I used the beginning of the vacation for a first (think about that) shooting this year, and returned to a familiar and close-by location.

Even though not a masterpiece, it is at least a good beginning of the summer holidays.

A belated honeymoon to the beautiful city of Vienna offered these possibilities. While I focused for the majority of time on the vintage architecture I also played around a bit with street photography, which I am not very familiar with but surely had fun doing it.

Once I read someone quoting that Vienna is a feast for street photography, something that I, even after this rather short visit, can subscribe to.

Whilst a huge part of the images is of more private nature I do have a nice collection of images from this trip together, which I will publish in two or three posts.

Aside one visit to the Finmark area two years ago [1], the majority of our visits to Norway took us into the Tröms area or the Lofoten, which was the most south that we have gotten so far. The road trip though led us again mainly through the Finnmark.

We began our trip just behind the Finnish/Norwegian border in Skibotn up to the northern spot on the European continent, the Nordkapp [2]. I find the wide open landscapes in this area to be very visually appealing and the resulting images reflect this in more streamlined and simpler compositions.

To capture these wide open spaces, I focused on creating panoramic images exclusively, something that I haven’t been doing for quite a while. It seemed though necessary as I had not the feeling I couldn’t capture the feel and atmosphere of the landscapes in a single frame. Looking back at the resulting images it proves me right.

My approach to photographing landscapes has changed quite a bit during the last two or so years as I have grown accustomed to the fact that the experience of being in a place is far more satisfying than the act collecting as many images as possible. Also I started to learn to deal with whatever the weather conditions are at the moment and stopped hoping or waiting for the right light. Right can mean a lot of things, and I think when it looks great, the light is simply is right.

During the short stint at these locations, many views have been left un-explored but I have the distinct feeling that this wasn’t my the last visit around there.

When not being out and photographing or some tweaking/re-designing and writing for my recently launched personal blog I had the chance again to contribute a fresh guest article to the german photography blog Kwerfeldein.

In that article I am introducing my Mänty Sketches project and share a few thoughts on the idea and the process behind the project and naturally some images.

More updates to come in the near future but now I invite you over to Kwerfeldein and hope you enjoy the article.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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