Archive for the 'Thoughts' Category

Cecilie, corporate/freelance portrait

Published on June 24, 2010 in Photography and Thoughts. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , .

The other day I had the oportunity to shoot sweet Cecilie, who wanted to update her stock of portraits for use at presentations,  lectures, seminars and press. Smart! I truly believe in the power of some good, updated,  personal pictures to use in this ocasions.  There are serious bloggers/facebookers/lecturers updating their portrait picture stock twice a year. At least. This way not only the contents of their work is constantly updating but also the graphics. Nice and convincing.

“Coorporate, Cecilie Stranger-Thorsen, independent media consultant based in Malmö, Sweden

She works in all of the Scandinavian countries, focusing on cross-media and media education projects, arranging seminars, writing and lecturing.”  She is also a witty facebooker with a lot of humor.

It´s easy to get inspired by David Hobbys STB (Shoot The Bloggers) project wich he just started, but have several interesting thoughts about. In short, the idea is to shoot freelance corporate portrais while you get the opportunity to pull the camera trigger and experiment with ideas of portraits on different personalities. It´s a win-win!

We had fun and altered between full stdiolightning, available light in the studio and mixed speedlight/daylight. All this to get a broad range of pictures useful to Cecilie in several occasions.

Luckily the studio has three large windows at northwest and if the weather is good they provide a nice, soft natural light to use. In worst case there is one or two huge trucks parking outside the windows, delivering beer, wine and food for the restaurants in the block. The only chance to get decent light then is to trigger the Elinchrome studiogear…

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Last week of april 2010

Published on May 1, 2010 in Graphic Design and Thoughts. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , .

The week has passed with great speed as usual. Time to sum up what happened in the studio.
Sanna typed all the balloons for all the comics  for Donald Ducks Summerspecial (Kalle Ankas Sommarlov) with unbelievable speed and accuracy as usual. 36 pages of pure comics! In the meantime I have worked with the rest of the issue, 16 pages of activity puzzles and cover. Now it´s time for me to put in all the “BOOOM”, “ZAPP” and “BADAAAM”-words wich is great fun but takes a lot of time.

An internal AD for the issue was also needed and after a little thinking I managed to find an (IMHO) nice design for it. Uploaded to Egmonts ftp-server in several sizes.

Peter and I (very much mostly Peter this time) have completed an assignment for Visma with their client magazine Vismagazine. Another interesting number, I hope.

I ‘m in the middle of production of four new pages of children activity puzzles for Hemmets Journal. They are due to next week.

A 10 meter E-TTL cord and three E-TTL radio triggers refuse to be delivered from Hongkong due to the volcano ashes. I´m very curious about the triggers (Pixel TR-332 Remote Triggers) and I hope to be able to use them instead of the too expensive TTL  Pocket Wizards, both in the studio and on location. And when needed, also to trigger the Speedlights (hence the TTL-function). Thanks David Hobby aka the Strobist, for the tip!

A little upload to the Stocksites of random pictures (some of them shown above) were made. To iStockphoto, Shutterstock, Dreamstime, Bigstockphoto and Fotolia. I have yet to tag and categorize them.

Well, that´s it for this week, I believe.

Not to forget some meetings and a lot of delicious coffee from our fantastic new Nespresso machine! This was another good week in the studio!

T

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Copyright on pictures

Published on April 28, 2010 in Illustration, Photography and Thoughts. 0 Comments

The copyright for a picture is easy. At least from where I learned it here in Sweden: the maker of a picture/illustration have the unbreakable, automatic copyright for it. That´s it.

It´s been that way for decades. Every publisher with some routine knows that. Maybe they sometimes takes some risks, but they know it.

I can shoot a picture and distribute it where ever I want to ( Facebook, Twitter, my blog, Site etc ) . If a customer want to use it, they have to buy the right from me to publish it. No matter where I have showed the picture before. It´s easy!

There is a really interesting article on Media Nation about this concerning a picture shot on Haiti during the earthquake.

Well worth the reading!

T

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Command-Option-Shift E…

Published on April 28, 2010 in Graphic Design and Thoughts. 0 Comments

(PC: Ctrl-Alt-Shift-E) For people living in layers.

It´s the command I tend to forget so often, and that I need so often.

It´s the command to keep all the layers in a Photoshop file and make a merged copy on top of them!

FANTASTIC for all us people living a layered life in Photoshop.

Or  elsewhere…

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The little heart

Published on April 23, 2010 in Photography and Thoughts. 0 Comments Tags: , , , .

Have been working on half strength for a while. Got help on the hospital this week.

Dramatic for me – routine for the surgeon. Found a picture from last autumn I thought was illustrative for this.
(50mm @ 1.8, 1/200sec,  gold reflector)

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Do we need more pictures?

Published on March 18, 2010 in Photography and Thoughts. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , .

dilemma

I love pictures! I believe we all do! Pictures are everywhere, all the time! Champions and masters in memorizing recommend us to visualize in pictures to be able to memorize strange combinations of numbers and such things. Then pictures simply must be good for our brains! Just think of all pictures that have been made since the beginning of picture (when was that?). Everybody is sometimes drawing and photographing something. Sometimes I think everything has been drawn or photographed already, bearing in mind how many pictures are being made each day. By amateurs and by pros. 24-7! But I may be wrong.

Often when starting a new photo or illustration project for a client I check up whats available on iStock or Shutterstock or maybe I Google it. First impression is often that everything of that topic has been covered. (When designing a brochure or similar for a cost sensitive client its often sufficient with some good stockphotos.) But taking a closer look of whats available it shows that there is always  a need for one more picture. A search on a stockphoto site for “woman, bicycle, outdoors” can give 2 000 – 4 000 hits! That´s a lot! There is a picture for most needs. But if I want a specific environment, color of the bicycle, clothing on the woman, lightning situation or anything else specific, it may have to be one more picture made! Luckily!

Do we need more pictures? Of course! Definitely! Let´s go on and make pictures until exactly everything is pictured!

Torbjorn

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A picture? What is that anyway?

Published on March 18, 2010 in Thoughts. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , .

Well, according to  common knowledge it may be a photo, an illustration or some kind of reproduction or this or that and so on. In communication we don´t analyze this much, do we? We see pictures and images everywhere in our everyday life. A photography can be digitally altered or not, it can be black and white, it can be lightened with virtually thousands of lighning modifiers including available light. What we see is a picture. An illustration can be made in thousands of ways on thousands of materials, and we still recognizes it as an illustration – or simply – a picture. That´s nice! (A Google search of the word “picture” gave 532,000,000 results. Thats a lot!)

In a small design studio we have to deal more with what kind of expression we want to give the product than should it be a photo or an illustration. It is often no borders between brush and ink, illustrator/photoshop or photos taken on location or in studio. Its about to choose wich manner that suits the project.

Since this is the first post on this blog, this is an explanation of the mix of photos, pictures, images, layouts, logos and designs that will show up on the theme “what is going on in the studio. I try to erase the borders between illustrator/photographer. I make pictures. Hope it will be inspiring!

Torbjorn

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