Jan Erik Moström

Lately, I’ve been doing a lot of ”assignment photography”, i.e., not photographing for myself, and it has been a learning experience — as usual. This type of photography, except for portrait sessions, usually means that someone wants me to document something. It can be sports, a visit by someone, documentation of how people work, etc. In other words, a bit different from when I take photos for myself. But I find it inspiring, it forces me to think differently about the photos I take.

Parts of the assignments are pure documentation, i.e., show what happened and who attended the event, and this is a typically how one of my photos looks.

But it’s often implied that some photos will be used for ads or something similar, and then they often want to have a lot of negative space. So, I try to take those kinds of photos as well. The one below documents what happened, but I also tried to frame it, so there was a lot of negative space available. All while not showing any details about who is in the photo. I think it would be fairly simple to create an ad from this photo.

Here is another type of photo: illustrations. Here it was implied that they not only needed to document what happened at the event, they also needed photos for invitations, illustrations for newsletters/articles/etc. They, a local church, couldn’t really tell me what they wanted, so I made a few guesses and took these:

The most common request I get is to take portraits. This is fun since I get to play with different lighting setup and see what happens when I move the light around. The editing part is also fun, it’s amazing how much it’s possible to change a portrait with some editing. My biggest problem is that I’m really, really bad at directing those I photograph, and I need to become better at this. Another issue is that I don’t really take my time, I would say that I spend a maximum of two minutes per person, often less. I should definitely start taking my time and direct people more.

Another types of portraits I really love are those that are spontaneous, I’ve taken them while something else was happening. In my opinion, they are much better in showing the personality of the person compared to a formal portrait.

While I really, really like doing these kinds of assignments, I also would like to improve on ”my own assignments”: nature and landscape. I find that these types of photos are waaaay more difficult to take, and I really need more practice. Here are my two favorites from 2025, I think they came out OK, but I would really like to improve on my ”hit rate” for this kind of photography.

Doing different types of photography is a learning experience, I think that it makes me become a better photographer. And thinking about how the photos will be used, forces me to think about framing, negative space, etc. While my goal for nature and landscape photos is to make them as ”pretty” and ”interesting” as possible, this is not required for ”documentation photos”. For documentation, it’s enough if the photos are ”good enough”, no one will complain if the photos are ”great”, but it’s more important to have photos that capture what happened.

Time to stop writing and pick up the camera again.