*Taking it easy at Malmö Western Harbor area on July 12,2025*

I started this retrospective look at my photography of 2025 in my last blogpost where I covered the first half of the year, so it made perfect sense to cover the second half in this post (as if I didn’t plan it that way in the first place…). :-) The second half of the year was actually less photography filled than the first half, mostly due to illness in the family that kept interfering. Fortunately that is not as much of an issue now, so hopefully 2026 will end up being MUCH better, both healthwise as well as when it comes to photography!

I will use the same format as I did in the first post with one image per month, and just like last time it isn’t necessarily the “best” or “prettiest” image I took that month, but rather one where something caught my eye or made me think of a memory when I went through my folders of 2025 photos.

*Rainbow colors before the Pride Parade, Malmö on July 5, 2025*

I have photographed at the Pride festivities in Malmö for over 10 years now and it is always a photographic treat to do so. I so enjoy seeing people being able to be their authentic selves and being proud of it! It’s also a color feast for photographers which makes it even better! This image is one that I keep coming back to, even though I took hundreds of pictures of the actual parade. This was taken during the warm-up gathering before the actual parade, where people congregated in a local park to “warm up”. On this particular day the weather was quite “moist” so the turn-out in the park was perhaps not the biggest. The parade ended up being very big though so no doubt people turned up at the last minute to avoid getting drenched before they started walking.

This group in their mostly dark colors ended up being a nice contrast to the young lady’s very colorful rainbow wings. I don’t know what interpretation she was after with her outfit, but to me it felt like she was able to show her true self for a change, and not hide it beneath unicolor clothes. Maybe that’s a bit of a stretch, but that is how I feel when I look at this image.

To see all the photos (and I have A LOT of them) from that wet parade day, go to my blogpost about it at https://www.tomasnilssonfoto.com/blog/2025/7/14/pride-in-the-rain

*Dancing in the street on August 11, 2025*

Festivals and markets are very good “hunting grounds” for street photographers, because there is bound to be A LOT of people out and about and no one is really all that bothered by people walking around with cameras (at least I haven’t encountered anyone like that yet…knock on wood). The Malmö Festival is one of the oldest city festivals in Sweden, celebrating its 40th anniversary in 2025. I think I’ve attended just about all of them in some way or form through the years, even if I wasn’t into photography for the first decade or so.

The picture here is taken not too far away from the stage where a lot of orchestras played and people danced to their music. Clearly this mother and child didn’t really need the designated dancing area to move to the music and that was such a delight to see. I am usually VERY careful about taking pictures of children in public, not that I have any nefarious purpose with my photography, it is just easier that way. Let’s face it…middle-aged men with cameras snapping pictures of kids could be interpreted the wrong way. In a city festival though there are so many people out and about that us camera wielding guys tend to just disappear in the crowd. I don’t stick my camera into adult people’s faces anyway like Bruce Gilden, let alone kids, and so far that approach as worked quite well. Whenever someone asks me to delete a picture (which has happened a few times only), of course I do so. It’s not worth the hassle for a photo!

For more pictures from my day at the Malmö Festival, click through to the blogpost at https://www.tomasnilssonfoto.com/blog/2025/9/1/festival-stroll

*Dancing in the smoke on September 5, 2025*

I took a lot of pictures at the local Norra Grängesbergsgatan Festival on September 5 and this one brings a definite smile to my face. The NGBG festival is a very local festival where people block off a street (legally of course) and setup stages in businesses along that street - tire shops, kebab places etc etc and then it’s live music for many hours over a weekend, ranging from black metal all the way to hip hop and all kinds of rock music and dance acts. The picture here I like because the kids had such a blast dancing and playing while the female DJ was at the mixing desk. I like the way she smiles in there too, because she obviously enjoyed the way the kids interacted with the music…and the smoke. Something I only just noticed when I put together photos for this blogpost is that the girl in the middle is actually caught mid-air in a jump. I think that was a cool catch on my part (well, mine and the ability of my Fujifilm XT-3 and the 1/500th of a second exposure time).

And, referencing what I wrote about the picture from the month before, I did show the image on the back of the camera to the mother of one of the kids dancing, asking her if it was okay for me to keep it and she just smiled at me and said absolutely, that is such a great photo! I then asked if she wanted a copy, but she shook her head and smiled at me with a “no thank you, that’s for you to keep”, which I found quite endearing.

For more pictures from my day at the NGBG Festival, click through to the blogpost at https://www.tomasnilssonfoto.com/blog/2025/9/13/another-festival

*Fall Colors at Skrylle on October 31, 2025*

This image definitely has the fall colors in it and I am glad I was able to get out there to capture them in October. This was a month when there was very little photography for me, due to the illness in the family I wrote about in the opening paragraph. I was however able to get out to the Skrylle recreational area outside Lund, Sweden to walk the 5K loop through the woods for some “forest bathing” and exercising my photographic muscles.

I ended up with this image and a few others (link below) and I do like this one for the way the path stretches into infinity with its leading lines, but mostly because I got lucky with the lady’s red jacket, making a contrasting figure in the middle, something that the eye is drawn towards. One of my father’s photographic expressions “there should always be something red in the picture”…in this case I think he was spot on!

I put more of the photos from that stroll in the woods at https://www.tomasnilssonfoto.com/blog/2025/10/31/more-fall-colors

November was a rather dark and dreary month in this part of the world so there was a very limited amount of photography for me. When the sunshine is limited as well as the days getting shorter by the day I tend to not photograph a whole lot. That is why I was SO glad I decided to head out to the coast at Lomma, an old fishing village, outside Malmö, Sweden to try and capture the colors and landscape as the sun set in the west over Denmark. I wasn’t sure if I’d be able to get anything good, but I think I got quite a few keepers, including the one I’ve uploaded here.

This photo is taken with a cell phone and is actually a better photo than the one I took of the couple with my “real” camera, proving that sometimes the best camera is the one you have at hand at the time!

For more pictures taken by the seaside that evening go to https://www.tomasnilssonfoto.com/blog/2025/11/16/colors-at-the-coast

At the risk of sounding like a broken record, when we have our winter months here in Sweden finding light and scenes interesting to shoot with your camera isn’t always that easy, so when I saw this on a brief errand run to Lund I had to get a picture of this fountain, converted into a lovely holiday decoration. In warmer times the water arcs pretty much the same way the light bulbs do.

For more pictures from that short stroll in the city, go to https://www.tomasnilssonfoto.com/blog/2026/1/13/december-streets-of-lund

2025 - looking back at a year (part II)

2025 - looking back at a year