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Landscape and Nature Photography from the North of Europe

Just before Christmas I posted what I consider to be my best images of 2011 and already pointed out in that post, my imagery turned out to be a bit different from the previous year (read 2010). Many more things did though happen which are worth to be mentioned here on the blog.

So let’s start to have a look at what did happen here on the blog to begin with:

The Blog

First of all, after a short stint on a self-hosted site I switched back to a hosted solution here on WordPress.com, which, looking back, definitely made my life a lot easier.

Even though I did enjoy running my own site, the aspect of taking care of all things security and backup, plus the endless possibilities to customize, wasn’t a difficult task to do, but ate more time that I was willing to spent on that. It turned out that having complete control over every aspect of the site, also results in me wanting to take advantage of just that as well. So I spent a lot of time looking for templates and plug-ins, which I then naturally tweaked, and tweaked and… I guess you get the idea.

It wouldn’t be me though if I still wouldn’t be tweaking this site, but since it’s limited to edits of the CSS file I only can and have to focus on that. Working with a limited set of possibilities always makes me more creative and surely the life a bit easier. And simpler and easier is always better.

With this latest iteration of the site I finally found a theme with the features I was looking for, and which is close to a theme that I enjoyed using a lot prior to my return to WP.com.

But switching the blog wasn’t the only thing that has moved during this year.

The galleries were running on Photoshelter and later on SmugMug before I finally moved them recently over here as well. I just prefer to have everything under one roof so to speak.

The latter is still a bit under development, as there’s some more editing and re-publishing to do, but it’s almost there.

Some satistics

Since I have switched to WP.com in April, the statistics of this website are a little off are not entirely reflecting what was going on the site and the galleries, but here’s what’s has happened a bit:

Some of these stats are derived from WP’s annual report, which happens to be a beautiful infographic. Since the stats are not covering the whole year though it is not entirely useful for you at the moment and I chose to not publish this year. Next year on the other hand I will include it in the post.

During 2011 I posted:

  • 82 new posts

And since the beginning of the stat counter in the middle of April

  • the site has been viewed roughly 43200 times
  • the 12th of September being the most busiest day of the year
  • and most of you are coming from the USA, Germany and the United Kingdom.

Popular Posts

Writings, Appearances and other Media

In the first half of this year I released my second e-Book dedicated to my Mountain Sketches Project which has been received much better than I expected.

And talking of which…

It had been a while since the last time, but I was asked again to contribute another article for the popular German photography blog Kwerfeldein.de. In that article I wrote on the Mountain Sketches Project. The article is written in German language and you can read it here.

In June I participated in an exhibition on the island of Hailuoto. I have been photographing on this island frequently and having the chance to have an exhibition there was a nice opportunity.

Late in Autumn I took part in one of Olaf Bathke’s hang-outs over on Google+. You can watch right over there or on YouTube.

What’s Next?

What’s next is always a good question, and to be honest, I stopped the whole idea of doing new years resolutions as they tend to not work out anyway.

Naturally one thing to work on during this year would be to further develop my photographic and compositional skills. Further I find it’s important to start looking beyond the horizon and also start working on different topics, whatever these might be. The idea of working and thinking more in projects and creating whole series of images is definitely something that I will put a lot more effort into.

The acquisition of a Ricoh GXR system was a very good choice and the idea of having a small camera almost always with me has inspired me a lot. In fact, I enjoy using a small camera so much, that I’m thinking of getting a NEX-7 once it’s available here. Let’s see.

Here for the blog, I also plan to maybe post a bit less, but to give more attention to presentation and quality of the content. Choosing quality over quantity if you will. The latter will also result in the revision of older posts to bring them up to the same level as current ones.

So, I guess that it’s for the time being, I thank all of you for your support and visiting my site and I’m now off into the new year and try to make the best of it.

Today I would like to wish all of you who take their time to visit my site a Merry Christmas. This year surely was an eventful one and with the change of year approaching rapidly I’m looking forward to the next one.

I would like to thank all of you for your support, for visiting my site every now and then and for following my work here and on all the other social media sites.

But now I don’t want to take more of your time and would like to wish you and your families a Merry Christmas and should I not have a fresh post ready in time, a Happy New Year.

Sometimes it is hard to believe that yet another year is soon about to be referred to as last-year and it’s that time of the year again to sit down and do a little recap, just like last year. This first post can be referred as the photo-edition.

In photographic terms it was a pretty successful year, even though many things and trips that I had planned didn’t quiet worked out the way I hoped for. As opposed to the previous years I had only limited time and possibilities for extended photographic journeys, yet I returned from most of these trips with successful compositions.

The two larger trips to Norway were symptomatic for this year: Successful in terms of produced images but not really in terms of execution and both ended much earlier than intended. Rather unfortunate, yet beneficial weather conditions and an drained car battery in Lapland come to mind. Still the images and the two projects which came out of these failed trips are amongst my all time favorites (at least so far).

Feel free to visit the Mountain Sketches, Falls and Poro in Motion projects to view some of these images within context.

Luckily not all trips turned out to have an unexpected twist and we had time for a road trip through the north and east of Finland in which I could contribute images to my Falls-Project and further explore the Finnish Lapland. Most of these images are still waiting to be processed though.

This year also was interesting since I started to work both technically and concept-wise a bit different from the previous years. For starters I definitely used my 70-200 what felt almost exclusively which led naturally for much different compositions. Getting a bit away from the usual ’wide-angle’ compositions presented itself as a welcome refresh to my work and opened up my eyes and compositions a bit.

Technical aspects aside, I started to think more in terms of projects, stories or series other than searching for the one image, and I have to say, this approach had a liberating effect to my work. Working, or better thinking more in creating a series of images, telling a story and creating a ”body of work turns out to be very inspiring. A first glance at works like this you can find in my articles An Evening At The Harbour, A Violin Teacher’s Room and Kiutököngas – A Series which are just the beginning with more to come in the future. Also the yet to be released “Winter-Trees” and “Lamp-Squirls” are very interesting, at least for me. But those will be out in the beginning of next year.

In an upcoming post I will reflect a bit more on behind-the-scenes-kind-of topics but until then here are my ten personal favourites from this year.

Just as last year this post will also contribute to Jim Goldstein’s Blog Project. Read more about the project on his blog

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So, there you go. I missed it. For the first time in now four years I missed the anniversary of this little blog of mine. It passed by un-noticed, that is until now of course, but without noticing the anniversary, I did though give it a little facelift and roughly just in time.

I wanted to take more advantage of some of newly introduced features here on WordPress and with the help of this recently released theme I will be able to present the posts like I envision them. I plan to bring text and photography together in a beautiful and exciting way.

I have some ideas on how to use some of its features to present my work in a cleaner and fresher and modern way, while at the same time have a consistent experience. It starts with finally having my galleries under the same roof as my main site. Something that I have been wanting to do in just this way, with a simple, stylish and responsive theme, for now more than one year already.

In order to get everything done right (finally I hope to say), I’m currently in the process of updating several of the older posts to make it more fun to visit overall more beautiful (seriously, don’t you just love this font or the new carousel in the galleries) and hopefully more of an experience. Looking at for example this or this post will give you an idea what to expect.

Additionally I will finally edit the galleries (still on the to-do list) and the images in it will be more carefully selected. Something that I felt to be overdue already. On the other side more and bigger images will be added to post’s on the blog and tagged for easier browsing. And then there’s the re-installment of the landing page, but that’s still on a bit on hold, until the inspiration strikes me.

For those of you waiting for fresh posts, which are admittedly amiss at the moment, I can asure there’s lot’s to come, I’m just way behind. But to start things off, here’s already one fresh image from a recent shooting from a familiar location.

Summer, with all it’s landscape-photographic opportunities is but a distant memory and another winter is just around the corner. The days are significantly shorter and darker by now and finding time for some landscape photography is getting increasingly difficult. It’s just about time to think about some photographic projects to keep me a bit busy, and this could become one of them.

If you visit here from time to time you might have noticed me mentioning the acquisition of a Ricoh GXR, which is a very fine and small camera. I have made it a habit of carrying it with me almost all the time just to be prepared once something catches my eye – just as it was in this case.

A Violin Teacher’s Room

A few months ago I visited this room for the first time and the coziness of this, let’s call it, combination of workshop and teaching facility has appealed to me in an instant. The room simply has character something that in times like these, in which teaching facilities favour a clean and functional style, seems to be forgotten.

Many images were hidden in here and exploring the room in the soft autumn light coming in through the window had been a treat. But now feel free to explore the room yourself in this series.

It is always a pleasure to return into this room and I’m looking forward to explore similar cozy facilities like this one. That is, if I find them, but that of course is a totally different story.

Aside from being a not-landscape-ish post it’s also a rare post in which my profession and my passion collide. Aside an occasional Instagram or a random Tweet out of boredom during a break, I have kept my profession so far out of this blog.

“Oh, my God!” were my thoughts just the other day when I checked the date of my last published article here on the blog. A month has flown by in a wink and not only is it time to finally update here again, but I also feel it’s time to catch up a bit with everything that has been going on recently.

Short version is: I had been really, really busy!

Despite that most of the things that kept me away from updating here had little to nothing to do with photography, I tried to remain as active as possible in photographic terms. Every now and then, I found some time to dive into self-assigned photographic projects and explore new terrain.

I finally decided to get myself a Rico GXR as my always-to-have-with-me-camera and after four months of waiting I received the Lee Big Stopper. I was hoping to have the latter available prior the summer to take full advantage of it during my trips to Norway and Lapland, but no can do. Also I did though went through a rather long decision-making-process regarding which mobile-camera to get. Either way, it’s done now and I hope to have a little something about the GXR on the blog soon.

During the short time I own both of these tools, they definitely have been inspiring me to get out of my comfort zone and work on themes I have been not exploring so far. While few of these attempts failed, even more of them actually succeeded and if only to direct me into yet another different direction and explore something else. The creative juices are flowing so to speak and some thoughts on these for me new projects and approaches will (together with a first series of images) go live in the next few days.

And talking about going live:

Olaf Bathke asked me the other week (or is it two weeks ago?) to join a Google+ hangout on Living and Photographing in Scandinavia and the recording can be seen on You Tube or on Google+ in case you missed it are interested and understand German. Of course you can also add me on Google+.

More to come soon.

It appeared what to become a perfect sunset when I left home – clouds and sun just right for taking out the Big Stopper which I finally wanted to work with. I planned to visit a beautiful and romantic little fishing harbor in Kiviniemi, Finland and do some long exposures of the piers and boats with some nice light and capture the movement in the clouds.

As so often during this year my plans didn’t quite work out but new and different options offered themselves. By the time of my arrival the clouds spent their time in the sky just about everywhere, but not where I needed them.

It was obvious that my planned images will not work out and instead I simply took my Ricoh GXR and explored the buildings in the harbour and chose to photograph a series and try to tell a story about this place. Paired with a few long exposures using my 5D this turned out to be a very nice combination.

Harbours like these are easy to be found along the coast and this first post might become the beginning of new project or maybe series here on the blog.

I’m very satisfied with the outcome of the series and the quality of the Ricoh GXR is simply fantastic. Couldn’t be happier with the functionality and the handling of the camera. In fact I would like to see a few of it’s features in my 5D MkII.

It surely took a while, but after four months of waiting my Lee Big Stopper finally arrived at my front door! Since it took so long it was way too late to use it during my trips to Norway and it’s coast (admittedly the conditions didn’t allow me then to actually reach there but that’s a totally different story) but there are enough places around here to make use of it.

Even though I had only little chance to make actually use of it so far, I found doing the math and/or looking at the accompanied table to figure out the correct exposure time, not difficult, but maybe a bit cumbersome. In short: I was looking for a handy solution.

Spending some time during a four-minute exposure and taking pictures of, well, the camera taking pictures.

Previously I checked the exposure, looked up the exposure time one the table (or worse: tried to calculate) and then started the stopwatch on my phone. Not too difficult but I was looking for something even easier, and naturally there’s an app for that!

Screenshot of NDTimer

I found a simple little app in the app-store called NDTimer which does all I was looking for: calculating the exposure and includes a timer. The procedure is simple, after composing the image I take a meter reading for the correct exposure without the filter attached and enter it into the app. I have already pre-selected of the many options, the 10 Stops for the Big Stopper and get immediately the correct exposure together with a timer. Next I only have to release the shutter (in bulp-mode) and the timer at the same time. The rest is just waiting. Couldn’t be any easier.

For the price of a fraction of the filter it is a no-brainer if you own an iPhone.

Note

The app calculates many different ND and pol filters as well. For a complete overview of it’s feature visit the app-store or the developer’s webpage