Showing myself to the world

Today two of my images will be shown at one of the largest video billboards at Times Square in New York! It´s the community of See Me that arranges this every year, and two of my images was choosen to be displayed, to my great happiness.

One of the goals that I have for my art is for it to be shown to as many people as possible. Since my art is an investigation in the human soul and mind, I naturally want it to be seen by other people. I explore inner worlds- psychological struggles that we all have to deal with. Our inner world is just as real and important as the outer world. By visualizing these processes, that normally are invisible, sometimes even by ourselves, I hope to be wiser. Through art, we can get to know ourselves better. By showing my art to other people, telling them about the thoughts that I had while creating it, I hope that my image can work as some sort of mirror. What if the viewer starts to think about something within, by looking at my picture, and finds something undiscovered inside herself? That´s my goal and that´s why it feels so amazing to have my art shown at a public space like Times Square tonight!

In the art world, it´s not very correct to say: I wan´t everyone to see my pictures! It´s almost as if your art is slightly better if only a few people like it. If the "ordinary" people like it, then it can´t be very good, can it? It´s as if art is better if it´s harder to understand. Well, I don´t think like this, obviously. If I did, I wouldn´t be so active on the internet, would I? But I love spreading my art and sharing thoughts with all the wonderful people around the world. I love the fact that you don´t need to visit a specific gallery in a specific city in a specific country in order to see my pictures, you can see them anywhere in the world, as long as you have an internet connection! And there´s also an economic aspect to this, even if I wish that I didn´t need to think about that. But I want to support myself by creating art, and by displaying my art on the internet, I get more opportunities to sell it.

I am creating because it makes me fullfilled. I have always created. Ever since I was a child, I´ve been creative. But these last years, I´ve felt the need to show my creations. It´s no longer enough to create only for myself. I think that something amazing happens when you leave your art to the world, and let other people make it their own. That´s when the magic happens!

On Solitude

When I grew up I loved to sit in my room, play the piano, read, write, draw. Sometimes I played with friends. I had friends. But I didn´t have a strong need to be with them. I liked people. I liked my friends. And I loved myself. I could be with myself for a long time without missing friends. Two months during summer, my family spent time in our summer house in the country. I mostly spent time with family. I never missed friends. I had my brother. He was my friend. And I had myself. I was my own playmate, and I didn´t have a hard time coming up with things to do. As the years passed by, I started to get more and more involved in other peoples lives. I started to actually like the idea of friends, and I started to like being with friends more than I had before. As a young adult, I found some really great friends. During a couple of years, I spent a lot of time with them, going out in bars, meeting in cafés, even living together. But I noticed a difference between me and other people. When other people wanted to hang out the whole day, I was satisfied after two hours and wanted to go home. When other people said that they didn´t know what to do and wanted to hang out, I never fully understood this feeling. I´ve always needed much time alone. To charge my batteries. To think. To be creative. I always have something that I want to do. Something that demands my time and full focus. I never get restless.

When my phone rings, I feel stress. I have never liked the sound of a phone ringing. So often, I am focused on something that I´m doing at home, and I feel disturbed by the signal of my phone. If I´m outside, working or meeting someone, it´s much easier. It´s as if I can switch something to on and off. If my social switch is set to off, it can be hard to answer the phone. Many times I let it ring and hope that the person will send me a text message instead. If I´m in my social mode, it feels easy to answer the phone. Most often, I´m not in my social mode. This has led to conflict with some people who feel offended by my need to withdraw and charge my batteries alone.

For a long time, I felt that it was something wrong with me. Therefore, I tried very hard to be "correct". I answered my phone all the time, and I tried to be "a good friend". I was afraid that other people would be mad at me, angry at me for acting the "wrong" way and not being as a friend "should" be. This feeling is so sad, because to me a true friendship is built on love, and if you love someone you often try hard to understand each other. This is a big part of my personality. I can´t hide that I love spending time with myself, and I can´t help that I feel tired after meeting people and that I maybe want the rest of the week to be still and quiet.

When I found my true passion, I started to accept this side of my personality and understand it more. I realized that I´m drawn to a profession where I can work on my own, because that´s what I love to do. I´ve never been a fan of working in groups. I have never felt the need to have a job in order to belong to a group. When I found my passion, it became even more important to take the time to create. I could no longer hang out with friends as much as I had done. Now I needed the time to take photographs, edit them and post them to the internet. For some reason, it felt easier to explain to other people what I was doing since I found photography. Now I had a very clear reason for needing time alone- I needed to work on my photography. But everything is a balance. I still need my friends. I have always needed them. To me, it´s so easy to step into the inner world and the world of creativity and imagination, that I need to drag myself out of there, force myself to get out into the world and meet people. Solitude can turn into isolation,  at least if you´re similar to my personality. This is something that I struggle with. I´ve made many pictures about this: Serenade for solitude, and my whole series Finding Peace, in which I use a bubble to symbolize integrity and isolation.

We live in a society that wants us to be outgoing and active. I´m not socially awkward, I find it easy to talk to people. I love meeting people and hearing their stories! But I have a strong need to be still, get time to think and work on my own. Sometimes I´ve felt that I should spend more time with friends and less time in my own world. That I should arrange big dinners for ten people and have parties. But I know that I wouldn´t feel whole as a person if I didn´t listen to my inner voice that tells me to create. It´s so important to accept who you are, and the first step towards acceptance is by understanding who you are and how you work. It´s nothing wrong with needing time for yourself. Lately, I´ve also read several articles and books on this topic. If you´re interested in this topic, you should read the book "Quiet- The power of introverts" by Susan Cain. She talks about introverts and extroverts. Introverts gain power by being alone (as I do) and extroverts gain power by meeting other people. Introverts like best to meet one friend at  a time, talking about deep stuff (me!) and extroverts like more to hang out with lots of friends. Most people are a little bit of both, and so am I (I love parties!) but I found it extremely helpful to read about this stuff and to get a better understanding for myself.

I would love to hear your thoughts on this topic. Maybe you have a friend like me, or you are just like me? Write a comment and share what you think!

Amazing Iceland

Wow! For six days now me and Victoria have been traveling along the south coast of Iceland to find different landscapes to photograph in. I have never worked this intense before. Usually I take one day to photograph, then I wait for one or more weeks before I photograph my next concept. Now I´ve been photographing several concepts every day. I have to admit that I think I work better when I can be a bit slow, but this is a great experience and it feels amazing to come home with tons of images to start working on! We´ve been on so many amazing places- glacier lagoons, a plain wreck in the middle of nowhere, black beaches, cliffs. I am so in love with the icelandic landscape. Everywhere you look, the sky becomes one with the horizon, and the spaces are never ending. It´s both beauty and emptyness. Fresh air and a lot of weather. Even though we´ve been working very hard every day, I haven´t managed to take all the photos that I wanted. The time just wasn´t enough. I´ll have to go back here soon again!

Mixed pictures from our time in Iceland. From Reykjavik to the south coast.

The Sleep Project on Iceland!

I´m on Iceland! I´m traveling with my friend and colleague Victoria. We both love this country, and both Victoria and I feel that this landscape suits our photography very well. What I love about Iceland is the diversity of the landscape, and most of all I love the inhospitable landscape with black lava, black sand and smoke coming up from the ground. Right now we´re still in Reykjavik. We decided to stay here a couple of days first, to relax a bit and have a great time!

Our plan is to rent a car, drive around the south coast of Iceland and work on our own photography projects together. The best thing about Victoria is that I know she understands what I need when I´m working on a picture. That´s why she can be the best assistant in the world. She can also be an amazing model for my photographs, as I know that I can ask her to do almost anything and she will do it because she understands the importance of it and what I need to fulfill my vision.

When we did our project Roots of imagination, we worked so well together, pushing each other all the time, producing a lot of images. What I´m going to do different this time is that I have one project that I will work on, in order to stay focused. This is a project that I´m very excited to start working on, and I´m not yet sure in what direction it will take me!

Right now, I call this project "The Sleep Project". In this project, I will investigate the state between being awake and falling asleep. This is a state that I´ve been thinking a lot about lately. It´s a state that makes me wonder. What is this borderland between reality and dream? My plan is to investigate this state with my photography. This is the state where you might experience the hypnic jerk, which means that you feel like you´re falling or slipping. Or you may see strong colors and patterns or get sleep paralysis. So many scary and interesting things happens at this moment that I feel I have to do a project about this, examining it in my own, artistic way. If you have any thoughts about this state, please tell me about it, I would love to know!

Images shot in studio with a black back drop. When I shot these images as test images I realized that I want to start working on "The Sleep Project". The image in the middle is a composite from when I visited Iceland last time in 2010.

The creation of "Path".

I wrote a guide in how I created this photo, entitled Path. With this blog post, I want to show you how parts of my creation process looks. I haven´t included every step, because it would have taken much longer to write and I didn´t want this post to be too long. But I hope you will at least get an idea about how I work!

In Mars, I visited my friend Victoria in Norrköping for a couple of days to work and photograph together. One day we went to a national park to photograph, and we got there at sunset. The light looked amazing on the fields, and I just felt that I had to catch it in some way.

I used Victoria as a model for some test shots in order to get the composition right, and then I ran out on the field myself to pose in front of the camera, since I already had a black dress on for another photo that I had planned, and I thought it would suit perfectly for this picture. I used Victorias 130 mm lens. This meant that I had to stand quite far away from the camera in order to get my whole body within the frame, and so the remote for the camera didn´t work on that distance. Luckily I had Victoria!

While I tried a lot of different poses, Victoria was my assistant and pressed the shutter. I knew that I wanted some kind of sad and melancholic feeling in the pose, but I wasn´t sure how to get it.

This is the photo that I ended up using.

In the editing process, I work a lot with curves. When I work with curves, I always create a new curve as an adjustment layer.

How to create an adjustment layer:

Go to Menu. Choose Layer and New adjustment layer. You can choose different adjustments, like Curves, Levels, Hue/Saturation and so on... I work a lot with curves, so I choose Curves.

You can also create a new adjustment layer by clicking the small circle in the Layers window.

By creating an adjustment layer, you can choose to delete the changes that you´ve done to the image anytime, because the actual changes are only saved in the adjustment layer. The changes you do in an adjustment layer never affects the original image. Because of this, you can easily see how the image looks with or without the adjustments you´ve made. By clicking on the symbol that looks like an eye, the adjustment layer will either be visible or invisible.

I usually work with several adjustment layers (mostly curves) to get the right feeling in my image. Many times I need to try a lot of different adjustments in order to get it right.

Here you see two of the curves that I´ve created. Nothing special at all. The one to the left is a classic "s-curve", where you lighten the highlights and darken the blacks. This gives the picture more contrast. In the curve to the right I´ve darkened the blacks a bit more, and also added more blue into the picture. These curves are quite modest. My curves can definitely look more crazy!

Then I realized that I wanted to turn the scene into night. I felt that this suited my original idea for this photo. I also added in a picture of the stars over the black sky. I shot the image of the stars some time ago, and it´s the first time I´m happy with an image of the stars and actually want to use it!

Here is the finished image with all the layers that I´ve used. You can see that I´ve added two different Photo filters and also worked a bit with Vibrance.

In the final image, I added more light so as to make her seem blinded by headlights. The meaning of this picture grew deeper as I worked with it. I ended up writing these words for the picture:

Walking through life, navigating between the stars through darkness. To be blinded by spotlight, the harsh reality that doesn´t allow you to be lost in the unknown night, in your own secret world. A black dress, as a mourning dress to mourn life while we´re living it.

Forgotten images

I´m writing a blog post about the creation of my picture Path. It´s always fun to show some of the outtakes from a shoot. So many pictures that ends up on the computer without ever being seen!

I´ve been wanting to write more tutorials about my working process, and invite you to take part in my process. This is what I want this blog to be. An opportunity for you to get a glimpse of my life as a photographic artist, as well as an art student an a passionate creative person. Since this is my world and I love it, I want to share it with you, with the hope to be able to teach you something of value along the way!

You can see Path on my flickr.

What life SHOULD be

I usually put on the water boiler right when I get home to get a nice cup of tea. Since I´m drinking coffee every day, I´m trying to choose herbal teas when I´m drinking tea to be a bit healthier. Today I choose the little stronger Yogi Tea with a lot of good spices in it. I love that they always have little quotes on them. I´ve been saving some of the quotes that I like. Here are some of my favorites:

Give up the need to impress others.

Give up your excuses.

Give up your past.

When you let go of what you think life should be, life gets clear.

I especially like the last quote. I think it´s so easy to be stuck in the thought of what life should be, and actually miss what your life is or what it could be. It´s so easy to fool yourself, chasing what everyone else is after, trying to fit into a norm, trying to fulfill the dreams that commercialism gave us. It´s important to take a look at your own goals and dreams from time to time. Are they what you really want, or are they something that you should want? If you´re uncertain, try to start listen to yourself more, and everytime you want something (like travel to a warm country, get a better career with a higher status, a new sweater, and so on...) ask yourself why you want it. Do you feel like it´s something that is important for you in order to live a fulfilled, happy life, or do you feel that it´s something you want because it fits in perfectly with your own expectations of what your life should be, how it should look? I don´t say that it´s wrong if you want something, but I believe life gets shallow if we can´t understand our deeper needs and who we are as a person. Everyone is different. All our roads should look different. They may cross or share the same direction, but they should always be unique. Only you know what you need from life. Take that seriously. Take yourself and your needs seriously. Let go of what you think life should be, see what your life is like now and what possibilities you have to make it your own.