For the sake of light mongering.

Hello internet. 

Where do we start? I think geographically would make good sense. I'M HOME!!! Back in my zone in the Mother City AKA Cape Town. What a stoke to be where I belong again… Been way too long since I walked on the beach barefoot in the warm, white sand and smiled to myself marvelling at the trivial yet beautiful details life has to offer. I have been doing this fairly often as I have been surfing and bodyboarding almost everyday since I have been home nearly 3 weeks now, and in order to get from the car park down to the waters edge, you have to walk along the warm, white sand. Some times life just hands you these nuggets and it feels like smiling is the most gracious way to say thanks.

So much to get out here, and I have been fairly slack with the whole blogging thing lately, that is not to say that I have been slack with the whole shooting thing, this is definitely not the case. In fact it is the polar opposite, I have shooting more than I can actually handle. I have shot plenty, and now I also sit with copious amounts of unedited pictures and only more and more ideas pouring out of my inspirationally saturated mind. Its literally like a downward spiral that is terminally growing at a frightening rate. However, the minutely sensible side of me has decided to take a stand against this process and start dealing with this apparent "problem" by getting my ducks in a row and churning out some pictures. Hopefully this will even out the scales in the right direction again. I take comfort in the fact knowing that I am getting somewhere now, but yet the problem will always remain the same, the one things that is absolutely essential in this line of work and has become a personal philosophy of mine over the last few months as well, consistency. Just got to keep on keeping' on.

Some times I have the intricate, elaborate and exquisite ideas that lead to beautiful images. I love exploring, developing and entertaining ideas and concepts that will challenge norms and standards that I have learned to accept and that I have become used to. Other times I can be just as happy shooting something simple and classic that will give me just as beautiful pictures. I have been playing a lot and experimenting with some things that have been yielding cool and different results. Instead of getting mad creative and throwing colours, textures and tones around, its just trying something different like maybe cutting a light modifier apart and putting it back together differently to try out something new, shooting with a different number of lights to what I am used to, shooting a different style of lighting, the list goes on and on, but basically I have gone back to basics and tried to make the changes all on my side of the camera before I get into post production. I love this as it reminds me that photography is a craft like being a carpenter or someone that one has to know their tools well in order to be a master at their craft. 

For a while I got out of the style I was shooting, started shooting different things, looking at different photographers' works, following different people, looking for inspiration in different places and generally trying to do things differently. I thought I had progressed and broken through to a new tier of being a super shit good photographer or a good super shit photographer. However this was not to be the case, I ended up going through a very brief and and rapid change of styles in a very short period of time. This all sort of happened subconsciously as I did not even realise it until I had seen the three last sets of pictures I had shot and seen the clear resemblance between all of them. Whatever, I just happy to be shooting and seemingly learning more and more and getting "better". I guess better is a bad word here, but I feel like I am progressing, I don't think one photographers work can be better or more right than another's, I think this comes down to personal taste and I don't really think that ones taste can ever be up for discussion. I love editorial photography, but not so much wedding photography, even though I give wedding photographers mad props for doing what they do. And you can fuck right off for trying to tell me that editorial photography is not as good as another style of photography. I guess this leads back to one of  my favourite editorial photographers, and if you read this blog often, you will have seen his name here before, Mr Zack Arias. What a dude. What a fucking dude. Zack, if you ever happen to stumble across my humble offerings by some sliver of chance, here it is man, your work is the shit. You are the business and a large part of the reason I keep shooting pictures. I aspire to shoot the jobs you are turning down. For real.

For those of you that are familiar with Zack's work, I guess you can see that I am influenced by him and have often drawn inspiration for my own shoots from his work. 

I went through a stage where I wanted to shoot just like him, not exactly, but as closely as possible without looking like a cheese. After a while and with much resented influence from the fashion industry, I sorta went rogue and just started shooting things the way I saw them and wanted them to be. I was really happy at one point that I thought I had managed to break out of this mould I had placed myself in, but then these Ariasesque flashbacks starting showing up throughout my sets and I could tell I was not really moving forward in the direction I wanted to. This is probably when I also went through my "fuckit I don't want to shoot" phase, which incidentally tied in with the "weather is complete balls and I am depressed and not amped to shoot" phase. This kinda threw me a bit as I just kept on going and shooting little jobs here and there and then spending a lot of time working on my personal projects, some of which were torn to pieces by some fucking ridiculously dim witted people that I foolishly allowed myself to work with. Moving along swiftly though, I have been refining my personal work like a finely tuned and caringly crafted Islay whiskey. The results are quite pleasing and I am looking very forward to shooting the Cape Town leg of these projects which will be slightly more "exciting". Exciting fits quite well here as generally where there is a chance you may be, shot to death, stabbed to death, raped to death or killed to death in shape, form or mean a fair amount of excitement is usually involved. I won't give too much away at this stage, but Im going to be exploring the grittier, untamed side of South Africa in order to showcase the shit that isn't so glamorous and/or fabulous. 

So things are coming along at a fair pace at the moment, starting to make progress on various things, networking with various agencies, getting a team together, planning out some shoots, making deals and doing favours and service trade's with various people. Possibly my favourite part about all this is the location scouting. My word are we blessed in terms of diversity and rad places to make beautiful pictures here in Cape Town. Another thing that makes life all the more pleasant in the whole scheme of things down here is the amount of light we have, and not just shit, flat, grey light, but amazing, warm, flattering light. Really spoilt for amount of usable hours to get out of the day.

Ok, enough nonsense for the mean time, here are some pictures I shot for the sake of being active and doing something cool for the sake of doing it. The model in question is from on of my local agency's in Trondheim, Trend Models. This set ties in with the last set of headshot's I posted, I eventually managed to get my shit together and find the colours, tones and feel I wanted, which also happened to not be any of the other ones I had played with before either, typical. Enjoy and check in soon again. Cheers, N. 

Choices and Choices....

I love the the possibilites of working with RAW files. Importing a fresh batch of pictures is like opening all your Christmas presents at once. Of course, if you have done your job as a photographer correctly, you should have a pretty good idea of what you should be getting. There are so many directions that a picture can go, sometimes it can be a bit overwhelming, especially when you have a vast amount of engaging pictures. I struggle sometimes to focus and figure out what it is that I want out of the picture. The matter is only made more complicated by the fact that I shoot mostly people. The challenge as an editorial/ portraiture photographer is to carry the feel or atmosphere of one or an entire series of pictures through from the time of looking through the lens to the final delivery after post-production. Often what I see and imagine to be there or not be there, is very different to what the final viewer encounters. This is the real challenge, making sure that this consistency is present throughout.

Im just going to include everyone here instead of just us photo-nerds. For those that don't know what a RAW file is, here is the breakdown. The file format you get out of a normal point and shoot camera, iPhone and most other consumer camera's is a .JPEG. JPEG's are a compressed file that holds a less informative digital signature. Looking at a print of the a JPEG side by side with a RAW file straight out of camera you cant tell the difference. The beauty of RAW is that it contains all the information that you could want for post production, this is where JPEG falls short as it does contain some digital info, but very little. I guess a fitting analogy would be to say that shooting JPEG is like going to a shop and buying a sandwich off the menu, shooting RAW is like owning a sandwich factory. Get the point? Good.

I recently shot a model from the local agency, I have been "babysitting" the pictures for about two weeks now, this is a long time considering that they were extremely minimal headshots and 3/4 shots. I have been throwing some thoughts around regarding what I want to do in my post production phase, and tried some of them, failed, lost hope, tried again, got bored, failed, tried again, got side tracked, lost motivation, failed. It went on and on until now, whilst offshore with a solid few hours to kill I sat down with a full box of snus, an endless supply of chocochino's and some cookies I managed to produce. Half a snus box later I had something to show for. The only problem is that I think I produced too much. Yeah, I might have got a little bit carried away with experimenting with different colour palettes, tones, textures, split tones, effects, exposures, presences and hues. There is an endless combination of things and techniques you can apply to a set of pictures. To make things slightly easier to start out with, I narrowed down my selection to one photo. Something that would be easy to work with in terms of pure post-production. Something that had a near perfect exposure to start out with. I enjoy working with skin and eyes in particular, so this narrowed things down a bit more too. Eventually after making my final selection I took one that I met all of the above criteria. Here's what came out: 

This is the original image, straight out of camera, no post-production, no retouching. As I said, this met all the criteria, near perfect exposure, good skin tones to work with, interesting, sharp eyes, a clean headshot all in all. There is one thing that bugs me though, the model's right eye is not holding the catch light as well as the left one. Something which is completely my fault. #inconsistency. However, no train smash. Another thing that helps is that the background is just shy of pure white. This way I have some room to play around with the shadows and fall-off light. Whats next?  The work that goes into making a picture like simple, but thought out in details you dont see. I will not go through all of the points here, but here is a brief outline.

*Compositon- Notice how she isn't placed smack dead centre in the middle of the frame? Rule of thirds, a valuable tool, and worth remembering to add balance by creating an off-balance.

*Exposure- I shot this with two lights, one through a pure white umbrella, that was roughly 45degrees off to my right, angled down and +-80cm away from model, and the other behind the model facing the wall with no modifier, 2/3 of power over the key light.

*Catch lights- I always try to light the eyes in my headshots evenly, I blew it here, but it is an easy fix in post. The first thing you see when looking at a picture of a person is their eyes, this why I always try draw the attention there with a catch light. I always focus on the eye closest to me aswell. 

*Make up and hair- I went for the minimalist look here, when you see the rest of the pictures in the series you will see why, the models natural features stand out more for headshots this way too. I also purposefully placed her hair behind her ear closest to me. This it to play on the shallow DOF I was shooting, notice how that ear is not in focus but they eyes are? Thats what I look for in my headshots.

*Posing- I play around with different poses when I shoot headshots, as a general rule though when I shoot guys or girls, I like to have the shoulders clean an neck clean, no bra straps, no jewellery, nothing that will distract from the models natural features. Posing also has a lot to say when shaping mood, feeling and atmosphere, here it isn't so apparent as this is just a headshot, so It comes down more to facial expression. I was fairly happy with the pose here, I liked the fall off of light on her neck and under her chin.

Right, so assuming I have covered these points whilst I'm shooting, I should be consistent and getting good results when I start looking through the images in post. So assuming I have got all the above to an acceptable standard, and that I am happy with what I am seeing on the camera, I shoot. I go through an entire shoot keeping all of these things in check. Finished shooting? Double check I have all the shots I set out to get, I like to think of this part as the Pokemon part, "gotta get 'em all!". Now the bittersweet process of post production can begin. For the sake of making things easier, I will exclude all the pictures I played with in Photoshop CS6. Photoshop is whole other can of worms when it comes to experimental portraiture. All of pictures that follow were retouched in Lightroom 3.5. Now you can see what I mean with the whole endless options of shooting RAW thing. These are a few of the images that I retouched from the original posted above. Will put up the full series in the next few days, until then, stay classy. N.

PS! - Click on the first picture and then you can browse through using the arrow keys to compare.

This was the first one I got cracking with, love the subtle tones and the crystal clear, sharp detail.

Bit of an old Polaroid feel to it, digging the grain and "roughness" of it.

Converting from colour to black and white is something that either works 100% or not, was a little unsure about whether these were better suited to B+W or colour. 

Black and white with a soft hue to warm it up a little. Tried to avoid going to too much sepia. Hate sepia.

High contrast B+W,  think this is my favourite out of the B+W ones.

Little bit of a softer look, less contrast and some warmer tones. Peachy-ish.

Offset split tones, lost a bit of detail in the skin, kinda 50/50 on this look.

Also one of my favourite colour retouches, neutral and true. Maybe a little bit too polished.

Low contrast, softer and less presence, almost looks like it was shot with natural light.

Daydreaming and the excitement of the unknown.

Wow.... Been a  while since I've done this whole shebang. To be completely honest, I have been way too busy for my own good lately. I feel burnt out and unmotivated.

I go through this phase every Autumn. I have this cycle of being so amped during Spring and Summer that I shoot and shoot and grind myself down. Then I sit and scheme and plan and spend more time worrying about how to actually make things happen than getting anything done. I was planning to write a book on procrastination, but I think I'll start that next week. When Autumn and Winter come round I have run out of creativity and have no will or energy to even think about doing something interesting. I know it has something to do with the weather. The Norwegian weather kills me, I have no sense of belonging and am completely out of place in the snow. Today was the first snowfall in Trondheim. The initial excitement of waking up to a completely white city wore off as soon as I had to trundle up to the shop to buy coffee and rolls. Its not romantic. Its not cosy. It sucks. I remember last year or the year before I went through the same shit. I didn't pick up my camera for two months. I was worried in the beginning. Then I kind of grew to accept the fact that I cant squeeze creativity out of myself, at least not all the time.

 I walk past my camera everyday, mentally it feels we are like a couple with some intimacy issues. She wants my attention, wants to be held and have her buttons pushed. I greet her as I get out of bed on my way to the kitchen. I make some coffee and sit in the deepish nook of my window sill that is my favourite "drift off and zone out" place. I smoke a cigarette and watch the world scuttle past down below. I steal a glimpse at her poking here head out of the shelf. I think about how good things are when we are together. We make things together, we compose, manipulate and create together. I know what she is capable of, I know how to take care of her, and recognise her in my hands every time. She makes some mistakes some times, but I forgive her, she is not perfect, but neither am I. Some times I blame her for my mistakes too. I could be better at taking responsibility for this. She sits there staring at me on some days, pleading to be taken out into the world and shown things she has never seen before.

I have been shooting a bunch of personal projects lately, some of them you will see and some f them you won't. The ones that you will see are great and something I am really proud of. They might not have great meaning to you as the viewer, but for me, the personal effort, sentiment and value is enormous. My head is in a thousand places now. So many things to finish, so many to get started, so many to follow up. I can only do so much at one time. This whole vibe of not shooting and being idle is ok for now. I have accepted that there now only a few weeks left for me to start getting things done. I have committed myself to the process of making some of these happen. Commitment is such a massive thing for me at the moment. I have been so scared to challenge myself and do things out of my usual way, experimenting, playing, testing, making mistakes. A while ago I had to remind myself why I started doing all of this..... Why was that again? Recognition? No. Fame? No. Money? No. To be talented at something? No. Fun? Yes. Photography can be a mental burden, a leech on one's soul when the inspiration runs out, a financial gamble, an art, a rewarding pastime, and a form of art. For me its the reward and the process of making something beautiful come to life. Capturing a moment that can be shared with everyone.

Winter here is a fuck up. Unless you have some winter fashion idea that will probably be cheesy as fuck no matter which angle you look at it. Actually, I do have some cool ideas for shooting outdoor stuff in the snow, but my word, how I can not be bothered to haul all the gear out into the snow and stand there and freeze. Hopefully when I get round to doing these, they won't be cheesy as fuck. Hopefully. So apart from the freezing temps, the shitty light, the misery of just living in Trondheim in Winter, there is actually nothing for me here in this time of year. In fact anywhere north of Morocco is fairly superfluous this time of year.

I hold my hope in one thing that is just around the corner. One thing that will fill my heart and my sun deprived skin with warmth. One place that always make my heart beat to a rhythm I can dig. Home. Cape Town. Oh yes. It has been way too long my old friend. Sun, beach, shorts, lazy evenings, my car, my family, my dog, food, moms cakes, dad's shit jokes, friends. Ill take it all right now. The best part of all of it is the time, 10 weeks!!! Half of which will probably go into shooting and building up my book so that I can show some spring/summer fashion when I get home in February. Its going to be great. I also have this bucket list of shots to get. Some of the big ones will start falling off the list soon. This one thing is pretty much the only thing that is keeping me from putting the toaster in the bath right now.

At the moment I have some other things going on here, making my new home feel like home is coming along pretty well. Tying up the last of the offshore jobs for 2012 is also on the cards. A short trip down to my favourite coastal town in South-Western Norway is also a possibility. And then I'm gone. Will try put up some things whilst I'm working through my mountain of shit. In the mean time here are some of the things, and people I have been shooting with my iPhone. For those of you that are on Instagram, you can follow me @twoshoesphoto. Much love as always for all of you out there following my blog. Take it easy. N.

PS. iPhone 5 camera? OMG!!! I want one soooooo bad. (Just had to drop that in there!)

Sad looking dogs always have the most personality.

Skate session with the boys. Rock, paper, scissors for who goes first.

I made dinner for 9, one of my most impressive feats to date.

Give some, Get some! Got invited to dinner with my girls. Thank you!!!

Collected the key to my new crib. So proud, so stoked, so much spaaaaace!

Went IKEA shopping with the rarest Pokemon from Bergen. Swedish meatballs are a given.

Went shopping for furniture with Linsa, acquired this bad boy Transformer of a coffee table in jet black.  Its now in feed me stuff mode.

And now in: "Oh hi! Im a sneaky coffee table" mode.

The boys testing out the PS3 and the stereo that is waaaaaay too big for my own good. Noise complaints are expected shortly.

Made a biltong pizza. OMG! Words cannot describe the stoke.

Norwegian poetry. Makes me restless!

Bought a bad ass little floor sucker! His name is Darth Vader.

Fast wireless internet courtesy of Apple. This thing is the business!

Breast cancer awareness. I showed and am still showing my support.

Tooooo many potatoes.... Amazing home cooked food ala TwoShoes.

First snow today. Tooooo soon.

When it rains.

I went to eat cookies and chill with my girlfriend. That was then, Sunday has now been and gone. I have been avoiding this whole writing and picture thing for a while now. I have busy up to my ears with bits and pieces the last two weeks. Here's a quick run down:

*Bought an apartment. Monumental. Colossal and epic all at once. It is beautiful. It is mine for keeps.
*Moved in to said apartment. Tiring, back ache. Amazing to get out of the hole I lived in AKA "the wank pit".

*Been partying waaaaay to much. Not productive, my justification is that I dont drink and therefore dont suffer the brutal hangovers that all my friends do. However I might as well considering I sleep in until 12 noon on Sundays.

*Been climbing and training like a beast. Good-bye wobble tummy, Hello chiseled shoulders. Good to have you back.

*Been shooting and catching up on editing that has slipped past me. Living in real time again.

*Planning out some awesome shoots for Autumn.

*Planning out a short film. WHAT?! Yes. Im going to make a movie. It will be brilliant.

*Tickets back to CPT are booked! 8 weeks back home!!! WORD UP CAPE TOWN!!! Road tripping, surf, climb, shoot, party, eat great food, repeat.

* Reykjavik Fashion in November with my friends ELITE Model Iceland. ! Hello French Vogue, Elle and Cosmo.

So all of this is going on on my side. Much anticipation as to what the future holds. I guess I am also well stoked to get out of Norway during the "super-shit" part of the year. I just can't crack it here then. Already the weather is miserable. If your'e one of these "Oh, the colours are so beautiful in Autumn" people, you should try life sans Prozac.

Im restless. Ive been sitting here trying to summon the creative writing genie out of his lamp for about 25 minutes now. I type a sentence, then delete it. Its not funny enough, its not witty enough, its not smart enough. Im listening to Sting now. What an underrated musician. Listen to Sting. I have a feeling we will not be finding the meaning of life in this blog post. Until I find something sensible or mildly entertaining to say, Im out. Here are some pictures. Stay classy. N.

Per from 22 at Blæst

Same dude, same band, different angle.

Andreas from 22.

The calm before the storm, Familien stage before 22 takes to the stage.

Guitar Hero superstar Magnus from 22

Mats from 22.

Mouthswap with Snap'n'Crackle. Childish.

Thomas "the tooth" Tennfjord.

The after party. Sisqo was there too.

Steffen, strong as they come climber, mellow dude.

Climbing competition steez.

Pulling down.

Beta scoping.