Days at work

Last week i went up to Sollefteå to shoot some pictures of cross country genius and double winner of the Vassaloppet Jörgen Brink. It was some portraits of him for a magazine about the new E4 highway in Hudiksvall. The weather could have been better, rain and heavy fog was all i could see when i drove into Sollefteå! but it worked out really well anyway, that light combined with my flash turned out really nice!
We shot all the pictures up on Hallsta mountain, at the roller ski course they have there. His very nice little daughter was with him as well, and she thought i worked too slow as she wanted to get home as soon as possible 😀
I’ll post some of the images as soon as the magazine is out. But for now you will have to settle for a nice group shot of us all!

Tomorrow i’m heading out to shoot another cover for LAJV Magazine. It’s gonna be great! Without saying too much i will have some stuffed animals and weapons! Found a really great location for this and i’ll post some images later!

A while ago i went up to Ånge to photograph Robban, singer/songwriter in the band Takida. A very nice guy indeed! The shot the pictures in his nice home and the magazine comes out in october. It’s allways nice to come photograph people in their homes. I crowded the whole top floor with all the strobes and moved half of their things around, but it didn’t seem to worry them 🙂 More about this shoot later!

The cover of LAJV Magazine, fresh from the printer …

Here are how the portraits for LAJV Magazine turned out. The portraits are of the pop artist Christian Beijer. The idea was to get the feeling of a guy under his cross, so that is what i went for 😀 And as the unbelievable carpenter i am i had to build the cross myself 😉 I used to huge logs of wood. What i didn’t think of was the incredible weight that this cross would have! We where to guys lifting this thing up on the rails of my car and it was just about that we managed to do it! Of course i wanted a crown of thorns as well, and i wanted really long thorns, so roses was not to think of. You need a bush that in swedish is called Amerikansk Hagtorn, it has huge thorns! 😀 Christian is an artist so i wanted something in the picture that had some “artist” elements too, i ended up buying and smearing finger paint over his torso 😀

And even though it doesn’t look that high up, it’s quite a climb to get up on those rocks. Bare in mind we had to drag the cross all the way up too!

When i had chosen what image to use i saw that it looked like he was standing at the end of the world screaming, so i felt i needed some water splashes coming up from beneath. I packed my stuff and went out to the ocean and shot 450 images of rocks hitting the water 😀 Not too simple a task when i forgot my tripod at home and had to aim and hold my vcamera at the same time throwing rocks at a specific place … But it worked out fine in the end!

I hope you like them!

Just found two photos from the last shoot in my iPhone 🙂 Must say the light stands stood really firm despite the fact that they where extracted really high and put in the middle of all the rubble.

This is how the images for LAJV Magazine turned out, which i wrote about in the last post. The first image with the jeep in the background is, before all the layers has been merged, 4.27 GB, which is some kind of a record for me! 😀 Maybe i should buy a cake or something!

Anyhow, I always want to be able to back up and change small details in my images, so the adjustment layers, masks and saved selections are many 🙂 With thes image some layers didn’t make it all the way to the end. I have one that have five fighters flying over his head in a V-formation (yes, i took that picture myself as well, no stock photo).

I posted an image of the actual cover, and yes the flipped the image 🙂 It fitted better with the text that way. I didn’t mind actually. Both myself and Jerry (the model) gave them our blessing to do it in advance.

I hope you like them!

Last week i shot the cover of LAJV Magazine. It was a portrait of the General of the big festival “Gatufesten”.

The idea was to use his title as the general of the festival and use it in a military way :D. So the hunt for props began some weeks ago, but as usually everything wasn’t ready until just before we drove away to the shoot.:)

We found some really cool guys who collected old military vehicles and stuff, they agreed to both let us use their jeep and themselves as “models”. The movies “The Pluton” and “Full Metal Jacket” flashed in front of my eyes several times during the shoot 😀 The really rocked!

The clothes we used i got from several places, borrowed some and bought some …

The location we used for this shoot was beside a big concrete factory. It was a big field where the trucks empty old concrete before they clean the tanks, this is later crushed by big tractors and but in a big pile. It looks like a real war zone! Around this field i found a lot of old barrels, car tires and wooden things we could use! Anything you would need in a war 😀

But because the wet concrete is all over this place, some kind of wet concrete mudd is everywhere. Luckily i had some mineral water and an old sweater which i used to clean all my cables and stands with.

During this shoot Hansa from Goecker had travelled all the way up to me to let me try out Hasselblads new camera H4D-60. A really nice camera almost like my Hasselblad H2 with a PhaseOne P30 back, with the only little difference that the H4D-60 has a full sensor and 60 megapixels! Thank you Hansa for the “behind the scenes” pictures as well!

The lighting was created with two Pro-7B’s, a Pro-B3, ringflash, Magnum- and softlightreflectors.

Wooaw, june went all crazy with work! This is my last (i hope) week before some vacation1

The last couple of weeks have been a blast! A lot of work and lots of fun things happening. Last week i shot the cover for LAJV Magazine, more about that later.

During that shoot Hansa from Goecker was here and trying to convince me to buy the Hasselblad H4D-60 instead of my old Hasselblad H2 with PahseOne P30 back. It sure was nice to shoot with a full frame (bigger sensor) though!
I tested it during the shoot and i must say it really worked out well, even the software, Phocus worked like a charm. Being a complete Capture One nerd i didn’t have much expectations, but it worked great!

More about that and the shoot later!