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Archive for the ‘Personal’ Category

Earlier I wrote a post on going from capturing audiovisual content to publishing it on the internet all in one device, the iPhone 3Gs. Relatively low resolution video can be captured on the iPhone and the camera app allows for some rudimentary editing. The true power of the iPhone comes through the app store and the multitude of 3rd party editing apps you can download from there. It’s doable, with pretty good end results, but the max resolution is still only 640X480 pixels.
With the iPhone 4, Apple just one upped itself. Same size sensor, more pixels, better low light capability….and here’s the kicker…. the ability to shoot 720p HD video! The real strength comes from being able to edit that same 720p video on the phone itself, and sharing it out to the internet. This is big. Very big.
Think citizen journalism, think seeing the news before it’s broadcast on national media networks, think sharing your experiences and doing all of this in HD.
Then think of the increase in traffic on video sharing sites and the increase in data trafic that phone networks will have to to accomodate the sharing of all of this content. There’s no doubt that iPhone owners are a very active bunch when it comes to harnessing the power of the internet through their devices and there’s no doubt that the network providers will feel the burn.
Either way this is a very large step in the right direction. Not because of the technology or the features but because of the usability of the software and the always on internet connection. Many other devices capture 720p HD video, very few offer a relatively full featured editing and sharing package to boot.

Gallery-wrap canvas of Strandvägen, Stockholm

How many of us really take the time and the effort to apreciate the art we create? A lot of people today use the computer as the only medium of interaction with their images. Sure, those images get posted on Flickr, Twitter and Facebook, but an lcd leaves lots to be desired when viewing an image. A screen is dynamic, it can show a lot of information at once. That leaves the more ADD-prone among us juggling 17 browser tabs, 4 im clients, itunes and a torrent app all at once while viewing an image. This leaves the brain scurrying to grasp all this visual information and not really immersing itself in the image. An image is almost never just “pretty to look at”, there’s always a little detail that stands out, that invokes an emotion, that makes your mind wonder a certain way. It takes time to see these details.
All this is eliminated when you hang a picture on a wall. People (mostly) tend to treat physical images with more respect, the stand in front of them longer and take more time to let them soak in. Regardless of how good your art is, being proud enough of an image to commit it to canvas and hang it on a wall moves you further away from the negative connotations of what some call being a “Flickr photographer” and closer to becoming an artist.
Print your photos, try different ways of mounting them, give them away as presents to people or hang them on your own wall and enjoy them…

It’s always a good thing to recap and look back at the images that meant the most to you during the past year. Most of the time you can see a clear evolution of the techniques and post-processing styles and gear that you’ve used. It’s great to see what direction your photography has taken and where it might go. Here’s a collection of  about 200 of my images:

Feel free to link me to similar slideshows, it’s always entertaining to see what other creative minds are up to…

I recently went back and re-edited a shot I took in autumn last year. Because I already had a finished  shot from the same series I thought hard about how I want to process this one and if the two could somehow be combined in the same context. So I went back to the first shot, examined it for a while and thought about what stood out and was inspiring about it.

Too many people motordrive their cameras because digital pictures “cost nothing” and put very little of themselves into their images. This is a valid logic when the goal is just to collect information, getting as many pixels as possible in a short amount of time. When this isn’t the case it is important for an image to convey a context, to tell a story or to induce an emotion and to get people thinking. Although other people may not feel the exact same emotion, if they feel anything, be it positive or negative and if they can somehow relate a piece of themselves to my image, I’ve done what I set out to do.

This got me thinking about why I fell in love with the subject of these images in the first place. As a kid there was nothing I enjoyed more than to run through dry fallen oak leaves in autumn. Simple times, when I didn’t have a care in the world. There was always something magical about autumn leaves and the freedom I felt every time I ran through a pile of them. To me this couple of images embodies just that. So that’s what the dreamy soft focus, the high grain grittyness and the strong contrasts between the snow, the leaves and the not too subtle black vignette are meant to accomplish.

Convey an emotion. Move someone with your image.

This is gonna be a short one… I recently got a used car, a giant old boxy Volvo 740. This thing is huge, I mean it’s just shy of a bus and my dog immediately took a liking to it. There’s space enough for him to frolic around in the back so he’s happy. We’ve never really been to the countryside around Kungsängen so we figured we’d go for a short drive. I didn’t really plan to do serious photography but I grabbed my camera, an 18-200mm lens and a flash just in case. Unfortunately there weren’t  too many places along the road we could  park and take a couple of pictures but in the end we found this little spot right by the road.  The sunset was amazing and I’m definately gonna go out there again at some point. There are also a few riding schools with so many really lively, playful horses so just that is a shoot in itself. I ended up trying to make the best of the situation an used the car window to lay my lens on in the hope of getting a sharper picture – makes me wish I planned ahead and brought a tripod, or just kept it in the car in the first place. In the absence of a tripod I’ve seen people use piping insulation draped over a car window to lay their lenses on… apparenly works wonders.

Here are the remaining two sunset shots:

The latest addition to milnikphoto.com is a photoblog! Its purpose is not to replace the gallery page but to give people a chance to comment on my photography. I want to hear what you all think, so head over here and leave a comment!