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.

Young drummers

Göta Lejons ungdomsorkester

At Quarnevalen, a triennial student parade through Stockholm, the Gothenburg youth orchestra “Göta Lejon” participates.

I got this shot from the sidelines. I find it attractive because of how it combines a strong sense of pattern — the hats, the drums, all lining up — at least as well as can be expected by a youth marching band; and then the concentrated faces of the drummers, looking straight ahead, working their way through their beat patterns.

It is a picture that ends up being very personal at the same time as it is almost abstract.

The tilt of the horizon? Actually a result of my laziness; but it ends up conveying a directionality, reinforcing the sense that they are moving forwards with the parade.

Jump!

Jump!

Watching the SF Taiko Dojo perform at the Cherry Blossom festival, I tried to capture the sheer, raw energy of their performance. This was one of the luckier shots from that session — the main composers airborne from a simultaneous drumbeating jump they were making, soon to come down with a heavy whack on their drum skins.

There are things I would have liked differently in this picture — it's a somewhat busy background, and I could have gotten better separation between dancers and backdrops; but it's not that bad. The things I want to show: the dancers, the drums and drumsticks, the energy and action of the performance all come through as cleanly and clearly as anything. For the amount of snapshotting — of taking, not making, a photograph that went into this, I am quite happy with the results. Convincing, illustrative, emotional. A fair shot.

Kungsgatstornet

Kungsgatstornet

There is something very pleasing about sunlit architecture against a backdrop of heavy, dark, rainy clouds. It brings extra drama to the picture, and a lot of extra focus on the details of the building now that it comes up clearly against the darker backdrop.

I saw this tower in central Stockholm one day, and pulled out my point-and-shoot to take a bracket, subsequently made an HDR picture. It is more of a technique etude than a picture with a deep message — even if the tower in question is one of the most gorgeously placed homes in all of Sweden, and the light golden details come of beautifully in this particular photography.

Looking at the picture, I think of how beautiful I find the builing, but also am moved by a few questions… what is up with the window all in white? Was it just a trick of lights and angles, or is there something going on in there? And what about the open window?

As an experiment, I gave the same picture a black and white treatment, and the picture is certainly different after that:

Kungsgatstornet HDR and B/W

There is heavier drama, deeper. The distinction between the lit window and the “merely” blue windows has vanished completely, and it loses some levity with the disappearance of the contrast between the deep blues, bright greens and brilliant golds in the colour picture. It takes on a completely different mood — a Noir cityscape rather than the inviting one above. Some of this is due to the harsher contrast treatment; but some also in the lack of colour harmonies.

I need to explore these emotions more.

Fire dance

I have been utterly remiss — I drowned in two moves back to back, and thus haven't finished my August photo critiques. This will now be taken care of, little by little.

Mirrored Dancer

Inspired by the photography I did early in the summer with two fire dancers at my friends' wedding, we set up a photo shoot with the dancers — explicitly to shoot fire dancing together.

The photo shoot went well — I'm still processing the photos — but a few popped up early and went online after I had played with them. I was captivated by the textures in the photo. The streaks of the fire flame, and the wavy distortion in the water reflection. I wanted to show these textures, to highlight them — and first tried doing it by going black and white.

However, I discovered that if I remained in color, but worked aggressively with vibrance and saturation controls, I could desaturate the fire dramatically without losing color tone in the dancer's skin or dress. The result is up here — and with what I find to be a very pleasing surprise embedded in what at first glance looks like a black and white picture: the splash of color in the visible fire dancer in the middle of her poi fire streaks.

Mormor Gun

Mormor Gun

Last I visited Gothenburg, I took the chance of sitting my Grandmother Gun down and posing her for a few photos, trying out flash arrangements and fiddling with my portraiture technique.

For this picture, the black and white treatment worked very well — while the color original was a good portrait, I feel that this ends up being more of a striking portrait. I tried to really show the texture of her skin, with lighting almost straight from the left; but possibly, it might have been a more flattering portrait with a fill flash, or a reflector, on the right. I do like this quite a bit, though — the side-lighting reminds me, almost, of Rembrandt's portraits.

Cellar door

Cellar door

Out in Roslagen, we spotted this entry door to a subterranean food cellar. I liked the worn structures, the decayed but not dilapidated look. To emphasize the textures I saw, in post-processing, I made it black and white, I boosted the greens, and I added some sharpening.

The two slopes lead the eye to the door at the center of the piece, as do the brick wall veining framing the horizontal streaks of the white wall, and the vertical lines in the top wood lining. The underlying message of «look at this pretty door» is underlined by there being interesting — different, but not unbalanced — textures on all sides of the door itself, complementing its own highly textured appearance with more variation in the picture.

Old pumps

Pumps in Alamo, CA

I have a bit of a thing for urban decay.

To me, these pumps — spotted in Alamo, CA, as we were driving through on our way from SF to LA — speaks of design built to last, of well worn equipment, smoothed out to fit its purpose. It carries a kind of … humanist beauty. The kind of beauty that comes from building something, and then using it for the benefit of the user more than for the item, regarding mere flaking paint as less of a problem than a kinked pipe would be.

Odd one out

The odd one out

I spotted this egg carton in my fridge one day, and it was such a perfect wanna-be stock photo that I just had to take it. The one egg in the carton that is different. The unique item in an array of equals. The odd one out, as it were.

This might be one of the most stock-photo-ish, most commercial-ish photos I have shot. It is such an iconic picture, one that I am far from the first to attempt. And yet, it works so well.

A Swedish summer offering

Swedish summer offering

An outstretched hand, offering wild strawberries. A gesture of warmth, invitation, generosity. Warm sunlight, perfectly ripe strawberries — it is a perfect summer scene.

Were I to do anything different with this shot, I'd frame it slightly more carefully. Avoid the close crop of the finger tips. The crop of the wrist, though, stays. It brings a closeness to the picture, an intimacy with the giver that boosts the underlying mood.

Thistle

Thistle

The thistle is a weed, and a thorny one at that. Annoying when it grows where you are trying to grow other things, and even more so when you, or a child, goes at it inadvertently.

It is also, once in bloom, a gorgeous splash of color. A flower with personality well up there with roses and tulips, though quite a bit more punk rock than these more established flowers.

This closeup puts the splash of color, the punk rock chic of the thistle up front and center. And in the background, gorgeous forest-y lush bokeh, and another thistle-bud, the potential of more color, lined up. The composition unbalanced, but harmoniously so. The vacuum on the right balances the potential on the left rather than unbalancing the picture, and a composition that could have been lopsided in fact is, well, punk rock.

Af Chapman

Af Chapman

In central Stockholm lies anchored the old ship af Chapman, which has for the last numerous years been functioning as a youth hostel. It is a landmark of Stockholm, and one of the ones I am myself very fond of.

The view from the café of the Photographic Museum of Stockholm offers up a perspective of af Chapman where the masts are almost completely aligned, offering up this resulting view.

In this picture, I see a familiar scene: it reminds me of home, and of youth events I have organized in the past, where we used this hostel to house the participants. And nowadays, it also reminds me of the half-week I spent with my aunt Anna, talking about photos and pictorial composition.

And there are a few words to be said here. The picture has a few compositional elements going for it. There is a repetition throughout the picture of horizontal lines, projecting calm. The cross-bars of the masts leads the eye from the buildings on the left towards the lush greenery on the right, where the opposition of the white church spire in the green against the green buoy in front of the white quay launches the gaze back across the picture. It helps the composition that the transition from urban to forest goes by way of a vessel.

In the mood

In the mood

At a jazz cafe, listening to the music, wearing my fedora, Susanne is intense, concentrated, in a phrase, «In the mood».

Focus is on her eyes, connecting you to her, but not very deep, bringing her neck, her shirt, even her lips and cheek, into a haze, fading into the distance. She looks, intensely, out of the frame, with the line of her gaze emphasized by the line of the brim of her hat. The entire image is comparatively low-key, a dark image, with the face the only detail visible, the texture of the hat just barely distinguishable from the completely blacked out background. While Susanne feels self-conscious about this image, it is one of my favourites. I love it to the extent that when looking for motifs to try to etch onto chocolate when I had access to a laser-cutter in February, I chose this image. Greyscale, and a very heavy-handed reduction in color depth, I ended up with the following image for the actual etching:

In the mood, etching copy

Gritty Tenderloin

Gritty Tenderloin

The view out of the window of my apartment where I lived in the Tenderloin in San Francisco. With a dramatic sky, and a bit of post-processing — graduated exposure-lowering filter, and some separate lowering of exposure — we end up with this picture.

It strikes me as gritty. It's the kind of picture I expect to see from a south-american city with pollution problems and favelas hidden behind the big tourist hotels. Façades that once were bright and cheery now look droopy with the colour faded in different amounts for different patches. Towering housing with speckled balconies filled with things.

The grimness of the picture is aided by the darkened sky, by the way that the tops of the high houses are drawn in with the graduated filter, and thus darkening towards the top, and by the sharpness of the image, in which all the flaws reproduced faithfully.

Kobe turtle mirrored

Mirrored turtle in a Kobe inner city park

A calming, but not quite tranquil picture. A single turtle, on a stone out in the water, enjoying the heat of the beaming sunlight. A pool of water surrounding the stone that is calm enough to offer mirror images, but wavy enough to jar the mirror image. As so many other images I end up liking, it has an inherent contradiction: an iconically slow animal in a calm scene, but not quite calm enough. Stretching out, aiming its head up, out, and away.

Even in color symbolism, this image stays mostly coherent — the turtle is enveloped in a rippled pond of green reflections from the foliage surrounding it, giving associations of calmness and of fecundity.

Olympic tree

Olympic tree

As we walked in Olympos, watching the ruins, my eye was caught by this tree, by the way the sunlight struck through the leaves and fruits, making it all glow as if from within. I lifted my camera, framed the shot and took this picture.

The red pods against green and beige, the only sharp things in a picture filled with creamy, soft bokeh, are a clear focus for our attention. The picture is not particularly subtle, but its context enriches it — the pillars in the background are from the ruins of the Zeus temple at Olympos: the picture connects across millenia from the seeds of the next generation of trees to the scattered remains of the great architects of ancient Greece. The new is diagonal, dynamic, organic — while the old is vertical, rectangular and steady, still standing after centuries and centuries, thick where the twigs of the tree are thin.

Susanne against the future

Portrait of Susanne

I'm not big on portraiture. I do it occasionally, but it's not a genre that comes easily to me. However, standing next to a monastery on top of a mountain in Greece with Susanne, watching the evening light fall in and soaking everything in its golden hues, I just had to ask her to stand in the light and pose.

And pose she did. After a number of decent shots, I asked her to shake loose her hair — and as she tossed it out — I snapped this.

A triangular composition, usually calming, here is filled with movement as the tossed hair flies, and the neck extends to sweep out her hair.

It shows off Susanne as a vibrant, happy, and beautiful woman, defiantly thrusting herself at her future, throat first. 

Grand Canyon tree

Tree against the Grand Canyon

Having walked down into Grand Canyon along the South Kaibab trail to Cedar Ridge, I was struck by the beauty of this dried out dead old tree. I sat down in front of it, leaned against a railing and tried to get as deep as I possibly could for the shot. As I framed it, I thought about getting low, about lining up the buttes with the branches, but not much else.

Only afterwards, I've discovered more and more and more things about this picture that serendipity assisted in with the composition. The way the clouds line up with the top branch. The diagonal line from the root to the branch. The size of Grand Canyon, and the beautiful view of it behind the tree, and the tree up front as a core magnet for the viewer's gaze.

The picture really only says “Look at this beautiful tree and its beautiful setting!”, but it does so with a balanced composition that combines both foreground and background for all the parts of the picture.

It remains one of my very favorite pictures ever.

Old and new

Old and new

A single photo, embodying the changes of the past century (or so) of the American west. A mule driver in Grand Canyon, mounted on his mule, riding along the rails of the Santa Fe railroad, headed for the Santa Fe train approaching in the distance.

In this picture, compositional elements help out quite well in framing this message of contrast and change. 

The rail, responsible for movement along a prepared path, runs through the frame in parallel diagonal lines, signifying the change itself. 

Vertically, in the foreground, the rider, almost toppling in his pose.

In the background, in a solid, restful horizontal, the train.

And old and new connected by the dynamic line of the railway.

The thought in my mind when first I took the photo was the stark contrast between the train and the rider; by instinct, I framed the image so that all other components fell into place. Revisiting the picture, I see the message above, in addition to the neat contrast and framing I originally picked it for, and see it as a comparatively strong message.

At the groundhogs' at SF Zoo

In media res

This pictures speaks mostly in what it doesn't show you. It is a mound of dirt, a crater, with a fountain of sand and dirt cascading out of the crater. It is a picture that, at the face of it, solicits questions. What spews out the dirt? Where is this? Even — what scale is the picture on? There are few hints, but a staging that leads the thought towards a number of different, but homogenous, possible stories for the picture.