Sojourner

Perhaps I should have saved the title of my previous blog post for this. ‘What the hell am I doing here’ feels very fitting now that I, very surreal, seem to be back in Copenhagen. 84 mind blowing ‘the best days my life’ photography and adventure in Namibia, Western Australia, Malaysia and Borneo have come to a stop. But it is just a temporary stop to get rid of baggage in my life. Sojourning for ever as a travelling photographer. New horizons, new photographs await.

My to-do list is overwhelming with RAW files to develop, getting new web sites, compressing my life and company into a travelling mobile package, prepare for next take off etc. First up is finishing the project for United Plantations and develop their images, so it may be a little while before I get to my own work and new blog posts with new photos.

In the meantime, enjoy this image I shot at Deadvlei in Namibia. Namibia is the photographic highlight of this trip. It is the most beautiful place I have been. I am dead certain it is the most beautiful place in the world! It is also some of the best images I have created.  I dreamed of a whole country of Wide Open Spaces. I dreamed but it was not a dream, it truly exists!

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“Principal joy of life comes from new experiences” – Christopher McCandless

“I haven’t been everywhere, but it’s on my list!” – Susan Sontag

“I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read in the train.” – Oscar Wilde

“Must not fear. Fear is the Mind Killer” – Frank Herbert

Painting Frederiksholm Canal with light

I received my Wacom Intuos3 6×8 tablet this week and I already find it to be an amazing tool and it is so much better to work in Photoshop with an advanced tablet like this than a clunky mouse. The way that the pen pressure can be set to for example opacity really makes painting with light so much easier and much more creative and enjoyable.

The first photo to receive the “tablet treatment” is the following Frederiksholm Canal mirror perfect reflection from an amazing evening a few weeks ago:

A mirror of Frederiksholm Canal
Copyright Flemming Bo Jensen Photography

This is an against-the-light shot so I used the tablet to paint in a bit of light on the buildings originally buried in deep shadows. I also used the tablet to paint a couple of different vignettes and for creating layers and masking for sharpening etc. In an attempt to really learn the tablet I moved the keyboard and mouse to the side and used the tablet exclusively. It was a great way to work and I found that Photoshop and the Intuous3 tablet were made for each other. I didn’t use a lot of painting with light on this shot, but I think in this case even a subtle use has a great effect!

This image is also a good demonstration of how much gold is buried, not only at the end of a rainbow, but in the binaries of a RAW file. I had forgotten I shot this a few weeks ago and looking at the very pale desaturated, high contrasty and very unexciting RAW file I thought “why did I shoot this?”. But against-the-light raw files are always the worst, they look awful until you begin massaging the information out of the RAW file and after some digital darkroom magic the shot appears and I remember why I shot it in the first place – the gorgeous contre-jour light and colours!

Updates, design tweaks and RAW housecleaning!

I’ve done a lot of “house cleaning and painting” lately on my blog:

• I did a few design tweaks trying to match the blog design as much as possible to my gallery web design.
• I updated the About, Photography, Buy Photos and Australia pages (see top menu).
• I added a lot of photography links to photographers I admire and good photography websites – see links in the left bar, scroll down a bit.
• I added a new page about Copenhagen, my home city where my My Copenhagen photo mission unfolds. See top menu.

I also added a new page with my Travelog to the top menu. This page is an easy way to access my travel stories in a chronological order. I tend to write a lot when I travel (lot’s of time to write when waiting for the light and lots of experiences to write about) but 23 posts written while travelling in Australia in 2007 surprised even me, I certainly was a prolific writer! I have a tonnes of older travel stories but don’t know if I’ll ever find the time to post them, I’m working on photography around the clock 🙂

I am also presently going through the more than three thousand RAW files from the 10 weeks in Australia 2007 one last time. It’s the last and final archive run-through making sure every keeper shot has been converted to tiff and all shots are catalogued etc. I’m far from done, but have found a few goodies that wasn’t online before, stuff like:

Pandanus Trees Panorama
Copyright Flemming Bo Jensen Photography

Dunk Island Dusk Panorama
Copyright Flemming Bo Jensen Photography

It’s all part of “house cleaning” before the next photography trip! Getting itchy travel feet, I gotta go again soon and am presently planning. Need more photos, more desert, more outback landscape and some more helicopter flights!  😀

Btw – it’s obvious to me when going through the files that fatigue both mentally and physically does set in on a 10 week photo odyssey. At some point the extraordinary becomes ordinary and there are some of the locations that are exceptional on their own but my photos are not and I didn’t shoot enough compositions either. It’s hard to arrive with “fresh eyes” to a location and really work the landscape when you’ve been travelling a long time, something I have to remember the next time (gotta figure out a “refresh eyes” function!)