The decision landed on a pair of Visico Excel VC300 plus stobes, outfitted with a set of softboxes, umbrellas and stands.
Im really excited to finally have the opportunity to get more control over my lighting, and I’m looking forward to be working (hopefully a lot) with these in the time to come.

Yesterday I got together with a couple living in my area for a somewhat spontaneous photoshoot. At the beginning of the shoot we had no plans really. Just rig the equipment up and see what happens.

Here are three of my personal favorites from the shoot:

All three shots used almost the exact same setup. For the middle one I moved the fill light directly in front of the model, and angeled it downwards at her in a 45* angle.
The setup for these was a basic two light setup with fill light coming in from the left using a 90x100cm softbox. The other flash was set up as a ‘kicker’ from the right and slightly behind the models, also with a 90x100cm softbox attached to it. Triggered with a sync cord directly from the camera (Left light) and an optical slave. (Right light)

There’s a lot to learn, and I sure know I learned some lessons during last nights shoot, something that makes me even more motivated to keep on shooting.
I’m already bubbling with ideas for upcoming projects, and I can’t wait to try to realize them. All in good time though. All in good time.

For those of you still out of the loop, Polaroid announced in 2008 that they were halting production of their widely beloved instant films. Not long after, a core group of former factory workers from the last remaining film production plant came together to form The Impossible Project. Their mission? Nothing less than to save, and in the process reinvent instant film for vintage Polaroid cameras.

Today, they announced no less than 6 brand new films, the first of which to hit the market this week!

The new film is a black and white integral film which comes in two flavors: PX 100 and PX 600. These are Impossible’s own brand of films, and 4 more are on the the way: Two color films and a set of type-600 b&w and color film. According to Impossible, the color films are planned for this summer. PX 100 and 600 will run for $22 and €18  for a pack of 8 exposures.

jesshibb

(Jessica Hibbard)

New film available for order on March 25, to begin shipping next month. #tippress

On 22-3-2010 16:24:37 from TweetChat

So, how does it look? Well, the image below speaks for  itself, but in my point of view, it looks absolutely timeless, gorgeous and as analogue as you get!

Image © Boris Zuliani / The Impossible Collection.

The official press release, along with other materials such as packaging designs and the Impossible Collection is available for download over at Impossible’s new site. Also, be sure to check out the video they currently have up on the front page!

I guess this means a certain someone has to step up the hunt for an original SX-70 camera. ;)

Today the Impossible became Im Possible.

Like many others I’ve been enjoying the beta version of Voddler lately. I’ve previously written a short blurb about Spotify, so It only seems natural to type a little something something up about this as well.

Voddler can pretty much be summed up as Spotify for movies, but to quote voddler themselves:

With Voddler you can watch movies and TV shows the way you want, anytime. Voddler is easy, legal and available around the clock – with great image and sound quality.

After using it for a little while Im not so sure about the quality bit, but it is legal, easy and available around the clock. Right now the selection of movies feels kind of small, but I would expect this to change when they move out of beta.

The very first thing which struck me when first booting up the application was  that it was kind of odd that you couldn’t use your mouse to navigate the GUI. But, when you read why Voddler decided to make it this way, it makes a little more sense. Voddler is designed not only to run on your regular computer, but also on your living room media center setup, provided that you have one… which I for one do not have.
So, apparently, the reason for rendering the mouse unusable was to enable the application to be navigated via a regular infrared remote, which I guess would correspond to the arrow keys on your keyboard.
Clever, but I still don’t get why we just couldn’t have our cake and eat it too, just this once.

And then there’s the issue with a constant flow of communication with Voddler’s servers, even when you’re not using the application. Always sitting there, eating bandwidth, unless you deactivate the voddler service of course. I suspect quite a few will find this to be a huge turnoff. Especially if you’re on a bandwidth quota or have one of those mobile broadband deals.

But it’s not all complaints! Let’s take a closer look at the user interface and features after the jump!

The very first thing you see when you first boot up the application is the option to make a new user. Voddler is thankfully keeping it simple here, and the process of setting up a user takes less than a minute, provided you have a keyboard, of course.

Following this, you’re greeted by a clean and minimalistic main menu which gives you three options; Settings, movies and quit.

The settings option takes you to a pretty easy to understand wizard which lets you adjust the image to fit your screen, and the positioning of the subtitles. Strangely enough there is no option to disable subtitles, so your best bet right now to get rid of them, is to position them somewhere off-screen.

The movies option takes you to the movie listing, obviously. This list comes in two flavors, (Wall and list-view) available to you from the “view” option at the far end of the list page’s main menu.

The list view is a little more packed with info without having to push any extra buttons, and brings up a small synopsis of the movie, in addition to some general info such as release year and runtime, both of which are available in wall view as well, however, note the user review feature. This is one of my favorite features when it comes to this application. After you’ve watched a movie, Voddler asks you to rate the movie, and these ratings are what is being shown in the screenshot above and below. These ratings also seem to be what’s controlling the “recommended” page you’re first greeted by when choosing the movies option from the main menu, so in a sense the very first thing you see is a community driven top-list, which is a really nice feature.

After you’ve chosen your movie, it’s time for some commercials. These sessions seems to vary in duration, but the averedge seems to be somewhere between 5 to 8 minutes. Not too bad, seeing as how you get to watch a free movie afterwards, however there doesn’t seem to be much variation in the commercials, so watching the same commercials and movie trailer for the 10th time is kind of a pain. (Yes, they make you watch some ads and a trailer-show)

And speaking of commercials, let me just take a brief moment to ask the Swedish people the following question regarding this particular Expert commercial:

What in god’s name is this thing!?

Anyway, back on topic. You might be wondering how movies look on a free video on demand service, and the answer is not as bad as I expected, but far from jaw dropping.
Here are two stills from the movie selected above, fade to black, from 2006:

Voddler certainly is a huge step in the right direction in terms of alternatives to piracy, there’s no doubt about that, and its definitively worth checking out if you don’t mind having the Voddler network manager running in the background.

However, I’m still abut torn between the negative and positive sides of the application. You get to watch free movies around the clock, which is great, however, you also get a 24/7 resource hog unless you disable it, and let me tell you right now, if you do disable it, expect a reboot of your computer to get it up and running again. (And what a resource hog it is! Last night I caught it using over 300 000 kB of memory, just idling!) It might be just me, but I have not a single time experienced Voddler working again after re-starting the Voddler network client. Hopefully this will change in the future.

So yes, I’m still not sure if I like Voddler yet. If you feel like making up your own mind, head over to voddler.com and sign up for a beta invitation. They seem to be giving them out quite frequently these days so now is as good of a time as any to sign up!

Like I mentioned in the beginning of this post, I’ve wanted to try this technique for a while now, and at first I was considering springing for a tilt-shift lens, however, said lenses are horribly expensive and therefore instantly out of my budget range, so the next best thing was to mimic the look of tilt-shift miniatyre faking during the post processing of the shots.

At first I was going to use a dedicated website for doing this, however, I was quickly disappointed by the low resolution images the site spat out, so I decided to come up with my own workflow for achieving the same effect, or as close as possible, in Photoshop.

I’m sure there already are quite a few tutorials out there on achieving this effect using different techniques, but I like experimenting so I set out to try and replicate the look without relying on any tutorials.

The workflow turned out to be quite straight forward, actually. The first thing I did was making a new layer, filling it with pure black, and create a series of white gradients on top of this layer, matching the elements of the scene, such as variations in the angle of the terrain and objects such as bushes.
I then merged all these elements together and moved this black and white layer into the alpha channel of the image.

Following this, I proceeded to give the image a pass through Photoshop’s lens blur filter, using the black and white mask I made earlier to control the focus of the filter.

The final step was to tweak the saturation and exposure to add a bit of punch to the image while heightening fake feel I were after.

These images turned out to be quite fun to make, so I bet this won’t be the last time I do this. I guess the biggest problem with these kind of images is to find a location to shoot from, as you need quite a bit of height in order to do this, regardless, you never know when you might find yourself in a position to get shots like these so who knows? There might be a followup on this later.

I’ve been playing around with the idea of starting a photoblog of my own for a while now, and I guess I finally gave in.
My current plan for this section of the website is to have a place to showcase some of the images I produce on a daily basis, be it snapshots or planned and carefully executed images. As you can probably tell from a quick glance at my blog, I’m not much of a rapid blogger, but then again, I guess it might be due to me being of the type who doesn’t open my mouth unless I got something to say, at least when it comes to online publication. Updating a site just for the sake of updating it, and in the process putting the content secondary just doesn’t sound right in my ears. Despite this, I’ll try to keep it as updated as I can.

Have a look over at the subdomain pblog.fleistad.com to check it out!

So I got myself a new toy a little while back, and have been having great fun using it. Actually, I’ve been having so much fun that I made the decision to mainly shoot analogue for the summer. Now why would anyone do such a thing, you might ask. Well, there are multiple reasons in my case.

Being 20 years old, I’m part of the generation that’s old enough to have used film in the past, but most likely never on an advanced level, and by advanced I mean cameras with 100% manual settings, like vintage SLR, TLR and Rangefinder cameras, and in my case, this is true; my analogue background consists entirely of cheap «point and shoots» and we all know those don’t have much to show for in the settings department.

Starting out as a digital shooter when I first started to get really into photography had its advantages and disadvantages.
The advantages being that it’s considerably cheaper than shooting analogue, with all the messing up one might expect when first starting out playing around with settings, and learning as one go along. It also opens for a lot of easy and convenient editing capabilities; it’s easy to fix mistakes and you get to see the results right away.
This however, is sort of a double edged sword. You see, over the years I’ve caught myself trusting the camera’s automatics more and more (Although I never use full automatic settings, I usually do however find myself shooting a lot in aperture priority) and getting more casual in regards to being in control of the exposures. It’s simply easier and less of a hassle to trust the camera.
I’ve also found myself within the routine of shooting a picture, checking the LCD, then checking the histograms and making adjustments to the settings if required, not really giving much thought to the actual settings being used at the time, and in my mind, this isn’t a good thing at all. Sure, I get a decent exposure and all, but do I really learn from it?

These are the main reasons I decided to go analogue for a little while. With analogue, there are no histograms, no screens, and no easy ways to correct exposures. If you want a spot on exposure, you got to work for it. And of course, one shouldn’t discard the fact that this was simply something I’ve wanted to do for a long time now.
Basically, I want to progress as a photographer, become more aware of my camera and subjects, and at the same time, gain some experience that I feel I’ve missed out on, starting out on the digital side of things.

So when the opportunity came up to get my hands on a Yashica Mat 124G TLR camera, I just simply couldn’t let it slip away.

At the moment I’m shooting with Kodak Portra 400 NC and Kodak T-MAX 100 film, and I do plan on experimenting with a variety of films during the summer. Fuji has some films that seem to be giving some interesting results, especially in an expired state, and I also want to eventually test out a few rolls of ILFORD SFX, a red sensitive black and white film, giving an IR-like look if coupled with a red filter. We’ll see…

One thing is for sure though; I’ll definitively be following up on this post with some scans from my first rolls of film as soon as I get them developed.

About 20 years ago something happened that would change the way the public viewed, shared and acquired information for ever.
A global network of servers and computers saw the light of day, and everyone with the necessary equipment, regardless or skin colour, religion, physical appearance or personal beliefs and opinions could connect, share and acquire information and knowledge alike.
This global network kept growing as more and more people joined in and made their content available to the rest of the world, and it continues to grow to this day, expanding by the second.

A huge contributor to this is because the internet has become a well integrated part of our lives.
Pretty much everyone has an email address, a profile on a social network to stay in touch with friends and family, and pretty much everyone uses the internet to catch up on the latest news around the globe or in their local area.
This is the truly beautiful thing about the internet. You as a user are free to roam wild in the vast information wilderness and use it for whatever you want.
Want to look at stocks? Sure, no problem! Feel like catching up on the news? Go ahead! Buy a new jacket? You got it!
It is this freedom which is the very fundament for the internet’s success and growth during all these years.

But what if someone wanted to mess with this foundation? What if this all of the sudden changed? How would this affect you? It’s a scary question isn’t it? However, the scariest part has yet to come.

This is in fact imminent to happening as we speak, unless we all do our part to prevent it.
Right now this is the case for the inhabitants of countries under the European Union.
As we speak, decisions are bring made in regards to what has become known as the European Telcoms Package.
Essentially this means that ISP’s are free to “chop up the internet” and offer it in packages, much like the way it is with cable television, where you pay for access to certain channels. The difference being that in this case we’re talking about individual websites.

I’m a website owner. I pay a monthly fee to keep my site online, not only for myself, but also as a generous gesture toward anyone who would be interested in visiting my website to look at my textures, photos or even read what I have to say. My site is free to visit, and I pay the bills so that others may have the opportunity to come here. This is pretty much the case for any website owner, be it a large website with a huge community built up around it, or a small personal website such as my own.

Take youtube for example. Millions of users use this website every day. It’s provided by its creators as a free service to its users. So what would happen if ISP’s start charging for access specifically to this website? You would be forced to subscribe to a package of websites to access it. Would you like this? I know I sure wouldn’t.
Who’s to say they own the right to charge people for accessing the information and content created by you anyway? The way I see it, when someone charges specifically for access to a website they didn’t create, it’s nothing more than a petty attempt to profit of someone else’s work.
Sure, you pay your monthly bill to get internet access, but it’s not the same though. The bill you currently pay is a subscription for access to the whole internet, and not individual pages. Isn’t that enough though? Why would you even need to subscribe to certain websites? What’s wrong with the way things currently are? At the end of the day, this suggestion isn’t beneficial to the consumers at all!
If anything this is a step backwards in the evolution of the internet. I could somewhat understand the reasoning behind this if it were presented back in the early 90′s when bandwidth was an issue, but then again, we paid per minute back then, so even then it would have been out of place.

If it isn’t broke, don’t fix it! And if you feel this way too, head over to telekompaketet.se or Blackout Europe to learn more about what’s going on, and what you can do to prevent it from happening, or if you prefer reading about it in Norwegian, both Dagbladet and VG have a couple of well informed articles covering the case.

Ever taken a photo which turned out to be out of focus? Maybe even had some motion blur and overexposure in there to add insult to injury? Of course you have, who hasn’t?

Usually the faith these pictures are either to be wiped of the warm comfort of the memory card, or left to rot in some deep and dark region of your hard drive. What if there was some way to put these less fortunate exposures to good use? Wouldn’t that be nice? It sure would, and guess what? There is!
Enter Poladroid; a completely free, easy to use and all in all neat application!

What Poladriod does, is to mimic the look of old Polaroid pictures, and it does this pretty damn well if you ask me!
Perhaps one of my favourite aspects of this application is that it seemingly adds its tweaks to your images at random, producing a fairly unique result.
It has a very limited amount of settings though, however it’s still under development so who knows what might be added. To be fair, do you really need all that many settings anyway?
Right now, you can adjust the level of vignetting you want, whether or not you want fingerprints and scratches, and where you want these, if added to the finished result.

As the title of this post hints to, I have found that this little application is a pretty nice way of salvaging pictures which otherwise would have been a lost cause. I mean, when it comes to Polaroids, they’re not exactly known for being perfect, so in my point of view, the mistakes made while shooting the picture in the first place, only adds to the look and feel of a Polaroid. The shot all of the sudden takes on a whole new look, and is instantly transformed into something new; a poladroid.
It may not be a masterpiece, and never will, but at least it’s something different than a useless picture now.

This is great for adding that long lost vintage feel of the “instant shame apparatus” most commonly referred to as a Polaroid camera to your snapshots and mistakes. What you decide to do with your poladroids is an entirely different issue though.

Grab it, and try it out for yourself over at poladroid.net and be sure to check out the Poladroid flickr pool, as it contains some really interesting and good examples of what can be achieved by using this little gem!

Quick info regarding the setup and equipment used during the shoot:

• Sony HVL-F42AM Flash, located off camera
• DIY grid spot
• Cable release
• Piano playing brother
• 2 tripods

The most crucial part of this tutorial is the shoot, obviously. Leave nothing to chance by using automatic settings, so be sure to set your camera, white balance and focus all to manual!

A cable release can also be a good idea, since any slight wobble or variation in position in the shots, can and will create a fringe.
If this happens however, it can in most cases be fixed by nudging the affected channel to the right direction to compensate for the variation in position. The best option is to be aware of these pitfalls while shooting the images though.

Today I received some very exiting news regarding my favourite band; Kaizers Orchestra.

It seems that The Jackal and his crew have been working on a new album! According to their website, Kaizers Orchestra have been hard at work in Yngve Sætre’s studio, laying down no less than 11 new and old tracks for their next release, which have been given the lovely name “Our Demons”
According to the bands website, some of the tracks on the upcoming album are close to a decade old, while others are leftovers from recent releases.
And that’s the word of the day; leftovers. Why? Well, if you’re to believe the band’s website, the whole album will consist strictly of leftovers from their 4 previous studio releases. Some of the tracks have lived their own life as live acts, while others never left the desk drawer.
So while some of the songs certainly aren’t new to the hard core fans, the studio versions are! So without further ado, here’s the track list:

• Medisin & Psykiatri
• Våre demoner
• Die Polizei
• Fanden hakk i hel
• Kavalér
• Gruvene på 16
• Den sjette sansen
• Señor Torpedo
• Du og meg Sonny
• Prosessen
• Stormfull vals

According to an interview in the Norwegian Newspaper VG, some of the tracks which appear on the new album were dropped as a clear career path choice:

«Våre demoner» contains the track «Prosessen» which in its time didn’t make it in on the band’s debut album «Ompa til du dør» because it was too commercial.

-If we had included it, it would have resulted in a whole different world afterwards. We did a clear path choice when we dropped it, says Geir Zahl

-«Prosessen» was a single, but we didn’t want that. We don’t do the whole pop-catchy thing. We are, and always will be an album-band! The funniest thing about this track from 2000 is that the lyrics are about how we were going to conquer the whole country. Something we did, says Janove Ottesen.

The album is due to be released on April 20th, a date I for one have clearly marked with a huge ring on my calendar!