Yesterday was a beautiful autumn morning and i thought as usual no camera – except i did actually have one. The best camera there is, my new iPhone, The camera that’s always with you! It gave me such a great sence of satisfaction to actually stop.

So try it, stop, use the camera that’s with you, the best camera.

Eventhough it´s summer i love browsing through old pictures and just grabbing one and see what it can become, in this case a winter picture from 2 years ago when we where passing through the famous “Trollveggen”.

This is an HDR image captured with 3 exposures +-2EV and processed through Photomatix. A little dodging and burning which i BTW always do with two curves layers and layer masks after HDR processing.

There are usually a couple of gems just waiting in the archive, and for me this is one.

I am speachless. Thank you Bounce for bringing us this experience.

So what do you do when one of your good friends and favourite photographers ask you “Hey do you want to do a project together for this festival? Its due soon, but we still got some time, any ideas?” well, as usual i triggers the playfullnes whithin and after my mind churned for a couple of secs it became clear “Well i have this new gizmo that i´ve been waiting for the right opportunity to use, let´s do it!” And so project “xero” was born.

We decided to work with highspeed photography, people and balloons. What a great combination.

Xenia is a true master on getting people in on things so we chucked a bunch of people from the street into the studio and told them to pop these balloons, in almost total darkness. Fun stuff. My contribution was my girlfriend and another friend of ours (easy way out, thanks love).

The technical bits are 3 x 580 ex tethered to the trigger gizmo, two on umbrellas on one grid on the balloon from behind. right umbrella set to 1/64 left umbrella  on 1/128 and shoot through on 1/128, yeah thats right, its just a litle birds fart of flash. When workin highspeed your flash is you shutter speed and to get fast enough shutter speeds you need to lower the flash as much as you can, the camera is actually set to bulb in a dark room and manually triggered right before and after we gave the ok to pop. Working on 1/128 gives you a flash duration/ shutter speed of around 1/30 000 of a sec. Thats fast.

Well, enough technical stuff, after mocking around in Morphage for a while we finally had it done and a few more hours of finding the codec, aspect ratio on all that other video stuff that i still need to learn it was really done. The video was shown on 3 different locations at the “Slottsfjell festival 2008″, projected onto walls inside an old industial building at about 10-15meters wide. Gotta say i get pretty wowed when i see something that i´ve helped create in that big a size.

Zach Arias lays it out there, this is the video that, amongst other things, inspired me to get going and start doing all the stuff i’ve wanted to do for a long time.  Winter is rough and hard. Re-inventing yourself is even rougher and harder, and Zach talks about this in a truly great and honest manner.

Its worth your time. Trust me.

Doing stuff that has been done before seems intimidating (and boring) sometimes, but if someone else has gotten an idea to work, its usually bound to work again and again, and sometimes again. I like to do things like this every now and then to see if i can make it look (at least half) as interesting as some of the shots i´ve seen elsewhere.

This shot was taken on a green screen, my intention was that maybe i could use it in some kind of composite, but i haven´t yet… Shots like these are quite easy to make actually, but as many other things there are heaps of gadgets to help you control your environment as much as you´d like. I recommend the Time Machine – it looks like something to control a spaceship in the old BBC hitchhikers guide series, but its actually a supercool piece of equipment. What i used for this shot was an old aquarium that i got from my in-laws, lots of water, one sb-80 speedlight on each side, shot through a frostfilter and off course two different colors of ink. Key´d out using Digital Anarchy Primatte for PS. To make it look a bit more undefined and creepy the shot is flipped 180`so it looks like some kind of weird blob growing up from the ground.

Setup shot:

This image was taken from my livingroom window during one of last years thunderstorms.

Tripod with my trusty old 5d in the window on 10 sec intervals using a tc-80n3 remote. I had it long enough to capture some good shots but when the lightning struck just down the street and nearly gave me and my (always forgiving) girlfriend a heartattack i found it better to finish up with the shots i had. One frame was taken for the streetscenerey and using two frames for the lightning i masked them out, desaturated the street and added  some blue tint to the sky.