Upload a day 1-7 January

Since on 1st of January I have been uploading a photo each day, most of them are photos from last year but since I have not been active enough to upload I thought I would try to upload more so this year I am going to upload a photo every day and try each week to upload at least one new. Even tough one day I would fail to upload an image I not going to stop, I guess I will just upload two the next day.

January 1st
The Year started with a photo of fireworks which was the following day stolen by a web page for MS organization in Norway. I know it is an organization for a really bad disease but still they should not post a photo without asking for permission, I would probably have allowed it if they had asked. So after this incident I started putting a brush over my photos with my web address on it. I really don’t like putting copyright notice over my photo because I usually put it in the metadata and in the description but now since I found out that some other photos have been stolen I am going to start putting my web address across the images.

January 2nd
This photo I took two years ago but I saw it while I was organizing some old photos. This was shot in the north of Thailand just after I had slept in a tent up on a mountain that was a part of one of the great national parks in Thailand. We were driving of the mountain when suddenly I saw this amazing landscape and mystic color so I asked if we could stop so I could take some photos. This is a view over a rice field and there is a small hut in the field where the workers rest on their breaks.

January 3rd
This photo was taken in my fiancées home town actually it is her grandmother preparing for the morning market the next day. I think she is really amazing because even though see does not need to do any work she still sells things at the market just so she has something to do. She likes to do it mostly because then she meets more people and has a purpose in life. She is a really interesting woman.

January 4th
This photo I took in July when I was leaving Bangkok to go back to Khon Kaen. We drove past this place and I thought to my self that it would have been nice to photograph them but I didn’t ask to stop the car, which I started to regret soon after but for some amazing my mother-in-law forgot something at her sisters house so we had to turn back and get is so when we were at this place I asked to be left outside because I wanted to take some photos and I started by photographing the field and then I moved closer to these women to photograph, then I moved closer to them holding my camera in one hand then I moved it closer to my face showing them that I wanted to take a photo and when they just smiled I knew it was ok to photograph them that photo you can see here but the photo below is the photo for this day.

January 5th
This photo was taken in May while I was still in Bangkok and I was walking to a market on my way to a mall and on my way I saw this vendor, preparing food on the street like so many others.

January 6th
This photo is taken while I was on a road trip with my girlfriend and we were driving from Húsavík on our way to the east part of Iceland. I was going quickly through some old photos. I saw this photo and I decided to post it only thing bad about it is the way the internet messes up the colors even thought the color profile is srgb.

January 7th
This photo was taken with an Olympus OM2 with Kodak TX 400 film using Zukkor 50mm f 1.8. I was in a sheep roundup while I was a worker on my uncle’s farm. We went to help other farmers that live close by. It was a lot of fun to go there and my uncle told me to take photos of everything because it is a lot of action there and a lot of fun as well. I uploaded my digital photos from this day last year and they are all in a set called Sheep’s in the collection Farming, Her is a link to the set. That day I shot both digital and film because when I went inside I needed to shoot much higher iso than my film was and also I wanted some color digital photos.

I will try to write something about all of the photos and the next seven days will come soon.

New goals for a new year

Well finally its 2012 and like so many other I have set myself some goals for the new year, and of Corse the main goal is to take more photos but now I’m going to try to take photos every week and post on my flickr page, but I’m also go to try to post as much as I can. During the last few days I have been posting from my trip to Thailand last year and I have even been going through previous trips and found photos that I really like but did not see before.

Few days ago I found out that a photo I took during new years eve was being used on a Norwegian webpage which would have been ok if they had just asked me before but it made me realize that I have to put some kind of watermark over my photos, but I hade watermarked photos because sometimes it can ruin a good photo but I decide to give it a try. I have not watermarked all of the photos but I will start replacing them on flickr.

When I was in Thailand I took several photos of street vendors and I had this idea to make a small series out of it. I have always been a bit fascinated of these street vendors, selling food, sweet or even just small things on the street. For many of them it can be a hard way of life and they do it because they don’t have anything else to earn a living, but for others it is done to have something to aim at. Most of them stay at the same corner every day.

At new years I went out to take photos of the fireworks but instead I found this street in my town that was covered with ice and even thought there were fireworks shooting all around me I managed to stay clear of them in that photo. Well that’s it for now I will try to post something more this month.

Farmers

I started to work on my uncles farm this winter, he was starting to build a cow house for the big bulls that he has so he needed an extra hand. I have had an idea on my mind for the past year to photograph farmers and their work. The main reason is because I used to work on this farm when I was younger and after I started working somewhere else I realize that people that have worked on a farm are most of the times harder workers and not as carefree as many others. So I want to show the world how hard farmers work, so people realize that behind every meal is a lot of hard work, because the meat is not just manufactured in the store like so many think. I have just started with this serie so I have not formed it precisely but it is still in the making so it might change.

During the time I was a sheep's roundup on several farms in the valley and we went to help out some neighbors with their sheep's. It was a lot of fun because there were so many sheep's and so much action. I started with a film camera but then it ran out of battery and I forgot to bring extra, but I had my digital as well.

On this farm there are now women only two older brothers and two younger. The have 1000+ sheep's on the farm and so many dogs, which as they say don't even know their own name (because when you order them to do something they just don't do it). I think this was a fun start of the farmers serie and I honestly hope I can photograph different sorts of farming in the future.
Here is a set for sheep's on my flickr

 

An Icelandic sheep dog

Sheep's coming home

Getting tighter

Sorting the sheep's

Sorting out the unknown

My cheap still life studio

Today I just got a new window for my room, it used to be split in two pieces but now we put a new one in and now I have this good window with a lot of light. Today we harvested some vegetables and there was this big cabbage that I wanted to photograph some parts of. So i decided to make a small still life studio on my desk. Today I only took few shots but i will definitely do this again.


here is both a post of the set up as well as the outcome. I did not use a tripod because I have not been able to buy a batter one that I can put the camera directly above the subject. 

My first exhibition

Well, I have finally managed to scan the photos from my exhibition since last April. I just uploaded them to my flickr, they will go to the webpage soon.

The theme for this exhibition is the streets in March. I used only film in this project and I shot it with my Olympus OM2 with Ilford HP5 at iso 400. I wanted to show the coldness of March. I also enlarged the photos in an agfa enlarger on Ilford paper.

I have for a while wanted to try something like this, photographing the street by film and specially when its snowing. I just love the way the snow is on the photos, it makes them look a bit grainier  and more street.

I just want to make it clear that photoshop was not used in any of the photos and the frame around the photos is the film frame so they have not been cropped at all.

Back in Iceland

Well I'm back in Iceland. I didn't Blog as much as I was going to but I posted some photos to my flickr. While I was in Thailand I traveled a bit. I went to the island Kho Lan, its close to Pattaya. I have only posted few photos from that trip but I'm still working on going through them.

But the first thing I did when I came there was to buy a new camera. I got Nikon D700 and wow how my life has changed. The photo below is borrowed from http://www.kenrockwell.com just until I have photographed mine but I mainly use 50mm 1.8 until I get another prime lens. This is such a huge step from my old D80.

I stayed few days in Bangkok but then in end of may I went to a town called Khon Kaen, that's where my fiance is studding. I brought my camera almost everywhere and I took a lot of photos. I made some portraits, landscape, among other things. While I was there I learned a lot how to use my flash in different situations and I used it more than I had before.

I went to Bangkok in July to take photos in my sisters - in - law's graduation but I shot many other things as well while she was in some ceremony because only students allowed during the ceremony.

I shot a lot of film as well but I'm still working on developing them and now I'm working on buying an enlarger so hopefully I can post more film here this winter.

Final project

Well now I have finally finished school and I'm going to Thailand after one and half a day so a lot to do until then.

For my final project I made a "post apocalyptic photo essay". It is a photo essay about the same character as from the post apocalyptic photo I made in November last year and I will include that photo in it as well. I really liked doing this project but I want to do something more with this theme. The first photo shows him sleeping outside, cause he didn't find a shelter for the night. The second photo show's him hunting a rabbit to eat, it is a way to show that he has to hunt his food. The third one he is looking for shelter, I know it's a bit dark but I have not been able to post it online in its correct colors. The forth photo shows him cooking his rabbit dinner.

I had an exhibition from 15th of April to 10th of Mai, I took the photos in March while there was a lot of snow. The exhibition was in my school, I decided to have it there cause there are a lot of people that walk the hallways there every day and I picked the one with the most traffic. I will post photos later.