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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…

So this is my first post of 2010! Here I go…

My problem with going someplace worth photographing is coming back with 40-50GB of photos to sift through and edit. I usually just don’t have the time to go through the sheer number of images after a trip and tend to leave it for later, months later and in some cases years later. Let’s face it, post processing takes time and inspiration neither of which can be conjured up at will.  When I come back from a trip I typically go through my images, delete the ones I don’t need and roughly mark the ones I’d like to edit at some point. Months later I’ll go back and edit these images turning them into what I originally envisioned. Most of the 4-5 star images tend to go through several re-edits until I’m completely satisfied with the result. Talk about a time consuming workflow…

I recently had a little time to sit down and stitch a few panoramas taken in summer ’09 on my trip though Nordland and Finnmark in Norway.

Honningsvåg, Finnmark

HonningsvÃ¥g, the northermost city in Norway. Well it’s more like the northermost large fishing village with a city status but it sure is picturesque, especially when you see a full grown white reindeer grazing in the local school’s yard. It’s also the starting point for most tourist excursions in the area.

A beach at Bleik, Andöy, across the road from the camping grounds where we stayed for a night to catch up on sleep and free wifi. Nothing but fine white silky smooth sand dotted with patches of vegetation as far as the eye could see.

The North Cape, often referred to as Europe’s northernmost point. However, the neighbouring point Knivskjellodden is actually 1,457 metres further north. Here the sun never sets in summer, well from the 14th of May to the 31st of July.  This shot and was taken just before midnight. Being woken up by reindeer herds wondering through the parking lot is an awesome experience. This image has been in the header for some time now. I was going for an almost artificially created simplicity…

Midnight sun at the North Cape

Another shot of the North Cape. The shots for this pano were actually taken between 11 and 12pm. This sight never ceases to take my breath away. Going along with the North Cape theme this is one of the images in the running got blog header for at lest the first half of 2010.

Wiew of a sunset in the Norwegian sea off the Hurtigrutten boat we took from Tromsö to Hammerfest. Shooting panoramas off boats is tricky, especially in low light conditions and in spite of the sea looking rather calm i was having trouble hand-holding a 70-200mm lens due to the gusts of wind blowing over the deck. However, I found comfort in the fact that even out in the middle of the Norwegian sea, I had almost full cell phone reception, something my phone company can’t provide in central Stockholm.

Narvik was a strategically important port during WWII and still today is the closest port to the iron ore mine in Kiruna that does not freeze in winter. Also it is one totally awesome great place to ski. The city also has its “own” whale which will periodically wonder deep into the fjord. I’ve been here twice and so far had no luck when it comes to spotting this whale.

Lillsjön, Upplands-bro

Part of the experience of living a little outside of a busy city center is experiencing the nature around you. Lillsjön, a little north of Stockholm is really nothing special given the fact that there are about 520000 lakes in Sweden. However this tends to be where I go most often.
I digress. Photography is about experimentation. Trying out something new and figuring out how you can make it work for you and incorporate it in your workflow. I’m a little torn on the subject shooting panoramas. Yes you have to have the camera on a tripod with a pano head to avoid parallax errors in stitching later on in Photoshop, but lately the software has gotten so good that i’m really doubting the necessity of an expensive head. I shoot most of my panos hand held but make sure that I try to line up the images, shoot portrait instead of landscape, have 20-30% overlap and rotate the camera around the plane of the aperture ring as much as possible. All this applies to scenes with good light, because no matter how steady your hand is a tripod is always better in low light. A tripod and pano head will however give sharper images, especially when used with a shutter remote, and will minimize the need for lens distortion correction and cropping in post.
Going back to trying something new I heard about an interesting technique for shooting panos. When shooting hand held there will be more resolution loss due to cropping in post. Now most of this resolution will be from the edges of the middle section of the image. So the idea is to shoot a few more frames above and below the middle section, this gaining back that resolution. That’s it!
Above is the result of a photowalk I took the other day.

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.

Smoke is one of those subjects that I always thought made impressive pictures. There’s an appealing surreal randomness factor in smoke images, something that maybe a designer could create with a pen, but nothing like any other photographic subject could provide. A vivid imagination helps a lot with these images, it’s really like looking up at the clouds and realizing that some of them form recognizable shapes. Because of the randomness of these images it’s easier to play around with them too. Mirroring a smoke plume and adding it as a second layer in PS can create some almost magical results. All in all it’s a great way to create interesting fine art photography.

What hit me though is how simple photographing smoke actually is when using the right gear. First of all you need something to burn, incense sticks work fine, they burn slowly and give off a constant, thick plume of smoke which can easily be shaped using different objects. I guess other things would work but the best results I’ve gotten were with incense sticks. Get ones that don’t make you nauseous, you’ll be smelling that smoke for hours….

A uniform background is another part of the equation. Anything dark will work fine. I used a large sheet of black cardboard from a local art supply store but I guess a sheet of fabric would do fine too. A matte background should be used as you want to avoid reflections.

Lighting is key here. It’s simple but it has to be done right to avoid a lot of work in post. Both constant lighting and flash are used. The constant light helps to light up the smoke creating enough contrast between it and the background for the camera to focus right. The flash is there to stop motion. Both lights need do be trained on the smoke. Getting light directly into the lens will almost certainly produce lens flare, which is not something to be avoided as long as it fits within the creative vision. Either a snoot or barn doors can be easily created out of cardboard and added to the flash. A snoot is better suited if you’ll be focusing on a smaller vertical portion of the smoke as the light will be more focused. The barn doors I made were held in place with patches of velcro, making them easily adjustable.

As the flash is off the camera it will have to be triggered remotely. This gave me a chance to test for my new Elinchrom Skyport trigger in a real-life situation. Turns out it worked without a glitch even when shooting sequences at 6.5 images/sec. The trick here is to underpower the flash so that its recycle time will be able to keep up with the camera. So with the flash in manual mode, set the power to ½. To avoid light spill directly into the lens you can also zoom in the flash anywhere from 85mm to 105mm. If you’re shooting sequences then high-speed sync should be on too. Typically the flash can sync at 1/250^th of a sec. To be on the safe side, with the camera set to manual mode you can set the shutter speed to one setting slower, so say 1/160^th of a sec. I had no problems running the flash sync at 1/250^th though; the Skyport trigger didn’t miss a beat.

To get the cleanest shot you should keep your ISO as low as possible. This shouldn’t be a problem as the amount of light that hits the smoke is controllable, you can always add more if you need to. The aperture should be set somewhere between f11 and f20. I was getting the best results at f18.

Smoke is rather unpredictable… you never really know what shape it will form, so shot a lot of frames and see what works best later on.

There is always a post-processing step, to get the right look and make the background uniform and smooth. The more contrast there is between the background and the smoke the easier it will be to correct the image. Then there’s the removal of little blemishes. The final step is to do something creative with the colors like invert the image or change the hue of the smoke. Smoke shots also work great when tiled like kaleidoscope images, mirrored in the y or x axis or rotated a certain number of degrees consecutively a few times.

So this is all it takes to kill an hour or two one lazy Sunday afternoon. The setup is simple but the images can be pretty moving. So try it for yourself….

My smoke shots are posted in my photoblog so check out the sidebar to the right.

Following my short lived attempt at using a flash in a remotely creative manner comes attempt nr 2, now wireless!

I picked up the Elinchrom Skyport universal remote trigger kit from Fotovideo in Stockholm. For the price (1695 SEK) it seemed to be the best thing going, with its ability to group flashes. Canon’s own remote triggering system works Canon’s flashes, which can all be run as slaves so no receiver units are needed, but this system is based on IR. The Skyport is based on radio and is better in sunlight or when a flash isn’t positioned in a line of sight from the camera.  An in-depth review and a few test images are coming in a futre post. So far after 2 days of searching i’m just happy to have found a 2.5 mm to 3.5 mm mono adapter without which this trigger wouldn’t work…

My recent infatuation with the iPhone lives on. Recently i’ve been rethinking my approach to photography and digging deeper at the roots of the passion i have for it. Part of it is the gear, i’m obsessed with and addicted to anything shiny and new. The other part is the feeling i get when i see an image that moves me.

I’ve never really complained much about carrying a large photo bag all day in fact i like the look and feel of a heavy camera body. But gear isn’t everything. The iPhone is by no means a replacement for my camera gear. However it provides a great way to be creative on the go without having to lug my photo backpack with me. It also limits me, in terms of flash and the lenses i can use. I find this simplicity quite relaxing and inspiring and it makes me look for other ways to make an image great. Angles, composition and mood become more important and the lack of zoom or flash although technically a restriction does not stifle  creativity. This is generally true for any type of photographic gear. It’s also a pretty good tool for macro photography, and that’s something i haven’t done much of using dslrs.

What i mean to say is that a great picture doesn’t necessarily need to come form a dslr, it can come from pretty much anything. The more portable that camera is the more you’re gonna shoot with it. Chances of getting a “once in a lifetime” shot increase because you have a camera on you at all times. The most inspiring images almost always tend to be the ones that capture the energy of the moment, and that’s hard to do if you’re gonna need time to set up a shot.

The editing apps are getting more and more powerful too. The apps i own right now can pretty much do everything i need but image compositing and multiple exposure HDR, and i’m pretty sure that that will be coming out in one way or another. Panorama stitching works flawlessly with AutoStitch. While a lot of camera phones can stitch images, this app allows you to take a matrix of images in any order and much like PS it’ll figure out what goes where and blend it together. Photogene, Photo fx and Best Camera are the apps i use for color correction/enhancements and the results are pretty great there as well. Although ColorSplash has masking capabilities i really miss this in all the other editing apps, it would be great if before applying a filter you could just paint a mask over the area the filter is to be applied to. And time-lapse, yeah there’s an app for that too. It doesn’t put the images together into movies but it’s pretty versatile with how many images and at what intervals it can shoot.

All this lead to me starting a new page titled “iPhone art” where i’ll post shots i take and edit on the iPhone. Check it out, see what you think, and be inspired to play.

I’m a fan and avid follower of the This Week in Photography podcast. It’s a great resource for everyone interested in photograpy regardless of their level of skill but a part of a discussion they had during an interview struck me as odd. They talked about the positive change in the way camera manufacturers think and referred to things like the creative auto mode on Canon cameras.

For those of you who’re not familiar with this, it’s a mode that shows sliders on the lcd  so you can intuitively chose between say a blurrier or a sharper background. My understanding is that this is done to assist beginners, make them previsualise the effect they’re creating before they press the shutter while not showing actual shutter speed and aperture values. By removing number values a photographer is meant to focus more closely on the picture they’re making. This is basically meant to remove the thinking about settings factor out of photography.
Is this really a positive change from the photographer’s point of view? Getting to know your gear is the first thing you should do when you unbox it. Knowing where buttons are on a camera and being able to have one finger on the shutter and one eye looking through the viewfinder and still find buttons and change settings. In other words very few dslr users actually look at the rear-facing lcd to adjust settings. Most people i know use the top lcd and the viewfinder so placing crucual controls on the rear lcd is a bad idea from a usability perspective. Another point is that you stop thinking about little but important details such as where the sweetspot for the particular lens you’re using is or the position of the sharp portion of your image. This makes a difference between a good but not tack sharp shot and a great shot.

From a conservative point of view it’s just plain wrong. Moving from looking through the viewfinder and being able to do mental arithmetic to calculate iso, shutter speed and aperture to using sliders that make the background more or less blurry is a large paradigm shift. Granted that our digital tools allow us the luxury of not needing mental arithmetic, but that’s as far as i’m willing to go. I’m in no way conservative when it comes to technology, i love my gadgets and for the most part i’m an early adopter of new gadgets and firmwares. But photography is runs way deeper than what new firmware your camera’s using or what new functions it has. It’s an art. People were getting amazing shots with pinhole cameras made out of cardboard boxes decades ago. Now more and more people are relying on technology to take the a great image for them instead of thinking it through and really focusing on what they can do to make the image better.

Then again i’ve not seen the CA mode on Canon’s higher end cameras, only on the xxxD and the xxD series. These are cameras that either beginners or advanced amateurs buy and as such, they  need to appeal to their target audience. Features like the CA mode might be of some use for this target audience, but i’ll still argue that dumbing down the use of a camera is not going to help these people become the photographers they could be in the future. A basic, dumbed down feature set should be reserved for lower end compact cameras.

That’s about the end of my rant, comments and hate mail are welcome…

I know I should have posted this before my trip but I simply did not have time. The truth is I was too busy trying to find a way to pack my photo bag and deciding what to take. My starting point was simple, one bag for all the camera gear, that I could carry as cabin luggage on the flight back. I had to have a laptop with me and I had to have 2 copies of all my raw files I downloaded to it. I didn’t care too much about having a backup of my Lightroom library since I wasn’t planning to do editing on the road. I had to be able to charge everything from a wall socket as well as a 12V cigarette lighter socket in a car since most of the trip was to be spent driving and I had to be able to use AA batteries in at least one of my camera bodies.

Simple huh? Well, no. Packing a photo bag is actually hard work, you have to know where every little thing is and have it easily accessible. If you’re driving your bag is gonna spend most of its time in the back seat of a car while you’re in the front so it needs to be packed so that you can one-handedly pick things out of it.

The general idea when you pack photo gear is to take as much as you can with you. Have two sets of bags, one to get the gear to wherever you are (say your hotel room) and the other to lug just the gear you need for a particular shoot. I couldn’t afford this luxury since the one bag I had, had to fit into the overhead compartment of the plane I was flying back on.

If you watch the video you’ll see that I stress the point of having as many lens cloths as you could possibly carry. This is good practice in any case but is especially important when shooting close to salty water or in areas where the prevailing winds blow in from the sea. Salt water tends to leave a sticky oily film on lenses which is really hard to get rid off. I tend to carry sensor cleaning equipment with me. It’s useful in case a major dust spot arises, but I don’t rely on it to thoroughly clean my sensor when away from home unless i’m certain that I have a nice dust-free environment I can work with.

Another point is to have a way to keep track of memory cards which have been filled up. I tend to put them back into the card compartments in my bag facing label down if the card  is full. Taking backups is a must here…i’ve never had a CF card die on me but i’m convinced it’ll happen one day. Even if I didn’t fill up my memory cards one particular day I tried to dump them onto my laptop once a day, since there I was creating two copies of everything  on separate hard-drives. This meant that I grabbed every possible chance I could to charge  whatever gadgets I had with me.

So that’s been my gear strategy, feel free to share yours…

Here’s the video:

Yeah, you guessed it, the iPhone. This picture was taken at the North Cape, Norway the northernmost point in Europe. This post is in part a testament to the iPhone’s usability since it was entirely written on one.

I’ve had a 3G S for a couple of weeks now and more than put it through the paces on my recent trip to Norway. The thing simply works, it quietly does what you want it to do, if not always with stellar results it at least keeps itself way above the average. It was actually strange at first since i’ve been used to things taking a whole lot more effort when it comes to capturing and sharing media on the move (thank you LG Viewty). My main problem with the Viewty was the unresponsiveness of everything, from the phone os to the 3G connection to the shutter button lag and the final nail in the coffin which was the touch screen losing its sensitivity in some areas. The iPhone os seems really well thought out. Someone must have sat down for hours and thiught up ways to put a smile on every user’s face every time they use this device.

The camera which at first glance should be a downgrade from the LG’s 5MP with AF, actually showed better, less washed out and sharper results in spite of the worse resolution. In fact i’d almost go as far as saying that it outperforms some of the 2-3MP compact cameras i’ve owned over the years at least in good light. In low light situations there is still the issue of high noise levels but that is just technically hard to avoid due to the small sensor size that a phone camera has to have. The tap-to-focus technology Apple used works fairly accurately and i can see this becoming standard in simpler compact cameras in the future. This is a feature that would just make sense to a novice photographer, it’s simple and intuitive.

Now for the drawbacks…The lack of ergonomics of the iPhone when used as a camera is pretty evident, it was clearly built to handle like a phone/pda, not a camera. Its unstable in the hand and i just couldn’t seem to hold it well with one hand and use the camera in the portrait orientation. Landscape was less of a chore but still unstable. I used a non slip case which didn’t seem to really help matters.
I did however forget all about that when i started using editing apps, flickr uploaders and the built in youtube and mail apps. In one word, seamless. No wonder people like Chase Jarvis sing this thing’s praises!

At about 2700-3000 items in the camera roll the iPhone slowed down but only marginally, weirdly enough not when browsing through the camera roll but when using the camera. The shot to shot time became a split second longer and it also took a little longer to change from the stills to the video mode. One 7GB memory dump later that went back to normal.

Furthermore the iPhone is a great way to keep yourself organized whether it is meetings or creative ideas you’re typing into it. It’s a good tool for location scouting and note taking because it’s capable of capturing stills video and text with the added bonus of being able to upload it to the web. Now if roaming costs wouldn’t be so excruciatingly high, it would have played an even bigger part of my 2 weeks on the road.