The Far Field

Just a few recent photos of the Swedish countryside. The first one is from Igelbäcken nature reserve near my place in Tensta, and the others are from Roslagsleden hiking trail.

It turns out that taking nice photos in a forest is actually rather difficult. Forests are so cluttered, that when you reduce it all to a 2D image it’s hard for your eye to know what to concentrate on. It seems to be even more important that usual to find strong, simple compositions, to help the viewer make sense of it all.

Sverige är ett riktigt vackert land!

It’s cherry blossom time in Kungsträdgården! I swooped down there after work, and funny enough the place was full of other ‘togs snapping away and waving around their big lenses. I guess I’d have to get up pretty early to photograph this stuff without people in the frame.

Just a few shots from a recent trip back to London.

Last weekend I decided to have another go at shooting the Stockholm waterfront at sunrise. Clear skies were forecast, and indeed they were very clear… apart from the small group of clouds on the horizon to block sun! So, no pretty sunrise for me, but since I’d already gotten up early I took some shots anyway.

I’ve been playing around with making black and white photos lately. It can be a good way to get a nice image when you don’t have much colour around. The photo of Gamla Stan from Stadhuset was pretty boring colour-wise, but I think it looks much better in black and white where the shapes become important instead.

I went to San Francisco to attend Photonics West 2012. San Francisco is awesome! It is also fantastic city to photograph, with bridges, tall buildings, pretty buildings, mist, and hills. I also had a great view from my hotel room on the 11th floor looking over Union Square. Here are some of the shots I got.

I’m quite pleased with how this one turned out. It was a very overcast day and I thought my chances of catching a good sunset were pretty small, but when I looked off my balcony at about an hour before sunset and I could see a gap in the clouds near the horizon, so I thought it was worth a chance. When I got round to the East side of the lake the sky looked like it wasn’t going to do anything interesting, but once the sun went down part of the sky turned a lovely bright red for about 5 minutes.

Unfortunately the red was really quite localised in a small part of the sky, but with a bit of processing I was able to saturate more of the sky and its reflection in the lake. This image was in fact heavily processed (it is a HDR merge of three exposures). Also, since it was windy and my camera doesn’t have auto bracketing there was quite a bit of ghosting in the sky, but I think I managed to hide it with some motion blur.

By the way the foreground patterns are ice, and bits of snow on the ice (not waves). Walking home I was quite annoyed that I couldn’t find any rocks or such to use as foreground elements, but this worked out much better!

The snow still hasn’t arrived here in Stockholm, but the cold has! These shots were taken on Edsviken, a lake near my flat.

Here is another photo from my balcony. This is fast becoming the most photographed part of Sollentuna! This one is a combination of five shots, stitched together in Photoshop Elements. Each was a 30 second exposure, with no HDR cheating involved! The light levels were just about right to balance out the buildings, the street lights and the sky.

Photoshop has some amazing algorithms for combining images to make a panorama. All of this was automatic, I didn’t even tell it to bend the images. The end results looks as if I took it with a fisheye lens! I love how the bending effect makes the lines seem to point towards a point in the center of the horizon – just where sun appears to be setting!

Here are some photos I took around Stockholm on a very windy and cloudy December afternoon.

I shot this from my balcony this morning. I’ll admit, the image is heavily processed. Thankyou Photoshop!