Festival days, part II

August 25, 2019 in Photography

Last blog post I showed some of my digital images from the recently finished Malmö Festival, the annual event held in Malmö, Sweden (for the last 35 years). I took analog shots too during my visits to the event, but I had yet to develop them at the time. I’ve done that now and scanned them as well, so this week’s entry in this blog is all about the analog shots I took, both with my 135 camera (a Canon 650) as well as my 120 camera (a Kiev 60).

*Walking among these tall pine trees felt a bit like stepping into a cathedral of green and light.*

Medium format in the woods

April 24, 2018 in Photography

Third week in a row with medium format images of mine to share...this is starting to become a trend! Last weekend I packed myself, my camera bag and my fellow photographing father into the car and drove an hour northeast of here to the Fulltofta Nature Reserve for a photowalk along with a few other members of a Facebook group I'm part of. It was blatantly obvious that my analog cameras were the odd ones out among all the long lensed Canon, Nikons and Sonys, but I didn't care very much...I was too busy enjoying the opportunity to try out the 1950s Zeiss in the new surroundings.

Using coffee for developing photos?

November 17, 2017 in Photography, Post production

When a fellow board member of my photo club said that this semester we'd have a "Develop with Coffee" class It certainly wasn't the first time I'd heard of the phenomenon known as "Caffenol". I'd even seen a video or two of it on YouTube, but I hadn't tried it myself before. So I figured, why not give it a go. The worst that could happen would be that a film would be ruined and I wouldn't have those particular pictures...really not the end of the world.

Bokskogen Forest on a day when the light was actually okay enough to snap a picture or two.

November is not a photo month

November 27, 2016 in Photography, Project, Writing

Whenever November rolls in my photography urges tend to fall to a year low, because frankly both the weather and the light tend to be dreary as hell. Also, I tend to be a bit more occupied with something that has become a tradition for me. For the past eight years I've participated in the National Novel Writing Month (yep, been there, done that, have the sweater...and the thermos mug...and the stickers) which, if anyone who knows me doesn't know too much about it already, is where you set the yourself the goal to write a pre-first draft of a novel of 50,000 words in one month. That's 1,667 words per day for 30 days in a row.

First image of my 365 project this year. "Night Cycle"

New Year, New Start!

January 01, 2016 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).