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 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

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.

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.

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

• My Favourite Images of 2010
• Lofoten Summer
• Mountain Sketches – The e-Book
• Cornwall – A Photographic Journey
• Adding "Convert Markdown To HTML" to any Text Editor on OS X
• One Night In Lapland
• Lightroom Preset – Sepia toning

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.

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.

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.

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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.

Like many of you I have upgraded to Mac OS Lion after its release in Summer and among all it’s features, I pretty much enjoy using full-screen apps. I have been a huge fan of going full-screen for years already and having access to more fullscreen-apps on the desktop perfectly suits my workflow.

It is though not always entirely satisfying. I find that many full screen apps work better on smaller screens, like on a MacBook. On larger screens though the application windows often become, well, unpleasantly large and it’s actually more complicated to work in then. Surely some applications work very well, Lightroom would be one of them (before you mention it, I am aware it’s not natively full-screen, but still) but imagine something like OmniFocus in full-screen on a 24inch monitor.

Nevertheless I prefer to work in one app at a time in an isolated environment, and have been looking for a pleasant solution for issue.

Just during the last week Brett Terpstra, known for one of my favourite productivity tools Marked and a major Markdown inspiration, brought an app called Quiet in a recent blog post to my attention which turned out to be the solution I have been looking for.

Essentially Quiet simply hides everything else but the currently running app with either a black background or the desktop wallpaper and leaves the app window in its current state. Simple, effective and just what I needed.

My favorite writing app iA Writer only with my desktop. It hardly will get any less distracting and more inspiring.

I would like to have the possibility to configure it that way, that it launches automatically together with certain applications, but I guess, one can’t have everything.

For more information visit Brett’s post or visit the app-store.

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.