Fotosnack! is the, to my knowledge, first Swedish photography videocast. This is the very first episode, produced by Ooh Shoot and Photo Meetup in Gothenburg.

I am very happy to be part of the project. It was started by Julia Reinhart, Petri Olderhvit, and me, but we are getting more people involved. A lot more people!

Dream Warrior - Shooting with Callisto

Dream Warrior

I had a wonderful shoot with martial artist and dancer Callisto Utriainen recently. Callisto was visiting Gothenburg, and we decided the opportunity to do a photo session was too good to miss. I asked my friend Petri Olderhvit if he was interested. He was, so we set the shoot up in Studio Olderhvit, that is in Petri's rather large living room.

Callisto and I had agreed on a theme for the shoot: Dark, very dark! That did leave a lot of room for creative interpretation.

Callisto is no stranger to shiny, sharp objects, i.e. knives and swords. It just so happens, Petri had everything we needed.

Callisto and the T-Rex

Well, not everything. Callisto brought the outfit, and I brought Tristan the T-Rex...

The shoot went very well. Callisto is great fun to work with, and so is Petri.

Throg the Troll's Last Mistake

Throg the Troll wanted in on the shoot too.

As you might suspect, Tristan the T-Rex and Throg the Troll have got a bit of makeup.

Tristan the T-Rex, without digital makeup

For the T-Rex, I used a very good plastic model from Schlecht. The original skin structure is very good, but it needed to look a bit more organic. Too accomplish that, I blended in skin from photos of catfish that I had taken for another project.

Throg the Troll

For Throg the Troll, I used a mix of elephant hide, and catfish skin. I also used a photo of some coarse fabric to give his loin cloth some texture.

As you can see, the technique works very well. The Throg the Troll doll has much less texture than the T-Rex, so he required more work in post.

I'll write a detailed tutorial about how to create pictures like this in a photo book I am working on. I will of course write about the Dream Warrior picture too.

Be seeing you!

2014 - One year, one picture

My year as a photographer in one picture. Featuring Petra Brewitz, Henrik Mårtensson, Lotta Odelberg, Petri Olderhvit, Victoria Vesterlund, and Linlin Wang.

Flash photography presentation at Pan

The first slide in my presentation featured Linlin Wang. From a recent photo session where I worked very closely with Petri Olderhvit.

I had a very fun evening at the PAN Photo Club yesterday. I had been invited to hold a presentation on small flash photography.

I had been invited by Jan Thorkilsson, the chairman of PAN, because Jan had seen me present at the Partille Photo Club earlier this year.

It was great fun. I like to present, and I love when it spawns a lively discussion afterwards. We talked a lot about how to get started with small flash, and getting over that initial wave of flash induced panic.

I also did a practical demonstration, shooting with one and two flashes, speed grid and gels.

We talked a lot, not just about flash photography, but also about photography culture. For example, I mentioned all the models, artists, and other people I showed pictures of, by name:

Linlin Wang
Victoria Vesterlund
Therese Ekblad (Modell Matheka)
My Hesser
Ida Stranne
Johan Wikström
Anna Mattisson
Daniel Eliasson
Géza Pályi
Sana Sakura
Lotta Odelberg

I also made a point of mentioning Petri Olderhvit and Julia Reinhart, the photographers I worked with while shooting some of the photos.

I did this partly to remind everyone, including myself, that all the photos I showed are collaborative works. I work with human beings, some I have met only once, others a couple of times, some are close friends.

From a practical point of view, the more people who know that Victoria, Therese, and My are models, that Johan Wikström plays in the rock band Mays Hounds, that Anna and Lotta are firedancers, and that Sana is a butoh dancer and choreographer, the greater the probability that they get paying gigs.

Of course, the more paying gigs they get, the greater the probability that they will mention me, Petri, and Julia to people who might want our services.

Taking it a step further, if we help each other out in this way, it will strengthen the Gothenburg Photo Meetup network most of us are members of.

So, what started as a discussion about flash photography, evolved into a discussion about collaboration, and from there we went on to discussing organizational structure. From the point of view of any traditional organization, whether it be a photo club or a business, a network organization like Photo Meetup looks like a crazy mess, except, of course that it works very well.

I am passionate about both photography, and organization, so I was pretty much in heaven. I think the PAN people enjoyed it too.

Photo Caricatures

Julia Reinhart

During a recent photo shoot I decided to make a few caricature shots of my friends. Of course, I could not ask them to pose for caricature photos without doing it myself, so I asked Julia Reinhart to take a photo of me.

Henrik Mårtensson (Photographer: Julia Reinhart)

Making photos like this is quite easy. I have used the various liquify tools in Pixelmator. Photoshop, The gimp, and other apps have similar tools.

Petri Olderhvit

My main tool was Warp, but I also used Bump, Pinch, and Twirl to good effect.

It is best to avoid stretching or otherwise enlarging parts of a face too much. The face will stretch, but will also loose texture.

A caricature works best when you exaggerate what is already there. Ask your subjects to make the weirdest facial expressions they can come up with, and work from there.

I had a lot of fun making these, and they certainly will not be my last caricature photos.

Review: Gemini - The duplicate file remover

You tell Gemini which folder to search for duplicates in by dropping it on the application window.

Every time I use my camera, I face the same painful struggle for hard drive space. RAW files are large, Pixelmator files even larger.

In addition, the same file often gets duplicated. For example, I may import a RAW file into Aperture, then process it using DXO Optics Pro, import the DXO version into Pixelmator, save a Pixelmator file, export a JPG file, and then import the JPG file into Aperture. Finally, I may export the Aperture version to a cloud service so that someone else can download it.

That leaves me with a lot of different versions of the original, but also with several exact duplicate files.

This morning I had enough, and bought Gemini, an app that locates and removes duplicates from my Mac.

Using Gemini is easy: You drag and drop the folder you want searched for duplicates onto the application window, and click a start button.

I dropped my home folder on Gemini. I could have dropped the harddrive icon, but I did not want to take any chances with Gemini eliminating system files. Gemini is supposed to be smart enough to avoid that, but why take chances?

Scanning the harddrive takes a couple of minutes. Gemini is fairly fast compared to other apps I have used.

Gemini found 27.97 GB of duplicate files. I have seen older reviews that complained about Gemini missing duplicates, but this problem seems to have been solved.

Without running comparisons with other duplicate file eliminators, I can't be entirely sure that Gemini finds them all. However, 27.97 GB is enough to keep me quite happy, for now...

When Gemini has analyzed the harddrive contents, a new window pops up. I do like the interface. Files are broken down into major categories. Within each category, files that have duplicates are listed. The list is ordered by size, you you can gain a lot of space by eliminating duplicates in the first ten to fifteen items.

Gemini has an Autoselect feature that automatically selects duplicates. This is fast, but a little bit risky. You and Gemini may not agree which version of a file to keep.

I selected files manually. A bit slower, but it felt a lot safer.

The worst space wasters on my harddrive were not photos, but audio files. Many of these had been duplicated fifteen times or more.

When I told Gemini to remove the files I had found, it showed me a list of files to be removed.

Gemini can remove duplicates in iPhoto and Aperture libraries too. To ensure the integrity of the photo libraries, Gemini launches iPhoto or Aperture to delete duplicates.

When Gemini deletes files, they are moved to the Trash bin. They won't be deleted from the harddrive until you empty the Trash. That means you have one last chance to change your mind, even after Gemini has done its work.

Even though Gemini found 27 GB of duplicate files the first time around, I removed about 15 GB. I was a bit pressed for time. I'll have another go in about a week.

Those 15 GB makes a lot of difference though. My computer feels a lot more responsive, almost back to its usual self. Another round with Gemini, and moving some old, large files to external storage, should get my computer back to full speed even when multitasking several large apps, and working with very large files.

 Gemini has some useful but easy to miss features hidden in its Preferences dialog. for starters, you can define the minimum size of files to remove. This can speed the analysis up by reducing the number of files Gemini has to check.

 It is also useful to be able to exclude files you do not want checked. You can exclude files based on which folders they are located in, the file names, or the file extensions.

Finally, you have some control over Gemini's Autoselect feature. You can tell Gemini which folders to prioritize, and which folders to exclude from Autoselect.

Overall, I was impressed with Gemini. The app does its job, the user interface is well thought out, and it is reasonably fast.

Book cover shoot: Write Like a Pro

Write ("skriv") and sell ("sälj") is what Lennart's new book is about: The entire process, from idea to publication.

My friend, author Lennart Guldbrandsson has just published his tenth book, Skriv som ett Proffs (Write like a Pro). It's a book about how to write and sell books, something Lennart knows how to do.

Lennart asked me to shoot the cover photo. The first thing I did was to ask for a draft copy to read, which I did.

There is a lot of useful advice in those pages. I do write a little bit too, so I recognize sound advice when I see it. If I started actually following it, I might be a lot more successful.

Lennart and I met a couple of times to talk about the cover. We even did a somewhat improvised portrait shoot before we got started on the big one.

The idea that turned into the final shot was Lennart's. We wanted something that would make his book stand out, make it visible when it is on a bookshelf, competing with a lot of other books on writing and publishing.

I think we succeeded!

Lennart wrote a blog post about his book. It's over here (in Swedish).