And now for something completely different between all the landscape/nature photos on this blog 🙂 Last week there was a “fotomesse” in Tromsø, a kind of trade fair organised by a shop in Oslo (we don’t even have a decent photography shop in Tromsø!). Apart from selling all kinds of equipment, there were also talks by photographers and several workshops. All for free 🙂 I was lucky with my work schedule, and I was able to join 3 workshops and a talk. The talk was by Audun Rikardsen, a professor in biology who takes truly spectacular images around Tromsø – have a look at his website!

The workshops were by Roger Brendhagen, a nature photographer and ambassador for Nikon. The workshops were all really interesting and I’ve learnt a lot. One of them was called “Walk of Feature” and was about documentary photography and publishing in magazines etc. At the end of the workshop he gave us an assignment: to document an event in 8 photos, and to really plan which photos to take beforehand.

After his workshops, and the talk by Audun Rikardsen, I came to realise that many great photos are not taken “by accident”. They are planned very carefully and basically staged. I still have this romantic idea that good photos just come to you if you happen to be at the right place at the right time 😉 though of course I do sometimes have a photo in mind before I set out. So it was a new experience for me to sit down and kind of draw out which 8 photos I wanted to take – it’s like drawing a cartoon story. I had big ideas, but struggled with the practicality of them, and when I was running out of time, I decided to keep things simple and chose the making of a cup of tea as my subject 😀

A simple subject, but surprisingly challenging to carry out… I was alone when I took these photos, it definitely would have been easier with an assistent 😉 but it was quite fun to try and get these photos perfect. Of course they aren’t, and I still have a lot to learn, but I found this exercise very helpful. So here it comes…