Postcards from Halmstad

I have been in Halmstad twice recently, once for a birthday party, the other time to visit my mother.

Whenever I visit, I like to take long walks with my camera. The environment is quite different from Gothenburg, so I can get pictures there, that are a bit different from what I shoot in Gothenburg.

I haven't started a Halmstad Nudes series though. I have thought about it, but I want to finish the Öland Nudes series first, and as I mentionen in my previous blog post, I will have limited time to make pictures in at least the near future.

So, without further ado, here are a few pictures from Halmstad. I hope they give you at least a little bit of a feel for the city where I grew up.

Talking a walk in the Halmstad harbor is fun, and occasionally rewarding. I rather like this shot of an old crane. The composition is clean, the colors vibrant, and it looks like what it is, a fine summer day.

Many years ago, I was a member of the Halmstad canoe club. There was a rowing club right across on the opposite side of Nissan, the river that runs through the city.

I do not know if this guy is from the rowing club, but he just might be.

There are some old streets in Halmstad. This one, Hantverkargatan, looks like something Paul Cezanne would paint, so I processed the photo in a Cezanne-ish style. Turned out better than I expected.

There is a bridge near the Halmstad City Library, where young lovers like to leave padlocks as a symbol of their eternal love.

There is a Swedish saying that "old love never rusts". Given the somewhat tarnished appearance of most of the padlocks, I found that quite funny.

I do hope the love lasts longer than the padlocks.

One day I went to the Gunilla Park to have lunch, sandwiches, on a bench near the Gunilla Fountain.

Talk about a work of art rife with symbolism...


The statue is from the late 40´s. There is some debate over who created it. Various sources claim it was Axel Emil Lindskog, J.E. Lindeskog, or maybe K.B. Bjering.

I got a few shots more while I was in Halmstad, but I'll leave those for another time.

Be seeing you!

Öland Nudes III: Eve

Öland isn't the Garden of Eden, but it is a beautiful island. The landscape is to a large extent open grassland. Here and there you will find small forests of windblown trees.

Eve started out as a jungle theme picture, but I changed my mind early on. I wanted to connect the picture to one of my ongoing series, so it was either adding spiders and turn it into an Arachnophobia picture, or change the setting to Öland, and make it a part of the Öland Nudes series. I chose the latter.

Sometimes I wonder if you have to be lonely to do any kind of artistic work. I wrote my first book in 2008-2010, during a period when I felt very lonely.

Since then, I have found that I am more productive during periods of loneliness and sadness. When life takes a turn for the better, the urge to create does not disappear, but it is muted. Perhaps because I feel I may have a future, may not just survive, but live and be happy, after all.

I started a new job a week ago, and I feel pretty good about it. I'll be busy working, something I really look forward to.

That leaves less time for photography, and all the weird stuff I do to create my pictures. I probably won't have time to write another book either, at least not for some time.

The one project I want to return to and focus on this year, is Alice: Demon's Gate. We'll see if I can manage a full time job, and work on a graphic novel at the same time.

Gothenburg Nudes XII: Naked Juice Bar

The 12th, and probably final picture in the Gothenburg Nudes series. I started the project because I was a bit tired of seeing pictures that objectify women. I wanted to create a series of nude pictures where nude human bodies are just appreciated for what they are: beautiful.

I have done that to the best of my admittedly meager abilities. It is time to move on to something else, unless, of course, I come up with an interesting idea.

Arachnophobia III: You are like an evil Bob Dylan!

I have gotten a some interesting comments on my recent pictures. I thought it might be fun to share them.

Here are comments on Arachnophobia III:

"You are like an evil Bob Dylan!"
- Tim Mårtensson, my son, and my harshest and most brutally honest critic.

"Dude! I don't have a clue what kind of childhood experiences you had with spiders, but your series is awesome!"
- Luis Carriere

 " I'm torn here. These pieces of yours are genuinely unsettling and well-crafted, so I'm happy that great art is being added to the world. On the other hand, SPIDERSPIDERSSPIDERS UGH OH GOD THEY'RE IN MY HAIR THEY'RE IN MY HAIIIIIR"
-Joel Clark

 Arachnophobia II also got comments. Here are a few of them:

"The sky didn't need so much texture but apart from that, stunning work."
-Barry Manowar

By the way, Barry is right. The sky should have less texture, because the texture distracts a bit from the point-of-interest, the battle with the giant spider. The reason that I haven't fixed it is that I generally prefer to leave a trail of imperfections, and instead try to do better on the next picture. I'll try to remember Barry's point the next time I create a picture with blue skye in it.

"Reminds me of the art from early AD&D."
-Michael Summers

"Like it, has a very vintage sci-fi novel cover feel. Awesome!"
-Corey Fuchs

 When I re-read these comments, I realized that what I wrote yesterday about not being sentimental, and not creating sentimental pictures, is wrong. I am very sentimental.

It's just that while many other people get sentimental about sunsets, I get sentimental about my friends in my old gaming group, my friends in my old software development team, I get sentimental about the debates we had about Science-Fiction, Fantasy, Horror, and science.

Here is a comment about Arachnophobia I:

"Hahha nice Really fun and exciting image."
-Jonas Henriksson

When I did the analysis of Arachnophobia II, I wrote about how I used guidelines from a 1937 book on photography to create pictures with a broad appeal. So far it seems to be working.

I'll return with more arachnophobic pictures soon. You can stay tuned by following my Facebook page, by following me on Google Plus, or by following me on ArtStation.

Arachnophobia II: Pictorialist design breakdown

I recently re-read The Command to Look, a brilliant book on photography by William Mortensen. The book was published in 1937. It is well written, Mortensen had a wry sense of humour, he understood people much better than I ever will, and as for the photography...he was well ahead of his time. If he had written the book today, he'd still be ahead of his time.

When I read something I am really interested in, I often make a breakdown of the major points, and how they relate to each other. Sometimes I create a mindmap, at other times, I scribble notes on a large sheet of paper.

With The Command to Look, I took the scribbling-on-large-sheet-of-paper route.

Early in his career, Mortensen photographed movie stars in Hollywood. The only trouble was, he wasn't happy with his own photos.

Mortensen set out to discover how to take a really good photo. After a lot of hard work, and going down a number of blind alleys, he constructed a simple formula for how to make a memorable photo:

1. The picture must make you look!
2. Having looked - See!
3. Having seen - Enjoy!

Fortunately, he elaborated quite a bit on that, and that is what The Command to Look is all about.

In Arachnophobia II, I have used several of Mortensen's ideas about how to construct a picture.

To make people look, I use a large, dominating mass. Mortensen's idea was that a large mass draws attention, because it is instinctively perceived as a threat. The large mass does not have to be threathening, it just has to trigger the instinctive response.

Getting people to look is not enough. Once people look, there has to be something there to see. Mortensen defined three broad categories of pictures that are of interest to most people:

1. Sex
2. Sentiment
3. Wonder

Sex is any picture that has a sexual component. A seductive smile falls into this category. So does porn, and a lot of things in-between.

Have a look at ArtStation, and you will see a lot of contemporary art with a strong sexual component, without having actual sex in them. For a classic painting, do look at the beautiful Le Sommeil by Gustave Courbet.


Sentiment is probably the most popular category. All the cat, dog, and sunset pictures you see on Facebook have a strong sentimental component, at least in the mind of the photographer.

Personally, I do not like overly sentimental pictures. They tend to be bland and boring. The biggest problem is not with any single picture. The biggest problem is that there are so many of them, and that they are nearly all boring.

I have never understood why it is a great thing to be bored out of your skull, but apparently, I belong to a rather small minority.

Wonder is where imagination and creativity lives. Pictures that  show you things, creatures, people, and worlds that exist only in the imagination. Here you will find pictures of John Carter battling four-armed giant apes on Mars, H.R. Giger's Alien, majestic starships by Chris Foss. The limit is only the limit of imagination.

The Arachnophobia series of pictures belong squarely in the Wonder category. Unless, of course, you live in Australia. (Don't look if you really have arachnophobia.)

So, it is my hope that a picture of two medieval warriors fighting a giant spider will be strange enough to create a sense of wonder in you when you look at it.

The third part of Mortensen's recipe is enjoyment. He was rather specific about what that meant: Create a path for the eye to follow, guiding the viewer from discovery, to discovery, with the occasional obstacle to keep things interesting.

This is definitely something I need to work more on, and I will, in pictures to come.

If you haven't seen Arachnophobia I, click on the link to check it out.

Arachnophobia I

I am starting off a new mini-series of pictures, Arachnophobia. I sat down to make a picture involving a T-Rex, but the ideas kind of morphed while I was working.

Spiders are fascinating. Looking at a spider is looking at a completely different form of life. It might as well be from another planet.

Giant arachnids have been popular in monster movies since Tarantula (1955). One of my favorites is Eight-Legged Freaks (2002). Tolkien created Shelob, and Peter Jackson put it on the silver screen in The Return of the King. Another fairly recent giant spider is Aragog, in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets.

Obviously, giant spiders are a lot of fun, unless they eat you, of course.

The setting for Arachnophobia I is Primus Vicus, a medieval village not far from Halmstad in Sweden. I'll vary the environments quite a bit in the series, but I plan to stick with the medieval Fantasy theme I began with.

Here is the photo composite I constructed to have a base for the digital painting process.

As the series progresses, I will test and use various ideas from the early 20th century pictorialist William Mortensen. Specifically, from his book The Command to Look (1937). More about that next time.

Pictorialism vs. Neo-Pictorialism vs. Contemporary Pictorialism

Bareback Riders - Pictorialist Version

In this article I will use the same basic photo to create three very different pictures, a pictorialist version, a neo-pictorialist version, and, for want of a better term, a contemporary pictorialist version.

Hang on! You are in for a ride!

The slow bit: A brief history of pictorialism

 Pictorialism is a photographic style that was popular from 1885 to about 1920. The style all but disappeared for a long time, but it was rediscovered in the 90's.

The rising interest in the original pictorialists and their pictures, also kindled an interest in recreating their style. Behold, neo-pictorialism was born!

Neo-pictorialist pictures are stylistically very similar to pictorialist pictures, but there are important differences. If there weren't, this article would end here.

What about contemporary pictorialism? First of all, I invented the term. There are people today, who do what the pictorialists did a hundred years ago. Because there is a 100 year gulf separating the original pictorialists from the contemporary ones, the technology has changed, our society, and social norms, have changed. Therefore, a contemporary pictorialist picture can look very different from a pictorialist picture from 1918.

Enough with the history lession! Let's get on with creating the pictures!

The boring base photograph

Base Photo: Bushes and Borgholm Castle

The base photograph is a picture of some boring shrubs. You can see the Borgholm Castle in the background, but as castle photos go, this one is pretty much a dud. The castle is very interesting, but you cannot see that in this picture.

Let's take this unremarkable photo, and have some fun with it!

Neo-pictorialist version

Bareback Riders: Neo-Pictorialist Version. Note the absence of horses and riders.

Let's begin by giving the picture the neo-pictorialist treatment. When people talk about creating pictorialist pictures today, they usually mean neo-pictorialist pictures.

Neo-pictorialism is mostly a technical exercise. The objective is to make a picture stylistically similar to an old pictorialist picture. The closer you get, the more you have succeeded.

Pictorialists in the early 20th century wanted to evoke emotion. They wanted to create art. To do that, they turned to painters for inspiration. Consequently, they often wanted their pictures to look like paintings.

To create painterly effects, the pictorialists used a great variety of tricks. Anything that worked was okay to use. They often blurred their pictures, they hand-colored them, dodged, burned, used early composition techniques...

Neo-pictorialists recreate the look of the pictorialist photos, much like historical reenactment societies recreate old battles.

Thus, if we take our base photo, and make it look stylistically like a pictorialist photo, then we have a neo-pictorialist photo.

Why are there no horse and riders in our neo-pictorialist version of the photo? Because there is no reason to have them there. Only the style is important. The content does not matter, as long as it does not look too modern. Consequently, neo-pictorialist pictures are often pictures of nature, landscapes, forests. A really old car is okay to shoot, but a modern car is not. To some neo-pictorialists, shooting with old lenses and using the original processes is a matter of pride.

Pictorialist version

Bareback Riders: Pictorialist Version

In the pictorialist (1920) version of the photo, the style is exactly the same as in the neo-pictorialist version, but the content is different. Why?

Because, to a pictorialist, content was important. Pictorialists asked questions like:

Is it beautiful?
Is it scary?
Does it tell a story?
Does it convey an idea?
...and so on

A pictorialist uses whatever means available to further the purpose of the picture. It is that simple.

They did not care about using the "correct" process, or whether the picture conformed to genre conventions. They used whatever means they had. The style is as much a result of technical limitations, as of aesthetic considerations.

For this picture, I have stuck with the convention of making the photo look like a painting, but the technique I use for doing so is completely modern. In case you are curious, I used Dynamic Auto-Painter, a tool that analyses the photo, and with a little guidance from me, recreates it from scratch, as a painting.

Making their pictures look like paintings was a means to an end, not an end in itself. It was a convenient way to help viewers relate to the photos by relating the photos to something the audience already knew. (A bit like when the iPhone was introduced. The iPhone is a miniature mobile multi-purpose device. Most of the time it is used, it is used as something other than a phone. Calling it a phone made it easier for people to relate to it.)

Nudes are common in pictorialism because the nude human form evokes feelings. Most pictures are of nude women, because most of the photographers were male. There are exceptions though. There were female photographers, and photos of nude males.

Note the difference between pictorialist and neo-pictorialist:

• The pictorialist uses cutting edge technology and processes to express emotion and ideas.
• The neo-pictorialist tries to emulate the results of processes used by pictorialists in the period 1885-1920.

What would a pictorialists do today? I am glad you asked.

Contemporary Pictorialism

Bareback Riders: Contemporary Pictorialism

A contemporary pictorialist would ask the same, or similar, questions that a pictorialist would:

Is it beautiful?
Is it scary?
Does it tell a story?
Does it convey an idea?
Do I have to ask exactly the same questions a pictorialist would have asked 100 years ago? (Hint: The answer is NO!)


If you have read my blog posts about the Gothenburg Nudes series, you know that the basic idea was to separate nudity and objectification, for the purpose of making room for appreciation.

This basic idea guided the design of each picture, and of the series as a whole. The Öland Nudes series uses the same basic idea, but it is tailored for a slightly different audience.

People tend to relate to places they know, so I use familiar locations to trigger interest, before I hit t
hem with abstract concepts.

I admit, it does not work perfectly. Some people see nipples, and after that, they see nothing else. This happens both with those who like nipples, and those who don't. Neither group is my target audience.

My target audience is the group of people who appreciates both the beauty of the human form, and abstract reasoning...and especially those who either live in Gothenburg or on Öland.

If you live elsewhere, please do not feel left out. You can appreciate Gothenburg and Öland even if you do not live there.

That is the difference between pictorialism, neo-pictorialism, and contemporary pictorialism as I see it. Feel free to disagree. If you do, please also feel free to comment. I am interested in your opinion, whether your argument changes my mind or not.