“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…

A while ago I was asked by the food producer ÖNOS (a brand under Procordia Food) to make one of their labels. They are a producer of delicate syrups and jam. There were allready several products in the product line so the illustration had to resemble the others. The new taste of rhubarb syrup was produced in the middle of the cold winter and there were no rhubarbs in sight in the store. I had to by some stockphotos to be able to remember how a rhubarb actually is constructed.

After some different mockups and sketches I found a nice disposition suitable for text and design of the label. I put one of the rhubarb  stems so it followed the “V-form” in the bottom of the label.
It´s nice to see a lot of them in the supermarket and of course I had to buy one of them .-)

The illustration was sketched and scanned into photoshop to be colorized.

And finally the label in use:

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

The studio is located in a very old building, the kind of building that has very deep windowsills. The window in the kitchen is right towards north. In a special time of the day, in a special time of the year, when the sun comes through a thin layer of clouds, it shines on the wall of a fairly high building to the opposite our kitchen window. The building has a warm, almost pink surface which is reflecting the light through the fairly dirty window which delivers a very rich, soft light.

That kind of  light occured yesterday and luckily we happened to have some products perfect to be shot in this kind of light:  A friend of my wifes has a nice business on Sicily, Citronodlingen, (The Lemon Orchard), at the foot of Etna. My wife had recently got some products sent to her from Citronodlingen  for testing out and  to tell about on her food blog.

This time it was chocolate, lemon cream, artichoke paste, and fantastic dried chili seeds.

The wall in the windowsill made a perfect backdrop and the light falling in through the window gave these jars with their delicious content a nice soft shine.

The Crema di Limoni is  a complete success! And so is the Paté di Carciofi & Mandorle.

A tiny silver reflector to lighten up shadows a bit was all that was needed to get a good exposure here. I really like this light and I wish the window was four times bigger …

Last autumn we decided to do a little side project, for fun and inspiration.  We thought it would be nice to produce something of our own, with no special customer ordering the job.  Sanna, project manager on our studio Centralateljén (and also my lovely wife) is running a nice food blog, Veckansmiddag (Week´s Dinners (not 100% sure of the translation here)). We decided to work with a little book, inspired of Sannas blog with dinner menus for all days of the year. The book is inspired by the thought of eating low carb food.

We had great fun! Sanna constructed  menus, Peter wrote text and I shot pictures and  layouted. Sanna and Peter even constructed a site, (Enkla Boken.se), as a small web bookstore.

The book is simply a bank of ideas of what to serve for dinner.

Some of the pictures were shot at home at the dinner table, with all the hungry kids waiting for dinner, others were shot in the studio.

To decorate the text we needed several  food objects on white background. I really like to layout with this kind of pics!

This was just a couple of samples from the little book. We have quite a few ideas for more books, and are hoping it will be time for us to put some of them together soon.

Coffee!

Java Jive! The old jazz song from long ago. Spotify tells me that it was The King Sisters that played it. An ode to coffee! Sweet! And that was long before Cappuccino, Espresso, Macciato, Latte and all that was in reach for us common people.

I love coffee!

We are lucky enough to have our studio in the same block as the fantastic Patisserie David. Nothing is like his pastry! Or his coffee! This is located in the older part of Malmoe a block called S:T Gertrud. Sometimes when I wait for the coffee tho get colder I shoot a picture or two of the coffee I bought from him.  Perfect for selling on stock.

We drink lots of it! I truly think that there is an almost visible connection between coffee and creativity. But thats just me…

.

.

.

.

A while ago I was lucky enough to do a shooting with Mariam. A truly talented musician. And an overly talented model as well. We shot several scenes in different lightning, but our main purpose was to make pictures in a 1970-1980:s stylish, soul inspired way, with clear light and strong colors.

It´s real fun to shoot  on blownout white background.

The images are going to be used as portfolio for Mariam, in my portfolio,   maybe be  used on  a coming album, and part of them sold on stock. And every other use that may show up.

To our help we also had Sandra, a really skilled stylist, working hard all day.

We had also planned for some really moody, dark pictures with an on stage-feeling.

Lots of Photoshopping…

Mariam in moody jazz shot

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