Sven Seebeck Photography | Sven Seebeck Photography

Mänty-Sketches #3

Sven Seebeck — Thu, 17 May 2012 19:35:36 +0000

Most of the snow in this area had finally given in, accepted that it’s time for Spring to get into business and melted away. The conditions are about to get better and I start to get back into the business myself again and keep my blogs running again.

Before continuing with fresh material, it’s time to publish and put a lid on the Mänty Sketches Project, if only for the next few months.

Before I get caught up with writing, I’d rather present you the last few images for the project.

For more images from this series feel free to visit the gallery.

A Case Of “Drive-Through” Landscape Photography

Sven Seebeck — Thu, 05 Apr 2012 20:19:07 +0000

The sea, the coast, rocks and mountains are surely my favourite subjects in the landscape and luckily all of these can be easily photographed in Norway. I quickly learned this during my first, and admittedly very short, visit to Norway three years ago. Ever since I have returned to different parts of the country at least once or twice a year for a more or less extended photographic journey.

During this year though I haven’t had a chance for a real photographic journey in general and specifically for a visit to Norway whatsoever [1]. A few weeks ago though, a work trip though brought me to the city of Narvik for something along the lines of 36 hours.

Since the nature of this trip, was purely a work related (that is, if one can actually call that what I’m doing as work, but that’s of course a totally different story), the chance to pursue landscape photography was very small one to begin with. To reduce luggage I in fact didn’t even bothered to take my gear with me. The thought of carrying a 10 kilogram backpack (plus tripod of course) while already being aware that I most likely wouldn’t have a chance for serious photography, wasn’t so nice and motivating after all.

Naturally though, I didn’t come totally un-equipped and took my Ricoh GXR with me. In Narvik itself I had no transportation available and the only chance I actually had to take at least some pictures was during a quick walk to the harbour just before breakfast. The outcome of those images isn’t worth mentioning in fact.

Things were a bit different on the way back though. Whilst the trip to Narvik led us first through heavy snowstorms and later for the greater part through the dark, the way back to Finland on the other side was a rather smooth ride in the bus in nice morning light in mountains. Since this was the only chance I had to do at least some photography during trip, I spent some time taking pictures out of the driving bus. This is surely something a lot different from my usual way of working.

The result is this little series of images, which I find interesting since they are of a slightly more playful character, a tad out-of-the-usual. At the same time they are taken from an angle I am usually not able to take images of. The slighty higher seating position provided often a better viewpoint (often over the tree line) than I would be able to work off would I have been working with my tripod from ground level.

Somehow I do enjoy the more documentary feel of the images, which somehow is supported by occasional reflections in the windows.

To me it feels that landscape photography is something that one really needs to actually want to do. It requires passion and ever so often, a lot of time. While I’m not lacking the passion, I am severely lacking time to pursue my photography. Sometimes small projects like these help to see a silver lining on the horizon and that soon more photographic opportunities will come up.

Last year at exactly the same time I have been visiting Norway and photographed what would become one of my favourite series of images, the Mountain Sketches. ↩

Hung-out

Sven Seebeck — Mon, 02 Apr 2012 19:14:20 +0000

It had been crazy busy around here and time for writing and processing images for fresh posts are a rare bonus at the moment. I did find some time to update at least my other blog every now and then and to finally fix the ever-so-often crashing iMac of mine. Which in fact is yet another reason for the lack of updates around here.

All these external issues aside I managed to find some time to participate in one of Olaf Bathke’s hangouts. We had some fun discussing different aspects of planning and organizing a photographic trip. With me were of course Olaf Bathke as well as Rainer Mirau and we did discuss several software tools and of course camera bags .

So if you are speak or understand german I would like to invite you over to the recorded video over on YouTube or on Google+ and have a look.

Thirty-something Below Zero

Sven Seebeck — Thu, 08 Mar 2012 17:00:23 +0000

The coldest days of winter are long over by now and the sub-freezing temperatures are long forgotten, the beginning of February though had been very cold time. In fact, on one those days we had the pleasure of having the coldest spot in Finland just here. I’m not sure about the exact temperature, but it was something in the vicinity of minus 32 degrees celsius.

It was on a day like that, on a Sunday, when after a long period, available time and beautiful weather conditions came together. Moments like these have become a luxury but one simply has to wait, and eventually things just work out.

I grabbed my bag and decided to go out an work primarily on my Mänty Sketches project. Since I already had an image and location in mind I knew where to go to. It was in fact so easy, it almost took the fun out of it. But on the other hand in conditions like this you don’t want to aimlessly run around and look for something to photograph either. After warming up the motor of the car, I finally head out to my planned location to take the image.

The only few kilometers of distance to my planned location led me over the motorway where the glowing tree tops along the river caught my eye. From my experience it’s usually best to stay focused and stick to the plan, but this view was just too nice to ignore and I decided to take advantage of this. I take the next exit of the motorway and get back to the same vantage point on the bridge over the mainly frozen river.

In temperatures like this, live-view (which I am now using almost exclusively) proves to be very useful. Not only does it make composing the image easier, it also prevents the breath to immediately freeze on the camera. This happened to me a lot on my previous camera models during winter time. Another positive side-effect is that by utilizing live-view, especially in a magnified view (5x or 10x), it is most obvious when the camera stops shaking.

After all I am standing on a bridge here and it is interesting to notice, that even though (or maybe even because of) I have the camera on a tripod, how much vibration is introduced on the camera by trucks crossing the bridge. The amount of vibration of a bridge is somewhat scary and really makes one trust into the construction of these things. This kind of camera shake, ruined an similar photograph of mine almost exactly a year ago. Then it was though the vibration of my shaking legs on another, very light bridge.

Usually I shy away of images within the city but I am rather satisfied that this time I didn’t. I get a few interesting compositions before continuing with my trip to my planned location and get the images that I have planned.

Mountain Sketches – The iBook

Sven Seebeck — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 17:00:34 +0000

It was just a few weeks ago I that I wrote about my planned re-design of my e-books after playing a bit with Apple’s iBooks Author application. The chance of getting closer tho what I indented my books to be in the first place, seemed to be worth the effort spending a few hours of doing that work.

My original intent was to start with the re-modeling my first e-book, Cornwall – A Photographic Journey, and as you can see from the screenshot in that post I already started to work on it. But, as so often the case, things come in different as planned around here, and today I would like to announce the 2.0 version if you will, of my second e-book Mountain Sketches.

Aside the obvious format change (PDF to iBooks) I have added an audio commentary, did some (minor) adjustments to the overall design and both the gallery and the exif data are kind-of interactive now [1]. In fact I didn’t add much to the original design, as I found it after another revision actually rather pleasing.

The Process

Producing this book was in fact a rather easy task as iBooks Author is a fairly easy to use tool. Being already rather familiar with Pages or Keynote, the iBooks Author app feels like the lovechild of these two and is very easy to get along with. Aside a few more tools, widgets for interactive and multimedia content come to mind, the controls and the workflow are essentially the same as in aforementioned applications. The familiarity with these two and the newly introduced multimedia widgets made the creation of the galleries and in fact the whole book a breeze. The content naturally was ready before and I merely needed to worry a bit on the design of the book and add the audio commentary.

If you are not owning an iPad, you are of course not left out and you can find the same audio comment of course also on the Mountain Sketches project page.

Creating the audio commentary was a somewhat lengthy, yet amusing task. The commentary, roughly 3 min in length, created many times that much worth in out-takes filled with obscure noises and yet to be invented words. For the sake of everyone’s mental health these will be stored in a password protected, encrypted hard-drive and buried in a secret place.

Overall I am rather satisfied with the resulting book considered that iBooks Author is, as you probably know, not targeted to produce text-books rather than photo-books like this one. But with some creativity and compromises one can get around so some of its limitations. I hope that with upcoming releases of the software Apple losens up a bit and opens the software with tools going beyond the creation of textbooks.

Coming up next:

In the end I chose to publish this one first, as I wanted to use the re-issue of the Cornwall e-book to also do some fresh (re-)processing of the images and do some fixing where necessary. Also the production of the video which I plan to include will take some more time. I will keep you posted once that’s done, most likely some time after Lightroom 4 is officially released.

But now I would like you invite over to my e-book page and download the iBook version of my Mountain Sketches e-book (or is it now iBooks?) for free from this page. I hope you do enjoy it.

I have to admit that the exif-solution is a bit cumbersome, but I couldn’t find a decent solution I was satisfied with. ↩

Mänty Sketches #2

Sven Seebeck — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 21:59:53 +0000

The “darker” times are over by now and it’s becoming increasingly brighter every day. As welcome the extra amount of light is, brighter weather in this time of year usually equals a lot colder temperatures. By the time of this writing it is -28 degrees celsius (-35 with wind chill) which naturally adds some extra excitement when taking pictures outside.

I have to admit though that I haven’t been exposed to that too much as I had only very little time to work on fresh images for this project and the last ones already date back a few weeks. But still I’m actively working on the project by scouting some new location or simply by working on the images in Lightroom 4 now.

Lightroom’s new RAW engine and it’s new features feel so much more advanced and superior to it’s predecessor that I simply had to re-process also the earlier images in the series. In fact I see myself doing that to a lot of my images.

Either way here are few more images and I would like to invite you over to my project page to see the whole series of images in case you missed my previous post.

If you are now looking through the images in this post, you might also notice that I did work on the aspect ratio a bit. On it’s initial release, I had them cropped into a 16:9 format, which in the end didn’t really work out with the newer images (those which you are looking at right now), hence I did re-edit them a bit, to create a uniform series of images. Something that is very important to me.

More images to come

e-Book-Updates Ahead

Sven Seebeck — Sun, 22 Jan 2012 19:30:17 +0000

If you are a regular visitor to this blog, you might be already familiar with the two e-books that I have made and released over the last two years. The first one, Cornwall – A Photographic Journey I have put together (trying to avoid the term written here) shortly after I received my iPad 1 and the second one, Mountain Sketches, just during last spring.

While I was, and still am, satisfied with the result, I couldn’t quite get together what I had in mind. It simply wasn’t quite matching my vision. Somehow the only solution getting done what I had in mind already then, would have been the production of a real app instead. Considered that everything that I do around here is out of pure passion and completely do-it-yourself, learning to code a decent app is quite a challenge and simply is too big of a task.

For my second e-book Mountain Sketches I tried to make the overall experience more pleasing, but didn’t really change the format. Releasing it in e-pub format, even though technically easy, didn’t seem useful then as I wasn’t really pleased with the way I could implement the images. In short I had no chance to get closer to my original idea and went again with the PDF-file format.

I started working on the iBook version of my e-book already and so far it looks promising.

That is until iBooks Author got released just the other week. I’m pretty sure that many of you have been following the introduction of, or are at least familiar with the release, of Apple’s application just recently.

I haven’t been working with it much, but even after a few minutes of work in the app, it was obvious that with this tool, I can get much closer to what I was envisioning in the first place. More interactive and fun to use. Just like this website of mine.

Note:
By the time of this writing books made in iBook Author are neither cross-platform or can even be read on a Mac. Surely this not optimal but it would be the same though if the book would be released as an app. An iTunes-ish cross-plattform desktop reader could solve some issues here, as not everyone who owns an iPad also uses a Mac. But then again, there’s always the chance to also release it additionally as a PDF or in e-pub format.
I will refrain from further diving into the discussion about proprietary file formats and TOS and leave this to other, more competent bloggers. As usual there’s quite some buzz about both. On the TOS the digest though seems to be that a free publication outside the iBookstore is legal, but once one wants to sell the book he/she is tied to the iBookstore. Actually it’s no different than the appstore, at least the way I see this.

Which this brings me to the 2.0, or more mature, version of my e-books if you will.

One thing that is for sure is, that I will have a few coffee and have some fun with updating my e-books Cornwall – A Photographic Journey and Mountain Sketches especially for the iBook format. Some text will be re-written and added, new and more images will follow (still thinking about re-prossesing some of them in the LR4 beta as well) and I will try include some video and audio content. In short, I will make them as beautiful as possible and hope they will be a fun and enjoyable read.

Also I have plans to finally finish and release the already written draft of my Finnmark write up. I will publish it first here on the blog and then as well as an e-Book (PDF) and in an iBook format. Just as I did with my previous e-books.

I am sure that we will see a lot photobooks and materials in the very near future appearing all over the internet as with this tool it’s easy to produce more compelling products.

I might post every now and then a little update here on the blog and write a bit about my experiences with the production of the book. And of course it will be a free download here. And who knows, one day, I might be trying to publish an e-book in the iBookstore. But before that happens, I will have to live up to my own standards. So until then, I hope you will be enjoying my current e-books and the upcoming re-releases.

I hope to have the first one ready in by the end of next month. Feel free to keep an eye on the blog or Twitter for updates.

The Mänty Sketches #1

Sven Seebeck — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 19:25:06 +0000

It is now two years ago that I launched a project, which I called the Winter Trees-Project, which is, as you have guessed already, about trees, well, in Winter time. The project did though not really progress much during that time. Truth to be told and good idea aside, nothing really happened.

When I initiated this small project I thought it to be a good idea, as

there are trees literally everywhere around here, and
I am not very comfortable photographing them, hence it would be a good project to develop my eye.

The Mänty, or Scots Pine, is probably one of the most common trees around here and once covered with freshly fallen snow, they often are exceptionally beautiful. The reddish colour of the trunk, the muted dark green of the leaves create a beautiful contrast with the fresh snow.

Back then though, my vision appeared to be not clear enough and the results weren’t really satisfying. It felt like, pardon the pun, I didn’t see the forest for the trees. During the last two years my eye and mind seemed to have been working in the back of my head and even though I wasn’t actively pursuing the project, my vision, or the idea, got clearer until it struck me and eventually started to see these images.

Now it’s merely an issue of waiting for the snow to fall, which for some reason this year hasn’t happened much, finding the right views or simply trees that have character.

Many of these images were taken during heavy snowfall which gave the images occasionally an impressionistic impression. Due to this I chose to entitle the series Mänty Sketches similar to my previous winter related series the Mountain Sketches.

The project is still in it’s infancy and more images will be added over the next few weeks and months in individual posts. A compilation, the best-of or portfolio if you will, you can find on the projects page.

2011 – The Recap

Sven Seebeck — Tue, 03 Jan 2012 06:06:00 +0000

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.

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.

Merry Christmas

Sven Seebeck — Fri, 23 Dec 2011 17:00:24 +0000

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.