Jan Erik Moström

Photos were taken this week, but they were mostly for others. Our department had its graduation ceremony and I was asked to take a few photos for posting to LinkedIn etc. My instructions were to make it hard to identify individuals but show the ceremony. The room where the ceremony takes place isn’t the best for photography, so my choices were limited.

I was also went my martial arts club and took a few photos at the graduation tests there. At least some people were happy.

My problem with this location is the color cast, the lighting used to be three different color temperatures but now it’s only two. But another problem is the color reflected from the walls and the floor (red, black and green). As you can see, there is red tone in the photo above … but I was too lazy to fix it.

While I’ve been walking around trying to find something interesting the number of decent photographs is very low, one to be more precise. I’m hoping for better results next week.

I was definitely in a B&W mood last week. I mainly walked around without a plan, snapping photos of anything in sight. The vast majority was deleted at once.

As you can see I used a ”hard B&W” look, I do like when black is actually black, it also works well in the middle of the day. Later in the week I had to go to Lycksele, and I of course brought a camera with me. When I was done with the things I was supposed to do, it took 5 minutes, I walked to ”Gammplatsen” and took a few photos. And then back home again.

The week started with a portrait session. There were 10–15 people who needed headshots of themselves. One that came out really well, is of a young boy. He got really surprised when the flash went off, and I managed to catch him with his eyes wide open and a very surprised expression. I made a print and gave it to him and his mother a couple of days later, and both had a good laugh when they saw it.

I’ve taken less photos this week than last week, but I’m still trying to push my edits. Some of the photos below are definitely overdone, but I find it useful to do these experiments.

I’m trying to figure out what kind of edits that give me results I like. Most of my photos this week were taken using my phone, I also attempted to edit in some apps that I don’t usually use: Photometer, Pixelmator Pro, and Darkroom.

During the I walked around a bit, both lunch walks in town and in the village.

This photo isn’t that interesting in itself, but I’ve never used B&W before and that it looks better than in color came as a surprise. I have to remember that.

I liked the texture, but I would like to push my edits even further so that the texture becomes even more apparent.

I just thought this bench looked nice

I’ve always found old abandoned buildings/things fascinating. It’s both fascinating to think about how things were used, but also how they were made. Visually, I like the different patterns and textures that you can see, it’s beautiful.

As you see, I tended to go for B&W for most of the photos. Currently, I’m trying to train myself to see things, and then try to capture of photo of it, and using B&W makes this easier in my opinion. And yes, I’m attempting to find ordinary things to see if I can make them interesting.

This is a photo that frustrates me, I found the light and the contrast fascinating, but unfortunately, I wasn’t able to catch this in a photo. I can’t really figure out what didn’t work … but this means that I have something to think about 😁

I’m happy to say that I’ve been out with a camera several times this week, and as usual it has been a mixture of different kinds of photos.
The first photo is from work, my task here was to capture some photos from a small event involving mainly Ph.D. students. The events are usually quite boring (from a photography perspective) so I tried to capture some events not directly related to the presentations

I also took a few lunch walks trying to find something interesting.

And at home

The common theme for these photos is that I’ve been trying to push my edits. I’m not especially good at editing, but I want to become better. For these photos I’ve tried to go further in my edits than I usually do, and it looks like I like darker, saturated edits.

I also went out into the forest to see if I could find something ”mundane”. I first tried some stronger edits

I hope you see the horse I found!! I then dialed back on the editing and made some more ”normal” edits.

So a mix of photos and editing styles. I’ve learned a few things, found a few places to return to, and most interesting is that I went back to a place I’ve photographed several times before without any decent results. This time was different, in editing I converted the photo to black & white, and this could work. But I need a more interesting sky.

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.