15, 20 players and among them… only one person actually working at Kelda ^^ Glenn-Ole created this team with friends a few years ago and from then a lot of new players have joined the team: friends, relatives, colleagues, interns… We play in a summer league in summer and a winter league in winter (you still follow me, right?), and have indoor trainings (almost!) every week. Summer is 7vs7 matches and winter 5vs5, indoor (just like our French UrbanFootball).
I did not really know how people played in these leagues before joining the team, and I was actually quite surprised! The level is quite high and the game pretty tough and physical, especially for me ^^ That is definitely a different way of playing from Minchester: on small fields everything is quicker, and you have to be really organized as a team to handle both defensive and attacking phases during the whole match…
At office: books, thesis… and football cups!
But that’s what Kelda Vikings are able to do! That was really amazing to join a team where people know each other, know how to play as a team… That gave nice moves, goals and results! Indeed, despite our 40 years old average age we beat most of the times teams of 25, 30 years old guys, and won the summer league title (second division, but still!). And it is always exciting to play with a guy that remembers playing against John Carew in Norway’s junior cup…
Playing in that team was definitely amazing, and I really looked forward to Wednesdays and Thursdays to join the Kelda Vikings for a game or training. If you ever work in Kelda, do not make the mistake to try rugby with Porgsrunn Pirates, join Kelda football team instead! 😉
(About the title: it was the motto of Kodak, a manufacturer of argentic cameras, “clic clac” was the sound of the shutter when you took a picture)
You may know it (mostly because I have told you), but one of my main hobbies is photography. I would not qualify myself as a professional photographer, but rather as an amateur with a bit of experience.
My father was very interested in photography, and he always took a camera whenever we were leaving on vacation, and this is how I landed my hands on a camera for the first time. I thought it was fun to take pictures and then to show them to others.
When I was younger, my mother used to buy us, me and my brother, disposable cameras when we left for summer camps. They were not very sophisticated, but it was more than enough for a 9-year-old to register memories of a three-week camp. We used to send the best pictures to our grandparents, to show them how awesome was our stay, and to show them our new (sadly temporary) friends during the summer.
As I grew older, I could start to use my father’s camera, a Nikon D70, who was, at the time, one of the best performing DLSR from Nikon, and he came out relatively cheap, if you compared it to other reflexes of the same quality. And with it, he had three objectives: the regular one, sold with the body of the camera, a tele objective (with a focal 70-220, which corresponds to a zoom up to x7), and a wide-angle objective with which you cannot zoom, but distorts a bit the image (giving a “fish-eye” impression). I really enjoyed playing with the three objectives, but my father thought it was not very handy, and eventually, I ended up carrying the whole bag and taking all the pictures alone, and it was quite fun!
But at that time, I did know very few about photography, and I used to shoot all my pictures in full auto mode (which a lot of photographers consider a heresy, especially with a camera like the one I was carrying). And then, in 2010, I went to Canada. My father had since sold the big DSLR to opt for a small numeric camera from Panasonic, very light, and I had the right to take it with me in the other side of the Atlantic Ocean. I was really impatient, because the landscapes in Canada are really beautiful (and in some places, look a bit like Norway!), and since I was in a camp working hand in hand with the Office of Forestry in Quebec, I would have the opportunity to take pictures of the wildlife! There, one of the organizers of the camp knew some things about photography, and he taught me how to make a better use of my camera, by using the manual mode. What’s the difference, you’ll ask? Huge.
To understand it, let’s make a small explanation on how the camera works. Basically, it is a series of mirrors, with at the end, a captor that collects the light from the source. This captor is hidden by a mirror, and this mirror guides the light towards the viewfinder of the camera through a prism (that flips the image so that we can see through the viewfinder). Before this mirror, there is a complex system of lenses, the objective, that allow the optical zoom, and there is a diaphragm, that controls the quantity of light going through it. Once we have all these pieces, we can talk about the three “biggest” parameters you play with a camera:
The aperture of the diaphragm. This controls the depth of field of the photo: if you want to only have the object in the foreground to be sharp, and the rest of the field to be blurred, you’ll go for a small aperture. In contrary, if you want to have all of your photo to be sharp, you have to choose a great aperture. The second thing the aperture decides is the brightness of the photograph: a small aperture will make a bright photograph; a great aperture will make for a darker one.
The shutter speed. When you press the button on your camera, you won’t see anything through the viewfinder for a fraction of a second (on DSLR only). During this moment, the mirror in front of the captor will rise, letting light reach it, and actually taking the picture. The time the mirror is risen is the shutter speed. It mainly influences the brightness of the photograph: with small speeds, you’ll have bright photograph, but if you are shooting a moving target, you may as well get motion blur, so you have to take care! Higher speeds will make for darker pictures.
The sensibility of the captor. This also decides the brightness of the pictures (it is defined in ISO numbers, usually going in a scale of powers of 2). The higher the number, the brighter the picture, but it can lead to noise if the captor is not well-factored.
When you take a picture in full auto-mode, the camera takes the point it uses to make the auto-focus and sets it as the “point zero” for the brightness, and plays with all the parameters above to make it so this point is at a certain level of luminosity. It is easy, but not very pleasing: you are not really taking the picture, you are telling your camera to do so. So, in Canada, I started to play with these different parameters… and often messing them up, ending up in too bright or too dark, or even blurred photographs. But I had lots of fun taking them and that is what’s important.
After some time, I lost interest in photography, and I started my preparatory classes, so I didn’t really have time for hobbies. And I entered Mines ParisTech. There, we have an association dedicated to covering the events of our student’s life, and they have some gear to do it: a DSLR, two other video cameras and a GoPro. Little by little, I came back to taking pictures, and my father had bought a newer camera, a bridge (a hybrid between a numeric camera and a DSLR: it works the same as a DSLR, but there is no mirror nor prism, light reaches directly the captor and you have a live view in the viewfinder, like a video camera) from Sony. So, I took it with me in French Guyana last February, and I found back the feelings I had in Canada, but now with a bit more experience and knowledge. And I also started to use a software to edit my pictures. It seems strange at first, but taking the pictures with the right settings is approximately 75% of the work. When the picture is saved in your SD card, it is using the parameters of the captor, on which you have little to no margin of maneuver. So, treating the picture after taking it is a way to have this margin. And it can also make for some of the mistakes you made when taking the picture (too bright, too dark, wrong framing, …)!
And after this, I use my trips all around Europe (Vienna, Saint-Petersburg, Amsterdam, Brussels and finally Norway) to take lots and lots of pictures (I have approximately 50 GB of pictures in my laptop currently!). When I knew I was going to Norway, I started to look if I could not by my own DSLR and give back his camera to my father (since le last time he saw it was 6 months before!). And I finally got my hands on a Nikon D7200, which is a midrange DSLR, good for experienced amateurs, but not a pro camera (since the price gap is nearly 1000$ from midrange to pro cameras). With it, rather than taking the Nikon objective sold with it (who suffer from design problems and have a lot of distortion and sometime chromatic aberration), I opted for an objective from Tamron, 24-70mm (x3 zoom), and most importantly, with a constant aperture (when you zoom, the minimum aperture of an objective tends to increase mechanically, it requires a special type of mechanism to allow a constant aperture, whichever focal length you use, and it becomes possible to make macro-photography – taking pictures of small things with a lot of detail) On top of it, I put a polarizing filter, to be able to decide whether or not the reflection on water of windows appear in the picture.
That’s it for the historic/technic part. Now, for the reasons I like photography. It really struck me when I first was in Guyana, but when I go in a foreign country, I like to see and to understand how people live there, what they are experiencing in their everyday life, what is their environment and what do they see. And this I what I try to express through the pictures I take: to capture a moment, an emotion of everyday life in the city I’m in, or simply, something I saw in a glimpse and that I find funny or interesting. For these reasons, I take very rarely pictures of monuments: a lot of people have taken pictures of them, that are surely better than the one I would have taken. But I’m sure that nobody took the picture of the snack seller right next to it, who is currently cooking, with the steam nearly hiding him.
When it comes to taking pictures of people, I really prefer them not to look at the camera. The posture we adapt when we know we’re being photographed is not natural at all: the smiles are (a bit) forced, we feel a bit ill-at-ease, whereas if I do not tell people they’re being photographed, I can capture something much more natural, ending up in a better picture.
Finally, I find that photography is something really particular, and I requires training, and even with training, few of the pictures I take are worth being saved : in Copenhagen, I took 1793 pictures in my whole 3-day trip (you read the figure well), and among them, I kept 26 that sum up what I felt in the city. And I the end, I find more and more that it changes the way I look at things, at people, cities, landscapes, always looking for the small details, the things you do not see at the first glimpse. And this is what I find cool!
If you want to get a sample of some of my pictures, you can go > HERE <
On Saturday, July, 22nd, Pierre-Étienne, Thomas, Yoënn and I decided to to go on a hike in Skorve, near Seljord. The site visittelemark.no promoted a “challenging hike” with “great views” and the possibility to see a plane wreck from the 2nd World War. A great day in perspective.
On the 21st of July, I came and picked up the keys to our rental car in the Hertz concession, in Hovensgata : a silver grey Golf, all equipped, perfect to guide us to our destination. On the Saturday morning, we all gathered in the parking of the Rema in Hovenga Center at 10 AM, joined by Matthieu, one of our friends currently doing his internship in Oslo. After shopping what we needed for lunch, we headed right to Seljord, at approximately 95 km Northwest from Porsgrunn. In the car, the playlist was playing some rock while we were discussing of how our internships were going and remembering the mess that was our residence back in Paris.
After 1 hour and 30 minutes of driving, we finally see Seljord, boarding the Seljordvatn, a huge lake. The water was very still, giving the impression of a mirror in which the landscape was reflecting. We entered the town and started to head towards the beginning of the hiking trail, following a very narrow road in the forest, to finally stop in a small parking lot. After we took our bags, we finally started the hike.
The beginning of the trail was extremely steep, consisting in a trail of sand and gravel going uphill for approximately 700 meters, changing after this in a small trail in a forest area. After one hour of walking, we arrived in a small glade where with a small house – a shelter for hikers that wanted to camp here. We decided to eat there (it was already 13:30 and we were famished !). At the menu : bread, egg salad, meat, some crisps and as a dessert, bananas (a regular lunch at Kelda !).
We continued our way uphill through a very small path, with few indications. Every 100 meters, a red mark reminded us that we were on the right way up. We stopped several times to enjoy the view on the Seljordvatn, which is absolutely stunning from the heights, and we kept on walking until a crossroads. We had the choice : on the left, we could go and see the “Flyvrak”, the plane wreck, but it was only a one-way path and we had to turn our back once arrived there, and on the right the path to the tip of the Goysen, the highest mountain of the area, at 1370 m. After a small consultation, we decided to head to the Flyvrak – it was still early in the afternoon, and we would decide what to do next.
The Seljordvatn
The path to the Flyvrak was not very steep, and we could enjoy the landscape, which was made of plains with some small ponds and streams. After half an hour, we started to spot several pieces of the plane, and finally, the small plate commemorating the event, right next to the plane wreck. We had to chose what to do next : either we could turn our backs and go to the Goysen, or, like the adventurers we are, we could go off the paths and try to join back the trail later, exploring the area.
The remains of the B-24
As true Kelda Vikings, that is what we decided to do, and we started to climb uphill to see what the area had to offer. We climbed, we stopped to enjoy the view, we kept on climbing, and at some moment, the vegetation became sparser and we arrived in a rocky environment, meaning we were closer to the heights. After a last part of “climbing”, we finally see the altitude lakes that we saw on the pictures of the hike : good news ! And finally, the red marks, that we lost quite some time ago, showing us which way to go. We start to follow the trail, enjoying the sun, that finally decided to show up. After an hour or so, we saw a small path going to the top of the Nordnibba, one of the peaks of the trail. Since it started to become late, and we wanted to finish the circuit, we decided to keep on walking and not go on top of it.
The lakes on top of the Skorve
At this moment, we lost (once again) the trail, and we started going downhill, trying to find back the path, but unsuccessfully. After some time we ended up quite down the mountains, without finding back the trail. We saw something that looked like a path, on the other side of the valley, quite far from where we were – and where we parked the car, so we decided to climb back the mountain to join back the beginning of the trail. And it was here that things became a bit tricky : we were far from the trail (actually we didn’t see anything that looked like it from where we were), on the mountainside, which was quite steep. Yoënn went first scouting to see if we could find a path that was passable. The one he found was “okay-ish” (on his own words), and with Thomas and Matthieu, we decided to climb uphill to find another way around the mountain. At some point, we lost contact with Thomas and Pierre-Étienne (who decided to follow Yoënn), and with Matthieu, we climbed straightforward to the top, to get a better view of our comrades. After half an hour of steep climbing, we reached the top of the mountain, where we could see Yoënn and Thomas, waiting for us in the distance, quite below where we were, and Pierre-Étienne, who was below them and trying to climb back. We shouted at them, Thomas and Yoënn saw us, but not Pierre-Étienne, deafened by the wind and the echo. After some time, we lost eye contact with him, and kept on trying to join Thomas and Yoënn, who were sitting on rocks, near a small path.
When we finally joined them, we still had to find Pierre-Étienne, who was nowhere to be seen. Yoënn turn back on his steps to see if he was stuck downhill while Thomas, Matthieu and I were shouting his name to see if he was not further on the trail. After half an hour of searching, we finally found him, waiting for us not far from one of the lakes we previously saw. After everybody gathered, we understood that we were back exactly where we were three hours earlier, and we decided to climb down the mountain, to the parking lot. Near the plane wreck, we ate some raspberry cake to get our forces back and finally, finished the hike to get back to the rental car, waiting for us where we left it.
Then, we headed straight to Porsgrunn, the car was quiet, everybody was resting from the day, and we could enjoy the view of the warm color of the sunset on the Seljordvatn and the cliffs around it, as we left Seljord.
Back to Porsgrunn, we ordered some pizza and ate it near the river, not far from Pierre-Étienne’s, gave back the keys of the rental, and headed straight to our beds, tired after this long day.
To sum up, the trail was approximately 14 kilometers long and meant to be done in 7 hours, 8 if we took our time. It took us nearly 9 hours, we did about half of it, but we enjoyed some great views of the valleys of Seljord, and we blazed our own trail, as true Kelda Vikings !
On the 24th of June, Michael went to Stavanger with the Porsgrunn Pirates, the local rugby league team, for a match against the Stavanger Storm. The Storm are the champion of Norway in Rugby Union (XV players) and are playing (and dominating) their first season in Rugby League (XIII players) with the same players. Their team got some international players from Australia, Fidji or Samoa, including some former professional and Nick “The Honey Badger” Cummins, the wing from the Australian national team, and his brother. Thus, the challenge was huge !
The match was furious but after dominating the first half time, two players from Porsgrunn got injured, the rest of the team began to be exhausted, the Pirates were defeated by the storm in an intense second half time. A side-step of Michael in the last 22 meters was at the origin of one of the Pirate’s try in second half time !
As Rugby is a story of fighting with friends, the match was followed by a barbecue. In the evening, the third half time, at the Beverly, a sport bar in Stavanger, supported by the Storm’s sponsors, was crazy and last until the morning…
A great experience with really friendly people. The rematch will happened the 2nd of september !!
As summer approaches and the bosses take out their boats Kelda decided to quit work early to enjoy some sun, shrimps and swimming in the skjærgård (archipelago) outside Porsgrunn.
The week before had shown Porsgrunn at its best in May, with 20+ degrees and sum from a brilliant blue sky. However, the days before the planned boat trip the clouds were threatening and we even saw some rain. Still, the trusted Norwegian weather center (http://yr.no) promised clear sky and 18 degrees from 4 o’clock. When 3 o’clock arrived, and no blue sky was in sight, we started to doubt the forecast, but the shrimps were already bought, so there was no way back. To get enough space in the boats, we split into two parties and drove out towards the Skjærgård.
Going full speed towards the islands. The blue sky is starting to show itself. Geir Arne comments that he usually don’t have the fenders outside the boat.
Geir Arne is the most experienced boat guy in Kelda and practically lives in his boat the entire summer. This knowledge benefitted the entire Kelda team when he showed us some great spots in the skjærgård. After the initial boat tour, Geir Arne guided us steadily into Paradisbukta (The Paradise Bay) where we decided to stay for a while. The French interns could not wait to take a swim in the warm Norwegian sea (At least 13 degrees!), but they could not beat Glenn-Ole that showed no fear and jumped straight out. In the end, most of us took a swim and it was actually not too cold.
Then three relaxing hours was filled with shrimp eating (including 2 minutes of panic when we thought the bread was left back at the mainland), talking, sunbathing and fishing. Naveen had never got a fish before, but this time it took him less than five minutes to get a decent sized pollack!
Happy fisherman! First fish ever! The lucky guy got to take the fish home and eat it fried on the pan.
When the clock passed 9 pm we started on the way back to the mainland. The sun still shone as the sunset is already up past 10 pm. Everyone was happy with the amazing weather and a great trip.
Below some more pictures from the trip are shown.
We use cookies to ensure that we give you the best experience on our website. If you continue to use this site we will assume that you are happy with it.Ok
