Fnittriga bilder

Filled with a giggling joy, some of my pictures end up at their best once I have bashed the living daylights out of their coloration. Sparkly, garish, brash and aggressive, I do think they end up with something … special about them too.

Kungsgatstornet

Strega on a rooftop

Purple rooftop

Strega and a candle

Brunnsviken

Framed by the two Stockholm scenes in their tranquil blue tones, the portraits of a glass of Strega on a San Francisco rooftop flank the perspective-highlighting rooftop in corrugated steel and brash purple sky. All of these photos have a touch of the psychedelic, that with the mood itself, rises through the sequence, peaks with the purple picture, and then decays again until the dramatic sky over Brunnsviken looks almost normal to the dazed spectator emerging after the picture sequence.

Monochromatic fire dance

Calligraphy

Parallell transport

Swirling around her

Filigree

Calligraphy

As I started looking over the photos from my recent photo shoot with the firedancing group Incendia, I noticed that the textures in several of the photos were by far the most eye-catching part. Experimenting a bit with black/white treatments, as well as twiddling the white balances and the saturations — just to see what an extreme modification might do to the picture — I ended up settling for this particular look for a handful of my pictures.

Photoshop and Photoshop Lightroom have two different approaches to saturating and desaturating images: one straightforward, and one that tries to care about skin tones (vibrance). As it turned out, by some experimentation, aggressive desaturation complemented by aggressive vibrance increase lends us this look, where the fire loses its saturation, its coloration, and fades into these almost black/white textured streaks, while skintones and the clothing of the dancer stay clear.

This treatment highlights the texture in the fire, while simultaneously emphasizing the dancer in the photos where she shows up clearly and cleanly, boosting the contrast between the moving fires and the (relatively) immobile dancer.

As for the composition of the collection, the two calligraphic-looking shots form a nice diptyk, framing the entire series; with the Parallell Transport a nice and directional way to lead the eye inwards, and the swirling picture a good, balanced and … centralized centerpiece.

Proud and surprised faces of Stockholm

At the Pride Parade of Stockholm Pride, 2011, I walked as a wheel guard for the fetish club Dekadance. While walking, I saw a large swathe of Stockholm's citizenry: many supportive faces, many proud faces — and quite a few … I have to say … surprised faces.

Here, as my first collection, a sampling from the faces watching our float.


It is always a wonderful feeling to walk the parade — the sheer weight of the audience's attention on you gives me an adrenaline and endorphin rush that has few equals. One way I try to capture it is to seal some of the attention and reactions we elicited, to gather them and arrange them.

You should be able to click the pictures to get a better view of each picture showing up, and — as always — all my pictures are on my flickr account.