Blog - Articles

Hell on earth. It sounds like hyperbole, but the Danakil Depression is exactly that. In late 2013 I spent 1.5 months traveling extensively in Ethiopia, and I visited the Danakil to scout locations for my 'Earth, Wind and Fire' workshop. It is, by my own experience, one of the most inhospitable environments you can actually visit. Scorching heat, no roads, no running water, not to mention hotels or any other modern convenience. But it is exactly these qualities which make...

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In this article I'll tell about the interesting process of producing my image 'Crystalline'. I shot it during January 2014, and processed it at the time, but lately the addition of new Photoshop features lead me to revisit it, and reprocess it in a different way. This image is an HDR-Panorama, a kind of shot which is usually technically difficult to produce, but as I show below, this difficulty is now relegated to the past. I hope you find the explanation interesting and...

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As you might have noticed by now, a subject that I spend a lot of time thinking about is setting my images apart. With the booming photography world and the constant clicking in epic locations, it’s getting harder and harder to produce something that looks different, not only in the artist’s eyes, but also in the audience’s. Photographers have different methods of doing this, and this time I’d like to discuss one of my definite favorites: shooting at nighttime. The...

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How many times should one take a shot of a place or a landmark until it’s too much? When do you think one should just let go? After Ten shots? A hundred? Never? I think a good approach to this might be to shoot it until you’ve got something that stands out from your own images of the place. If you keep getting the same standard of shots from somewhere, you’re not quite there yet and you need to keep shooting it. Once you get something that’s truly special and very...

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Part of what can make an image both visually appealing and conceptually interesting is the connection between its different parts. An image is a whole made of differentiable elements, and these elements can either be separate or have a variety of relations between them. To make an image which is indeed a whole and not just different layers on top of each other, a photographer needs to make the layers (or elements) communicate with each other. But how? One way, of which I will write here, is...

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This time I’ll talk about a subject which might be less inherently connected to landscape photography, but as I see it, it’s very relevant to this field as it is to other kinds of photography, and through it one can have a larger appreciation for our craft and a stronger connection to one’s own art. Naming a piece of art has always been important, not only to have a way to refer to the piece, but also, and much more importantly, to present a window to the creator’s...

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In this article I'll take you to a grisly scene I encountered, which enabled me to produce quite a rare shot. This image is special to me for two reasons: first of all, it's a very unique image, telling a story you don't come across very often. Secondly, I've had to put in work I usually don't do when it comes to post-processing, to make it look right. All in all, I'm happy with the result, and it has won good acclaim in international competitions and publications. The...

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Often when talking to fellow landscape photographers about different aspects of our work, rises the subject of differentiating your work from other photographers', and one of the most common ways for landscape photographers to set themselves apart is shooting in hard-to-reach locations. Probably as old as landscape photography itself is the notion that a 'good' photographer is one that pushes the physical boundaries, hikes further, climbs higher, suffers harsher conditions, endures...

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Landscape photographers live and breathe on variety. It's a bad idea to shoot the exact same image as someone else, and, while not as bad, shooting a very similar composition to an existing image usually isn't considered an achievement. A good landscape photo should be original in at least one way, and finding a unique composition, a different, fresh look, is an important part of originality. But the photography world is booming, and every other photographer has images of iconic...

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Landscape photographers love looking at forecasts, and for good reason. The readier you are for what’s going to happen, the better prepared you are for the cloud conditions, the light direction and the overall weather, the more you can plan your shot, and so you can get to the right place at the right time to achieve what you’ve been planning for a long time. I agree, and I fully support people who direct themselves mainly using forecasts. But I tend to do things differently. The...

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