The teams line up for the referees' mandatory gear inspection .
Almost two months ago I had the privilege to shoot a Roller Derby game in Malmö, between Malmö Royal Roller Derby (in green) and the Royal Army from Stockholm (in black), as part of a four man group of photographers court side. I've been meaning to share some of the photos before, but just never got around to it...until now at the start of the new year.
Read MoreFor the last few weeks my grand total photos taken with my DSLR can be summed up with a very low number. In fact it can’t get any lower without going into negatives. That may sound rather ominous for someone into photography to not shoot photos, but it actually isn’t ominous or alarming at all. Quite the contrary in fact!
Read MoreI am currently on vacation in Austin, Texas and as my beloved host and I made our way home from brunch at IHOP (gotta get some of those pancakes when I am here!) she suggested we go to the Aquarium, and I thought that was a great idea. I hadn't exactly planned for a day of photography, so my DSLR was still in my backpack. My HTC One cell phone was what I'd have to use for photography that day. I was fine with that though, this vacation is NOT a photo vacation as much as it is a time of seeing loved ones.
Still I couldn't help myself snapping away a few as we walked through the displays and tanks with various fish, octopuses, sea urchins and a few creepies and crawlies. It actually felt good not to have that big camera with me...guess I am slowly turning into a "normal" person? Pity the thought!
My point to this post though, is that it is okay to use whatever camera you can have with you; it doesn't have to be a big full-frame DSLR, it can sometimes be a cell phone...or a point and shoot. It's even possible to do without photography entirely and experience it "live", as my beloved host so eloquently puts it. That could be my New Year's resolution for 2015, to experience things more and not necessarily shoot photos of everything.
As I write this it is December 13th, a day that in Sweden is Lucia Day where we for some strange reason celebrate an Italian saint from Syracuse, with women wearing candles in their hair, men in pointy, star-strewn hats and other costumes (look it up people, it is quite a sight).
Last night we had a pretty severe storm go past us, so I spent the night editing photos I took a few days ago on a recent, but far too rare nightly photowalk in Malmö. I was in town for a meeting of the board with my photo club, as well as picking up my telephoto lens that had had some refurbishments done at the workshop, so I headed in a bit earlier and did a walk around the city, where most of the stores are now more or less fully decorated for the holiday shopping season. Lots of lights, lots of red and quite a bit of green in other words.
Most of these photos are taken around the Gustav Adolf Square in central Malmö, which has become the epicenter of Christmas decorations in the last few years with lots of torches lit daily, decorated trees, christmas trinkets on sale and a merry-go-round for the kids.
I also tried a few really long exposure shots of the canal, but I am not sure I’m happy with those. It’s an area of photography I need a lot more practice at. Also...clean your lens and filter dude! Those dust specks are large enough to be landmarks on a map!
It’s now December and that means this year’s edition of National Novel Writing Month is over. It’s a bit of a mixed blessing to be honest. I will not miss the feeling of “having to” write all the words just to keep up, but at the same time...when you hit your stride, your flow, it’s such a great sensation! That’s when you can easily chalk up 5,000 words in a day, while some days just typing 1,000 feels like you’re dragging an NFL linebacker up a hill!
My story this year ended up in the sci-fi field, partly inspired by the ongoing rendezvous with the comet 67P (I know it has a longer double Russian name but I can't spell, nor pronounce it). It also ended up with a lot of similarities with Clarke’s Rendezvous with Rama. So much so that if I ever decide to do more with it than sticking the manuscript in a box I’ll have to do LOTS of rewrites. But hey, that’s what the months after NaNoWriMo are for! Right? Right!
Instead, these few weeks before it’s time to board a plane westward towards the Lone Star State I will spend some time on reading some fiction and edit my never-ending project (from here on called The Book That Shall Be Finished...or TBTSBF...hm...not sure that acronym is all that good). Anyway, it’s something that’s been on the back burner for much too long and I need to finish it to get it over and done, so it moves from the "To be Finished" to the "Done and Ready" pile, which is embarrassingly small in comparison.
I've also promised someone very dear to me to read the first book in the Outlander series before Christmas, so that's also on my list of things to do. It's a shame that the paperback version of the book that I've got has a really, teeny, tiny typeface and my eyes aren't what they used to be! I've given serious thought to borrowing my mother's magnifying rig that she used to use when she did needlework so that I can read the text without squinting myself silly! We'll see if I actually need to do that though. I hope not, because it does look somewhat silly to use that thing to read!
I hope the book is good...that’ll make it worthwhile. I've gotten great reading suggestion from this very person before, so I am counting on it being worth the "effort".
During the month of November it generally is very gray and dark in Sweden, so it's perfectly timed to participate in NaNoWriMo, since it is not exactly photography weather most of the time. However, if you sit in front of your computer day in, day out you're eventually going to go bonkers (at least I think I would), so I've still been outside, if only to get a bit of grayish daylight into my eyes.
Of course I bring my camera too (I wouldn't be me otherwise), but there still hasn't been much photography this month. Here are a few of the fall-related pictures I've taken this month though, just within a mile or so from where I live.
They're all taken with my Canon 600d and a 50 mm 1.8 lens (since my zoom lens has been in the repair shop for a large part of the month), and I find it intriguing to try to take the shots with a fixed focus lens sometimes. It makes you zoom with your feet, so you get a workout on top of getting your images (albeit a very small workout!). They've been processed in Adobe Lightroom 3, where I've increased contrasts and color to make them "pop" better on screen.
During the month of November I am not doing a lot of photography, due to it being National Novel Writing Month, and that tends to soak up most of my creative energy. It's fun to do something much slower, more introspective than photography from time to time. But since this is a photographer's blog there has to be photos...right?
So, this is a photo that is an "oldie", shot back in 2007 at the Wanås manor in Skåne, Sweden. I was there with my photo club, looking at all the sculptures and artwork that the place is full of during the summer months.
I shot this with a Canon point and shoot and haven't really done anything with it until today. I tweaked the saturation, brightness and contrasts in the picture a little bit, to make it "pop" some more, but other than that it is the way I shot it 7 years (!) ago.
It is (sometimes at least) fun to go back in your Lightroom catalogs and look at the stuff you did a year ago, two, three, four or in this case seven years ago, and find stuff you had almost forgotten that you shot! I also discovered that the ratio of photos I'd actually keep if I shot them today is a lot lower, but that's all part of the learning experience!
I took part in a Sunday afternoon photowalk in Malmö, organized through a Facebook group for local photographers. The weather was co-operating with us by not raining cats and dogs like it had been doing for several days, and we had a nice turnout with around 15 photographers taking part. Very soon after we started walking we came across a multitude of dogs and their owners out doing a charity walk against cancer. So there were A LOT of dog pictures taken that day!
Day One
I don't know how many photographers have been swept up in the whole Five Days, Five Black and White shots challenge thing on either Facebook or Google+, but I've just posted my fifth and final image and I figured I'd post them here as a whole (not that they are a collection or on a common theme).
Day Two
The more I've done photography through the years the more I tend to do black and white photos (much to the chagrin of my dear mother who just doesn't "like" black and white photos ;-)), so it was a fairly easy process to find five images to post.
Well, actually it was more a process of eliminating shots that I wanted to include but couldn't. As usual my selection process involved having way too many photos to pick from and from there narrowing it down to the final five.
Day Three
Now I am sure that's nothing unusual for photographers (or any artist making selections for public events, but I find it fascinating that at first I think I don't have any good shots to show, then I go through my stuff and pick the "maybe's" and the "potentials" and I usually end up with twice as many as I have room to show. From there it's a process of elimination, and finding the reasons why an image should either stay or go.
Day Four
The five images I picked for the five day challenge turned out to be an interesting bunch. I've got two street photos, two details photos and one landscape photo and I think that fairly well reflects the sorts of photography that I tend to do. It wasn't a conscious choice to do this, but I like the way they are "collected" here.
Day Five
Yours truly receiving flowers and a reward. Photo by Agneta Nilsson
It's not everyday you stand in front of an audience and accept a bouquet of flowers and a check that has a healthy amount of money written on it, but I can definitely get used to it...fast!
The reason why I did just that this weekend was that I was rewarded for providing the image of the poster for this year's Culture Night, an event where local artists show off their works, be it photographs, paintings, sculptures or performances of various kinds.
I wrote about this in a previous blog post so I won't go over it all again, but rather talk about the evening a bit instead.
My father and I had gotten spots at City Hall, which was definitely a step up from last year's location, a nearby school gym, as far as audience numbers go. This year it was pretty much non-stop people showing up from about 5 PM when the event started all the way to 10 PM when everyone seemed to have disappeared. The event was scheduled to continue until midnight, but when no one had shown for 15 minutes we decided that enough was enough and took down our stuff.
My setup at City Hall.
I showed 11 50 x 40 cm frames (20 x 16 inches) and one at 100 x 70 cm(40 x 28 inches). The bigger one was the poster image put on a separate easel so that people could look at it close up. The others were mostly local images...and in color too, which is a rarity for me these days. I did have four black and white ones though, and they seemed to render quite a bit of interest too. I even had a tentative request for one of the images, but it didn't end up in a sale since the lady in question didn't come back to close the deal. That's too bad, but not something I cry myself to sleep over; I didn't think I'd sell anything. If I had sold anything it would have been a lovely bonus to a very enjoyable evening!
This was my fourth time participating in Culture Night and I hope I can do #5 next year too, because it is just so much fun! Next year I'll try to avoid the rookie mistake of not putting titles or price tags on my pictures too...perhaps if I show they are for sale people will actually be interested!
