Kamera&Bild

Swedish pro photo magazine Kamera&Bild featured my photography on a 10 page reportage in issue #2 2009. This article was written by Matti Sedholm who came over to Tokyo last summer and spent a couple of days with me here. Check September 2008's post HERE.













Fun to see some exposure of ones work and in a Swedish magazine on top of that, my mother tongue! Makes you strive harder to keep up a high quality of work as well as explore new grounds. It was interesting to see what the editors of K&B chose from all the images I sent. I was really happy to see that my B/W elephant images got so big space and the travel photography I have dome for different publications also was the main look, but also I wish there were some more fashion and studio light shots. I guess they tapped the part of mwcp that forms the essential.
Man, there is so much to shoot out there, so many places to visit and collect memories and different worlds in forms of images. Next up is San Jose/San Francisco (arranged a bicycle to get around in a proper manner), Long Beach C.A as well as Death Valley and Yosemite National Park in June for a couple of weeks.
I will take a look of the street scene in SF/SJ, mainly the "fixed gear" part of it all, then cover a tattoo convention on Queen Mary in Long Beach as well as head out in the wild and get lost in Death Valley and the surrounding desert, this is all part of a photo story I started a couple of years ago. Will be hauling both digital and medium format gear with me this time (rental car, no worries), was a long time since I was shooting film professionally so that's something I am looking forward to. Lost of gear to carry and keep an eye on.

Fullframe 15mm on a Friday night...

Spent Friday night riding the streets of Shinjuku looking for stuff to shoot for an upcoming project. Some days are just not meant to be behind a camera though. I had everything pretty figured out in my head but when I was on location it just didn't work out the way I wanted. Shooting with a fisheye (15mm fullframe) for a couple of hours before I gave up. I ended up with these 2 frames that I liked, the rest is doomed as files on a harddrive probably never to be opened again. But, hey...2 frames is better than no frame so pretty pleased with my Friday night after all. What else is there to do on a cold Friday night in Tokyo? Well, ride your bike, explore and shoot from top floors of deserted office buildings is one. Mingle with the party minded minions has never interested me.



I like the reflection on the glass window, time and space.

Light Houses Of The Pacific Coast USA

Now when the LightHouse story is out (WingSpan) it's time to post some of the images here. I was traveling with writer Tony McNicol and his texts always makes the articles really great. Here are some that got published and some that wasn't. Had burgers first meal after arriving in San Francisco.

Canonian

I just had to post this one I found on the net. Too cool...

Portrait

B/W














A self portrait for my new web page that will be ready pretty soon. Dark & hidden... this is how I see myself (?). Having some difficulties with portraying this one and need to take a longer look to see what's there, too personal in a way. People probably see me as a easygoing and fun character, sorry to disappoint you people. But this is the real deal I see in the images of my self taken by myself (...interesting!). I rather be this guy, the real guy, than some smiling jerk staring into the camera....looking......friendly.....WTF!? What's with the ear? I don't know, why not, just liked the image.

You people who knows me, please let me know what you think...comments below.

-m-

New Books

If I would say that I have a passion for something, like a need or in a way...obsession, then it is towards photobooks, well...books in general. So today was a good day. First Annie Leibowitz "At Work" was delivered. I am a big fan of her photography. Got this book from a tip from photographer Yasu Nakaoka who met her in New York once. Second to arrive today was my "own" photobook. Well, with the help of Pi,Inc we got it together and made one sample issue. Turned out really cool and the contrast and colors was in right place as well as the paper quality. This photo-story is about the Mt.Everest trail that I walked last November. More stuff is coming later this year, stay tuned.







Pi, Inc - Thanks for everyhting!

Giants

I have always liked to roam in the western part of Shinjuku, if you have followed this blog for awhile you will know that by now. To be amongst these huge buildings have a cool effect on me, maybe because I grew up in an old town there the trees were taller than most buildings. I was cycling through this late afternoon just at the short moments in time when the suns light just left a hint of fading light in the sky. Today was a cold and extremely windy day and the wind rushed between these gentle giants with an enormous force. Hard to stay upright on a fixie with a camera in one hand. The light was just stunning blue...










Then the earthquake set in....

Back To The Future

I was out all day in the city shooting with my new Mamiya (with a smile on my face). Came home and got lost somewhere on the internet, found an american photographers webpage. Proved to be an eye opener and I realized some stuff that have been bothering me for quite some time now, just that I had gotten used to it...

Jeff Singer is a professional photographer in San Francisco and what he was writing on his blog just made so much sense to me. I really couldn't have said this better (my English isn't that good, thats why...). My day shone up and I realized that I did a pretty decent thing by getting an old medium format camera again, going back from film to digital, to film again.
To read that other people shooting for a living also have sensed that film makes you a better photographer in a way that digital can't, was great for me. After shooting film I found digital really disturbing the first couple of jobs and the debate at that time was always in a pretty mundane tone. Like two camps and you either was this or that. I was always "that" i.e. the slow dude who had just learnt a new language, the digital language and still spoke like a child.
The first digital camera I bought was really a piece of worthless junk in my perspective. I graded up to better stuff and got to learn and respect the way it made some stuff so much more convenient and saved me so much time and money. But I also noticed that the same images that I would get with my 35mm and 6x4,5 gear suddenly needed time to tumble in a software to have a similar feel to them. Well, this is all history by now but I never thought that I would stand in front of that monster fridge at my old camera store here in Tokyo and pick rolls of film like groceries again.

This is a quote from Jeff Singer on his blog:

-"This isn’t digital vs film quality debate. I’m not going to say one is of better quality than the other. I’m not shooting film again for quality reasons. They are just different. I shoot differently when shooting film. I like the way I shoot with film. I slow down and think about things more than I would with digital. And anything that can get me to think has to be good".



Well said Jeff, and thanx!

Light House Article

I have been working with writer Tony McNikol on quite a few articles now. We went to China 2007 for an A-B story for WINGSPAN, by train from Shanghai to the remote city of Urumqi in the western corner of the Gobi desert. We went to Hachiyojima in the Tokyo archipelago for a story on the traditional drum culture over there. This as well as many smaller local stories on various topics. This time a big article on the American Pacific coast's lighthouses. A road trip starting from San Francisco, heading up to Seattle and back to S.F. Great to work with a writer like Tony, he takes care of everything for the text part so I can focus on the photography 100%. Turned out pretty well, of course I wish we had some more pages and more of the photography (got some remarkable images that wasn't in the article). WINGSPAN is the inflight magazine for ANA i.e. All Nippon Airline.