One more thing regarding the LCD-display, that also always lies, is that you don’t have to review your images on location. Your computer screen is much better suited for that. There is also a risk that you will throw aways pictures that wasn’t as bad as you thought. Just because the LCD-display lies. If you absolutely want to review your images in your camera, do it when you are done shooting. Not during.

There are a few more small tips to capture your masterpiece, let’s get through them briefly.

• Shoot as much as you can. “Film” is almost free since you can reformat your memory-cards. Duh.

• Again, don’t trust your LCD-screen.

• Study your surroundings to predict fabulous pictures. Then you will be ready when it happens.

• Always bring your camera. With that, I mean your best camera. What if you shot your greatest image with your crapy phone and couldn’t print it as large as you wanted. That would be sad.

• Like the tip above, always use maximum resolution. Don’t risk getting a way to small image.

• Remove your lens cap. It should only be used when your camera is in your bag.

Using these small easy tips will help you capture more great images for you to choose between. As simple as this tip is, it’s equally simple to forget to keep on shooting. Don’t fear of getting home with too much images, it’s quite easy to throw them away. The more the merrier!

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This picture is taken with my D800 with a manual 50mm prime lens from the 70′s. Completely manual with no extra light.

As a photographer you sometimes feel that you are completely out of ideas. You feel lost. Like you have lost your edge and talent. Especially those days when you have planned in advance to shoot with a friend, and – when you get to the location you almost get an anxiety attack, feeling like you are the worst photographer ever. You have no idea what to shoot. Let me tell you one thing: Take a deep breath, believe in yourself, because you still got it. It’s all in your head. 

My tip is debatable. Some photographers says it’s the wrong way to go about it, and that it limits your potential. Well, if you feel that way, it’s okay. It’s still works great for me.

So, first stop whining. Then take your camera bag and empty it. If you got a smaller bag – take that instead. Your are allowed to pack ONE camera body, ONE prime lens, extra battery and memory cards of course. That’s it. No more. Not even a flash. If you have one built in, your not allowed to use it. It may sound a bit harsh, but remember, this is first aid. The LCHF of photography. You are on a diet.

Then when it comes to settings and exposure, set everything to manual, maybe not white balance, but everything else. Manual exposure, manual focus. Maybe this sounds completely terrifying, but then let it. It’s not as bad as it sounds. Your meters in your camera still works and will tell you if you done something wrong.

I can almost sense your reactions now. That I’ve lost my mind and got completely bonkers. How could this tip possibly help you? The thing is, this will force you to be creative. To use your mind above your tool. The camera will be what it always should be. Just a tool to get the image of your imagination. Instead of a zoom lens you will have to zoom with your feet. You will put the focus in places in the picture that you like, and you are not forced to certain patterns of focus points. You will become more creative with your exposure since the camera always tend to put it somewhere in between. You will be forced to create. Think of all the old masterpieces. The are all made manually.

Will this help you get better images? Yes. Why? Because you will put more time and effort into every picture.

When you realize that you still got it (after a day or two), go back to shooting with all of your equipment, but remember the feeling and the effort you put into every picture and now use that. Always.

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I’ve known Mattias Klum for some time, not personally, but as a great Swedish photographer, but never really more than just “a great Swedish photographer”. It wasn’t until I read more about him and found these amazing videos that I realized that he is quite amazing. He is something of a photographic genius. His commitment is something that could get every photographer inspired. 

For the person who doesn’t know anything about him I can tell you that he is a Swedish photographer that started his career in 1986 as a freelance photographer full time, only 20 years old. Already then he had decided what he wanted to work with. Especially what he didn’t want to work with. He didn’t want to work as a news photographer or shoot celebrities. He wanted to show nature, in all its glory. All the beautiful things that exists everywhere, even just outside your own doorstep.

At the age of 29 (1997) he was the first Swedish photographer to have his picture on the cover of National Geographic Magazine. Since then he have had his pictures on the cover nine times. But to be brief, since it’s so much to tell about this amazing photographer I just want to share some videos that I found on youtube, from some of his seminars. If you want to find out more I suggest you visit his fantastic web site. http://www.mattiasklum.com

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Before I grab my camera and set off to a photo shoot, I always attend to this list before I leave. Too many times, I’ve realized on location that I have left half the stuff I need back at home. Or worse, your camera isn’t in your bag.

• Don’t ever forget chargers for anything you need, and do always take some spare batteries with you in your bag. You don’t know when your batteries runs dry, or for how long you are going to shoot, better be safe than sorry.

• Make sure your memory cards are empty and formatted before your start a photo-shoot. Also check that you have copied your previous images to your computer. It’s extremely embarrassing to have your assistant run like a crazy person to buy some more cards because your other clients images still is on the ones you have. Equally important, don’t just bring ONE card. Bring many cards. They don’t weigh anything, and the same thing here, better be safe than sorry.

• Take as many pictures as possible. It’s not like in the past, when you had to pay for film-development. The more pictures you have, the better the chance that you really captured the image you intended.

• If you are out on-location on a shoot – always bring many business cards in your bag. Or a digital one on your iPhone or iPad. Market yourself to every person you meet! Maybe they will be the new customers who turn you into a millionaire. Moreover, don’t forget your ID-card at home. You never know when you might need it.

• Bring an assistant along. Maybe it doesn’t feel that important, but you couldn’t be more wrong. An assistant could be of so much use to you! An assistant makes work easier and more fun. Remember that you only have two arms! You can’t do everything during a shoot your self. In addition you will look more professional in front of your client.

• Clean your stuff thoroughly. You don’t want to do it on location. Then probably your stuff is going to get more dirty than there were before.

• Before a photo-shoot on location empty your bag completely and repack it. Bring only the stuff you need. It’s also common that you have removed something from your bag, that you later on would need. So many times I just grabbed my bag believing that everything would be there. But it was not.

• Reset your camera before a shoot. If you use your camera on a daily basis, you probably don’t remember what settings you’ve made. If you just take up your camera and start shooting, the risk is that your result is going to look kind of weird. The most important settings to check are ISO, exposure compensation and the JPG/RAW settings. Maybe you are going to ask yourself if someone is that stupid to forget that. Yes, they are. I completed a full portrait-session with ISO 1600 and did not realize my mistake until I sat in front of Lightroom. Not good.

• Regarding my tip above, don’t trust your LCD-screen. It lies. Everything looks great on your camera. On a 2-inch screen everything looks like your best shot – ever. The truth is something else. Zoom in thoroughly to really check if everything is okey.

• If shooting outdoors, always have rain poncho with you. Simple and inexpensive – does not matter. Use it for your own protection or for hiding your camera and your bag. You never know when it might start to rain. Camera-gear and water don’t go to well together.

As an end to this very long tip I will give you the most important tip of them all. It’s more like a rule than a tip. Maybe you think for yourself now ”Oh my good, can he shut up, this tip is too long, I’m fed up with this”. There in lies the rule. NEVER be fed up as a photographer. NEVER say that something is to hard or to much work. These are some expressions that don’t exists for a good photographer. If you don’t allow things to be hard, difficult, annoying, sticky, wet, too cold, too hot, and so on, you never going to get that perfect picture.

Good luck!

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As a beginner it can be hard to understand all the settings in your camera, but with this quick tip, you can forget all the technical issues, and just use your eyes and own preference. This is also really good when your camera lies. And understand, it does, sometimes.

Now for the actual tip. Set your DSLR to live view mode. Then change the white balance and pick the one that looks good. It’s not more difficult than that.

Good luck!

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I recently found this picture on my computer that was taken years ago with my old Nikon D70s camera. Everything is wrong. The light is bad, the crop is horrible and the subject is spot on in the center of the picture. A turnaround in Lightroom and with much retouching in photoshop the picture became an improvement beyond my wildest imagination. I realized I had left the picture unfinished on the computer without a thought of making it what it looked like in my mind the moment I pressed the button on my camera.

Retouching is definitely a part of photography, not something you add because your picture didn’t get it in the camera. Retouching was born at the same time when Man began to portray the world around him. Since dawn of photography retouching has always been made to achieve the result the photographer intended when he or she pressed the button. The only things that have changed or are different are the methods of retouching.

It’s not a thing that must be done after the picture is caught by the film or sensor. It can also be done even before you press the button. By staging the picture, removing or adding objects, retaking the picture with different preconditions – or simply use a make-up artist or stylist. The goal is the same. To get that perfect picture.

In 1928 the Hungarian photographer André Kertész took a photograph of an alley with a large bridge in the background in the French suburb of Meudon. He wasn’t satisfied at all with this picture, returned and took another one. This time with people in the foreground and a train passing by on the bridge. That picture became a masterpiece. Just because he came back, and changed his first picture. Because his vision hadn’t been met. In other words, he did a manual retouch of the surroundings, but kept the view.

68 years earlier, one of the first bodily retouches was made by the photographer of the American president Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln didn’t like his body on the first portriat so in the processing he ordered to have his head placed on another body. The retouched portrait later became the picture that was printed on the five dollar bills.

Let’s get further back in the history. Before the camera. Let’s get back to the glory days of Europe’s monarchs. They always had their portrait made by different artists to portray their grandness and sovereignty. These paintings was retouched to death by the artist. Skin like porcelain and perfect hair that glowed. If the king or queen didn’t like their portrait it was most unfortunate for the artists. They lost their head.

If you want to go back even further, by a couple of thousand years, Egypt’s old pharaohs always changed the writings, pictures and history from their predecessors by simply deleting it or change the facts to suit their needs. Even old paintings in caves a long time before that was enhanced enormously by the artist.

With all this information we realize that retouching is something human and something that is done to all stories, pictures and paintings. The old artists did it with a brush or pencil, today we do it on our computers with a wacom-board.

Photojournalism however is different. An art born with Robert Capa’s astonishing war pictures and Henri Cartier Bresson’s amazing street photography. Still, even those pictures had to be processed to be seen. Here in lies the art of doing retouch without changing the reality.

Often the decision was simply to leave the picture alone. To go to uncharted territory. To leave the retouching to the eyes of the beholder. Bresson has an amazing picture from his early career that illustrate this perfectly. The man jumping over a water puddle and out of the frame. To the for the beholder, the unknown.

Another area that rarely is retouched is ordinary peoples snapshots. An idea that started by the company Kodak in the year 1900. They built a camera for the common man with preloaded film. It was very simple and looked like a small black box. When you had taken all the pictures on the roll you shipped the whole camera to Kodak that developed the film and printed it for you. Then they sent you the camera back, with the pictures on paper and the camera reloaded with a new roll of film. A technique intended to capture a single moment easily for the common man, not for the professional photographer.

That said, other kinds of photography is not always meant to portraying the truth or a specific moment. It’s meant to show the photographers vision, inner thoughts and feelings. Feelings that are supposed to be transferred to the beholder.

During the first world war it was very common with retouched pictures to make political statements. The film was often cut and put together in a fashion that suited political needs. At the same time photojournalism was born with photographers who instead wanted to show the exact truth. Without refining it. This was a time of learning for everyone, a time of developing and perfecting the techniques of photography. A time when you learned from your mistakes. Those mistakes are today the foundation of modern photography.

Nowadays you very often hear that retouching is something bad, and that the picture should be made in the camera, not afterwards. This attitude is a new invention and something that was not born at the same time as photography. The urge to do retouching and change the reality to something better lies within the nature of the human being. The only thing that has changed is the method and the availability to change. The latter is called evolution. Todays softwares like Photoshop is nothing different from old chemicals in a lab, a painters paint and brush or the scissors used in the old darkroom. To use Photoshop is just to go back the roots of photography. Our human urge to enhance and beautify.

When you press the button on your camera you are simply borrowing colors, lights and shadows from reality to get the tools you need to make your vision come true. If you skip the processing of retouching yourself, you leave that entirely to the camera. It’s still done. By someone, or something.

Then, is my insanely retouched Seagull any different from what the cavemen draw on the wall in Spain 40.000 years ago? Is it any different from the beautified portrait of the French monarch Louis XIV in the 1600s? Is it any different from giving Abraham Lincoln a new body?

Photography doesn’t stop with the press of a button. It lives on. Make sure it does. How the picture is made doesn’t matter, as long as it is made.

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A friend and colleague suggested this link for photographers and I immediately felt it was the right thing to do before the weather permits more outdoor activities. Thank you John Hagby!

http://www.creativelive.com/courses/yoga-photographers-vanessa-joy

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/Jonas

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I got a really nice question from my colleague Malin Tvedt today. She asked me if I wanted to go out and shoot Stockholm by night later on. That is always interesting and sometimes you come home with some really nice pictures. Today was such a day. Malin and I walked from from Medborgarplatsen up to Fjällgatan at Södermalm. A great and rewarding place photographicly speaking.

Just one drawback. I can’t cope with high altitudes. Fjällgatan is a mountain that drops straight down into a highway 30 meters below. It really feels in your knees and sometimes you have to squat down so you do not faint. At least I have to. Especially when it is just an iron fence with thin steel rods between you and a certain death.

This is the picture I got. It has been developed in Lightroom and then it got some Glamour Glow from NikSoftwares Color Efex Pro 4. I used my D800 with a manual 50mm f1.4 (old glass from the 70s), Aperture 8, Shutter Speed 30 seconds. Of course I used both a remote and tripod.

Dan Wolgers statue “Torso” in front of The Photographic museum in Stockholm. Shot handheld with just the street lighting as main lighting from above. I used a small flash to illuminate the eye and then I experimented with the white balance. Since the white balance was for a completely different type of lighting, the handheld flash got a blue effect.

Go out in the night and shoot more! It’s really fun! A good tip is to go manually. The camera has a tendency to give you some really werid exposure values otherwise.

Good Luck!

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