A few days ago I listened to an episode of one of my favorite podcasts, The Candid Frame, hosted by Ibarionex Perello where he had the photographer Mick Victor as a guest. They talked about his project of photographing graffiti, tags and other decorations and markings on walls close enough to make them more abstracts, and therefore more "arty". I thought that sounded so utterly removed from the street photography that I often do that I just had to give it a go!
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A reporter from the local paper Skånska Dagbladet talks to Susanne Bogren and the photo club chairman Rikard Persson about the club's anniversary exhibition "Life in Malmö".
It's Double Exhibition Time!
It is a rare treat for me to be able to say that I’m showing photos in two locations at the same time, but at the moment that is actually the case. It's even rare to show them in one!
Read MoreThe Bridge and Jetties
At a Wintery Beach
in Photography, Project
Starting the new photo year
We’re just over a week into the new year and I’ve taken my DSLR out once so far. I can’t say that I am happy with that amount of photography, but it just hasn’t felt that interesting to be out there with it yet. So it rests comfortably in its backpack for the time being. No doubt it’ll see plenty of action soon enough though...once the weather improves just a bit.
The photos in this post are from the beach at Ribersborg in Malmö on a pretty cold January morning, but before we got the recent dusting of snow. The winds were pretty fierce so my dad and I didn’t stay very long. It’s hard to operate a camera when your hands feel like they turn into icicles! We took a brief walk over to the dog park area nearby and saw a few little critters who weren’t bothered at all by the ice cold winds. They were too busy having a good time with their other four-legged friends, old and new.
On the Instagram 365 project
I am now on day 10 of my Instagram 365 project and I’ve updated the page here on the site with photos from the first week, with many more to come as the year progresses. I am pretty content with the photos so far, but it feels like I’ve not been experimental enough with the cell phone camera yet. It can handle much poorer lighting conditions than my previous phone could, so I am not as limited in what I can do with it. Hopefully as the year progresses I can explore that more! I’ve got 356 more opportunities to do so before December 31st, so that ought to be enough! :-)
First image of my 365 project this year. "Night Cycle"
New Year, New Start!
in Photography
After quite an hiatus again from this blog it is now the first day of 2016. I type these words after a 2015 that had a few ups and quite a lot of downs and it feels nice to say that it is a new, "clean" slate as far as photography goes. Sure, I can tell myself that I'll improve all the things I'm not good at as far as photography goes this year - I'll master this or that, but I am not going to do that. That smells too much of New Year resolutions. Instead I'm going to try to keep things much, much more realistic.
There are two things I want to get better at/try this year as far as photography and that is analog photography/darkroom work and my restarted Instagram 365 project. That may seem like very weak goals, but these are thing I hope to stick with throughout the upcoming year.
Shooting film/developing
The analog/darkroom stuff will be an interesting experience, but one that I've been wanting to learn more about for many years, ever since learning about it via Ted Forbes' The Art of Photography podcast. I've been telling myself that I "should get into that" but without doing anything about it. Now though, with my photo club getting a brand new darkroom with lots of space, it should be much easier to learn and get into. We'll see how that ends up functioning in the end, but at least I will try it! The fun stuff will be picking what camera to have a go with. I do have an old 35 mm Chinon camera that my dad bought in 1979, but I also want to have a go at using a Holga and 120 film, because of the size of the negative. So many choices! :-)
The Instagram 365 Project
The 365 project is one that is "easier", since it's something I've tried before. My plan is simple: to shoot, edit and post one photo a day for the whole year via my LG G4. The camera in that thing is so good that I think it'll do justice to such a project in a way that my previous phone (an HTC One M7) didn't. I had a go at this two years ago, but ran out of steam after 7 months. This year I hope to go the distance, since in hindsight it was pretty foolish to stop after reaching well beyond the halfway point! I won't be doing a blog post for every day's post, but rather summaries, either every week or every month. If you want to follow along on a daily basis, go to my Instagram account at https://www.instagram.com/tomasnilssonfoto/ or the Flickr album where they will be displayed as well (https://flic.kr/s/aHskrRACGm).
On the way to Svedala...
Photo Time Out
in Photography
This week I don’t have any new pictures to show you (beyond the cell phone camera one above which is rather out of focus, but hey, it did have nice rays in it so there it goes). It appears that I’ve taken a break from photographing the world around me, just like I did last year over Christmas and New Year’s. It wasn’t an intentional break this time, but I think it’s fitting, especially since the light conditions during November and now December in Sweden are...at best...well, abysmal. Also, last month was NaNoWriMo, when I busied myself with writing rather than photographing the world around me, which made for a nice break from triggering the shutter.
November this year was REALLY gray and drab, to the point where you look out your window and think...naaaah, I’ll take this day off from photographing. It’s been like that all month really, and now the first week of December as well. Hopefully the weather will clear up at least a bit (he says as the winds howl outside and the sideways rain stream down the windows) so I can go out and shoot some of the Christmas decorations put up in the city. That’s always nice at this time of year...that and observing the increasingly haggard look of the Christmas shoppers looking for that elusive gift they have yet to find!
Sure, I've read photographers’ suggestions to shoot in inclement weather, because that’s when people don’t expect photographers to be out, and yes that may be true, but since my camera isn’t weather sealed like the more professional models, I don’t want to drown the electronics or optics inside! :-D It can stand the occasional rain drop falling on it, but not the downpour we've had lately, so best to not risk it. ("Captain Cautious" at the keyboard!)
Okay, back to the timeout on photography. If I had had this long a break from photography without last year’s timeout (which I wrote about on the blog at the time)...I think I’d be worried that I was losing my “touch”. Now though, I know it is a good way to recharge the urge to be out there, camera in hand. I think at certain points during my photographic endeavors in the past I’ve gone out there more out of habit than out of actual desire, and that’s not exactly a good way to land good photographs! Now though I am eager to go out there (weather providing of course) to land photographs that are worth keeping! Regaining that urge can’t be a bad thing!
Örestad Concrete and Colors
in Photography
Outside my window the snow is falling and the lawns below are slowly getting more and more covered in white, making for a very monotone landscape. The images in today's post (taken at the beginning of the month) are also quite monotone in nature, apart from some very bright color splashes here and there.
Read MoreA DSLR free week?
There are few weeks when I've not taken a single picture with my trusty Canon DSLR, but this has been one of those. The weather has simply been...well...November is a good way to describe it. And Swedish November at that...which means seriously crappy light for photography! Also, it's NaNoWriMo now, that month of the year when writing takes center stage for me, which means I don't mind leaving the big camera in the backpack for a bit!
Read MoreA photographic "shoot-out" between generations....
October in the City
in Photography, Writing
Today's post is images from a photowalk I did at the end of October in Malmö, Sweden with a local photography group on Facebook. It was fun to do, and it's always cool to do those with new people, to enjoy the social aspect of photography.
Read MoreFall Colors in the Park
in Photography
It's that time of the year again, when pretty much everything green in nature is turning yellow, red or brown and it's pretty much a photographer's "duty" to be out there to take pictures of the abundance of colors! I've certainly done my fair share of fall colors photos in the past, but there's always room for a bit more.
These pictures are from one of the parks (and cemetery) in Malmö, Sweden where the colors certainly were pretty and people were out enjoying the scenery!
Read MoreMore Copenhagen pictures
in Photography
I had the privilege of visiting the Danish capital across the water two Saturdays in a row, so I got quite a few pictures, both during the Scott Kelby Worldwide Photowalk (which I've written about in an entry two weeks ago) as well as an outing there with my fellow board members of my photo club. So I'm sharing some street scenes from the latter trip today.
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