Frozentime Images

A day in the life

markh — Tue, 03 Apr 2012 11:40:27 +0000

This is the story of the shoot of an advert for a new-business network that I’m in.

A group of us in the network decided we could afford a full-page ad in the local paper if we all shared it, and so three of us set about making it happen.
Zara happens to have been a professional graphic designer in her past, and Emilie is a natural model as well as stylist. We all loved Zara’s first sketch, with our products arranged around a model, so it was just a matter of collecting the items, and shooting.
I thought about renting a full-sized studio, but we ended up using a room outside Zara’s Fish Spa, for flexibility and convenience. The only problem this caused was that my 2.7m background wasn’t really wide enough, so we had to improvise some extra width and photoshop the seams.
After shooting the safe, planned pose, I suggested that Emilie shake loose, just for fun, and inevitably that resulted in a much better shot than the planned one. The best shots always seem to be during warm-up and testing, or winding down.
Three hours was really a bit rushed, but we got exactly what we wanted, and Zara made a great ad from the shot of Emilie doing impossible things with her leg.
Here’s a timelapse video of the day (you should have sound on…) :

And here is the final ad.

Oman

markh — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 08:06:23 +0000

Back from a trip to Oman that I won with a photo from last year’s holiday in Sri Lanka.

The most photogenic area of Oman has to be the sand deserts that were a few hours north of our hotel in Salalah, but unfortunately we only had one night there, and with sunsets only lasting a few minutes down in the tropics, it was intensive work to make use of the golden hour, which would have been more like the golden half hour without all the sand that acts like a giant warming reflector. The silhouette picture you see here wasn’t planned – the guy just happened to be on the next dune between me and the sun, and I simply asked him to pose in profile. But I liked the pic, and so gave him my card later so that I could send him a copy, at which point I discovered that he was the editor of the magazine through which I had won the holiday. A mix up with seating on the plane also meant that I ended up sitting next to him on the flight home, and now it looks like I might be able to get some work through him in the future. Now what are the chances of all that happening ? And on my first day as a full-time freelancer too. I think someone up there is giving a giant thumbs-up to my career change.
You’ll find more pics and a quick report of the trip here : Oman photos and trip report

Underwater photography

markh — Thu, 08 Dec 2011 09:36:35 +0000

Professional underwater housings are extremely expensive and dedicated to a particular camera model, so I’ve been playing with cheaper alternatives at the local pool.

First I tried a soft case for my DSLR, but found it very clumsy, and since scatter in the water wasted the quality from a big camera I moved over to a hard case for my compact Canon S90, which gives plenty of quality at ISO 80, and when set to manual operation has a shutter lag of around 0.5s, which is annoying but useable.

I then tested different waterproofing techniques for external flashguns, and after a couple of expensive mistakes settled on Tupperware-style containers with a plastic bag inside to contain small leaks.
I expected to then be able to use a normal optical slave to trigger the external flash from the S90, but due to physics that I don’t yet understand, these don’t work through water, so the final solution was to use optical fibres designed for home audio systems. Neodymium magnets were then attached to the ends of the cables which could couple with steel nuts through the plastic walls of the containers, and camera and flash were then mounted on a standard monopod.
Lead weights in the flash container were used to make the whole unit neutrally bouyant.

Then it was just to drag along some adventurous models to the pool and start shooting. Shutter lag and card-writing speed were a bit of a problem given the limited time the models could pose, but the image quality was fine for these sorts of pictures, and we were all pretty happy with the results, which you can see here :
Underwater photos

Vintage industrial exhibition

markh — Mon, 03 Oct 2011 08:06:20 +0000

Last week I picked up my pictures from Edsvik Konsthall where they were partying with new friends in the autumn collection, and now I’m preparing my next personal exhibition, to be held at Ateljé Anna-Karin Sjöblom.

The theme of the studio and exhibition is industrial vintage, so there will be pictures of old mills, rusty tractors, a steam ship’s engine room, and the 425-year-old wood plane that you see in the image here. That wasn’t in a museum, but in the workshop of my host for the last exhibition in Dalarna, and has been hanging on the wall there since the workshop was built, alongside other wonderful gear that has accumulated over the centuries.
And as you can see, it’s one of the many areas of Sweden that is still sepia toned.
Click on the picture to see the rest of the exhibition.
Exhibition list

Location lighting

markh — Wed, 13 Jul 2011 16:26:49 +0000

Studios don’t suit me very well – they are expensive to rent and need a lot of imagination to build an interesting scene out of four white walls.
So I much prefer location shooting, but still want to have good lighting.

Nikon have long had an excellent remote control system for their pocket flashes – Even back in 2004 the humble D70 could provide wireless automatic exposure for remote flashes using optical signals sent before the shutter opened. That’s the system I used to take the portrait of Mia above, which required a surprising number of SB800 flashguns to achieve the natural-looking lighting. Canon have finally caught up, with their latest cameras and flashes sporting similar functions.

But pocket flashes have limited strength (~100J) and long recycling times when used at full power, so when Quantuum came out with a battery-powered studio flash at a fraction of the cost of established brands, I jumped at a 600J unit, and and was so happy with its professional and robust build (it’s already survived a 2 metre fall on to asphalt) and its performance (consistent exposure and colour, fast recycling) that I also bought a 300J unit.
With this sort of energy you can overpower direct sunlight even with a large softbox. You lose automatic exposure and your shutter speed is limited to 1/250 s, but in an arranged shot that is not a huge problem, and if you use the Phottix Strato radio trigger you can still get automatic exposure on all your pocket flashes while the studio flash is triggered in manual mode.

My current portable studio fits nicely on to a Golf trolley (Prestige Europe GC510) so I can walk with it out into the countryside, tow it behind my bike, or take it on public transport.

Just a few days ago I heard about external battery packs from Pixel that can recharge an SB800 in under 2 seconds after discharging at full power, and costs a quarter of Nikon’s own version (thanks Johan!). I ordered immediately and got mine the next day, and it’s brilliant – neatly designed and robust, with a belt case and a tripod screw so you can mount under the camera if you wish. With the flash set to around 1/4 power you can take motordrive sequences with no noticeable falloff of power. So then of course I needed a motordrive for my D700….

I bought a cheap noname brand that has all the features of the Nikon MB-D10 for a quarter of the price. It may be plastic, but I don’t think I will break 4 of them before I would break one Nikon. Here’s a pic from a sequence that I took with the motordrive and two juiced up SB800s :

I think Ormen would do just as much damage to an MB-D10 if he screwed up here.

Exhibition at Gottsunda Library

markh — Sun, 27 Feb 2011 08:44:56 +0000

During March I will be having some pictures on display at Gottsunda Biblioteket along with Eva Triumf and Saska Björck, who constitute Hovmästarna, a group dedicated to celebrating horses through painting, photography and poetry.

The focus of the exhibition is the horses in Hågadalen, a valley near where I live, and through which I walk most days. There are several stables in the valley, and most days at least one of the horses is looking photogenic, so I have several thousand images from the last year alone. Of those I’m trying to pick out my favorite 30. It’s not easy, because they are all so cute.

The opening is Saturday, March 5th, and the exhibition continues under March 23rd. More details here : Hovmästarna

Sri Lanka

markh — Fri, 07 Jan 2011 10:37:51 +0000

Just back from 2 weeks in Sri Lanka.

This is a brilliant place for photography – wonderful scenery, exotic birds and other animals, and friendly smiley people who are happy to be photographed.

I left my full-format D700 at home, because the D300 is much more flexible, with its 18-200 VR do-anything lens that I used most of the time, and the 10.5 fisheye. But I also had a 70-200 f2.8 along for a bit more quality and the ability to extend for the bird shots, and then an SB800 flashgun, a close-up accessory lens, and a small carbon tripod.
Not to mention my Canon S90 pocket camera that was always with me, and for example contributed with the pictures of Lotta in the sunset.
I was a bit worried about my full memory cards getting lost or stolen, but with 30 MB at the end it was going to be very tedious to copy them at an internet cafe, and handing them over to a stranger to copy seemed too risky. An iPod or dedicated photo backup device would have been a good solution but I was too mean to buy one just for this trip, so in the end I just locked them in the safe at the hotels, and held very tightly on to my camera bag in between.
More pictures and a full trip report are here : Sri Lanka pictures

Pocket cameras

markh — Tue, 07 Dec 2010 12:16:36 +0000

Here’s a picture taken with the tiny pocket camera that I always have with me :

The weather was bad and I was just taking a quick walk on which I didn’t think it was worth lugging my usual 8kg of gear, when I heard sleigh bells through the forest and these guys came galloping past me. I just had time to pull out my Canon S90 and take this shot before they were gone, trailing only the sound of jingle bells.
It was a pretty magical first-of-advent morning, but I would have been mad if I hadn’t caught it on ‘film’.

If I’d had my DSLR with me the result would have been sharper, less noisy, and I could have taken several frames and chosen one where the position of the horse’s hooves better showed how fast they were going, but I didn’t, and that’s where pocket cameras come into their own. They can always be there.

The downside of pocket cameras is that they have tiny sensors that show more noise, especially in poor light, and can’t handle as much contrast as bigger sensors. The cameras tend to be slow to respond too, have limited frame rates, and make terrible indoor portraits if you need to rely on the built-in flash. But for static subjects in good light, A4 prints can be embarrassingly similar to the result from cameras costing and weighing 10 times as much. It’s also way cheaper to buy an underwater housing for a pocket camera. They are good for close-ups given their large depth of field, and I often grab my S90 for a close-up even if I’m carrying my DSLR, just because it’s quicker and easier and the results are so good. And a less technical advantage is that people find them less intimidating – no one has ever refused to let me shoot them with the S90, but if I have the big Nikon they often get suspicious of my motives, and sometimes just refuse.

Since all my other gear is Nikon I would have liked to stayed with them so that I would get less confused moving between different menus and button layouts, and could use my big automatic flash, but for the last few years Canon have simply been way ahead on the pocket camera market, and the S90 was the first model that I considered to have sufficient quality in a small enough body to be worth buying. It’s replacement, the S95, is very similar, but has higher resolution video.

Here are some more S90 examples.

The Butterfly House

markh — Mon, 08 Nov 2010 18:16:33 +0000

Today I took a trip to The Butterfly House in Stockholm with Johannes
It was mostly for fun, but also a bit of training before my trip to Sri Lanka.

Being the first day after the school holidays it was very quiet and not much of a problem to use a tripod. Flashguns are ‘discouraged’, but the nice lady on the desk said that we could use them if a picture ‘really needed it’. It was -5 C out, and we walked from the far car park, so it took 15 mins or so for the cameras to warm up and stop fogging. Next time I would put mine in a plastic bag and sit it on a microwaved bag of rice for the journey, and/or have it in the footwell of the car with the heater on. We chose a sunny day, but despite the buildings being made of glass, light was still a bit of a problem.
But there were plenty of pretty flowers and butterflies, and new ones were hatching all day. Definitely a place I’d recommend to go for an afternoon of shooting off season.
Here’s the result : Butterfly show
Most of the pics were taken with a Sigma 150mm macro, apertures between f5.6 and f11.

Exhibition at Georg Lulich gallery

markh — Mon, 25 Oct 2010 07:24:34 +0000

Georg Lulich is off to host his LA exhibition during November, so I get to take over his gallery for the month. Amongst other things I’ll be showing my canvas nature prints, some horse pictures, and I’ll also be selling A5 greetings cards with winter and Uppsala motifs.

The opening is on Saturday 30th October, officially from 12-16, but probably longer since it’s also the opening of the light festival that evening.
Then I’ll be open every Saturday at least from 12-16, until the 27th November, which happens to be the first of advent.
Weekdays I’ll open when I have free time, so call or mail if you’re in town then and want to see if I’m there.

The Georg Lulich Gallery is in Walmstedska Garden, Sysslomansgatan 1, Uppsala.
That’s between Saluhallen and Ofvendahls, next to Kultur Kafeet.

Nov 29 – And now it’s over, so Georg’s pictures will be back next weekend.
I had a lot of fun talking to the 500 visitors that passed through, and am very glad that I got the chance to do this. Here’s what it looked like : (mini gallery show)
If you missed it, my next exhibition will be at Gottsunda library next March.