Happy Holidays

Now that we are getting very close to the end of 2023, how has the year been for you? Have you developed yourself creatively? Have you been able to keep yourself afloat in the economic downturn we have been through? How do you see the new year coming up?

I think most of us would agree that 2023 has been an interesting year, to say the least. It’s the first full year without a pandemic suffocating the whole world, if the aftermath is still noticeable. Unfortunately, we have seen an increase of war and violence this year. And unrest in many places in the world. But there has also been many, albeit smaller, highlights throughout the year.

For me 2023 has had its ups and downs. My photography business has been hard hit by the economic crisis. I have had to fight for every assignment. In hindsight, now that we are getting towards the end of the year, I can notice that in the end I was able to keep my business at the same level as last year. But, as I said, it’s been a struggle all the way up until now. In fact I made 30 percent of my business income the last two months. One part of the business that has been particularly challenging is the workshops and teaching. In times when the economy is tight, we all must make priorities, and whatever can be considered luxury will be the first to be discarded. Although I have had to cancel a few workshops this year, another year provides new opportunities and I remain optimistic.

Photographically, 2023 has been a good year for me. I feel I have been able to develop myself as a photographer. Throughout the year, I have completed some really good photo projects. One project was street portraits in Naples, a project I worked together with two other photographers, all from different countries. I also went to Bucharest for the first time and did a photo project there, with the whole intention of challenging myself and trying out new ways of photographing.

How has 2023 been for you? And how do you anticipate 2024 to be?

However you face the new year, I hope you will continue to move forward. I wish you all the best. A Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. And may peace prevail.

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Photo Workshops and Tours Spring 2024
These are the photo workshops I and Blue Hour Photo Workshops plan for the coming spring.

“The Personal Expression”—a weekend in Bergen, Norway with focus on how to develop your personal, photographic expression. May 3rd to 5th 2024.

“On the Path of Cold War Memories”—a very special workshop exploring Berlin in a historic light. Go back in time to when there were two Germanies and two Berlins. May 12th to 17th 2024.

New Year New Possibilities

We have turned a page. A new and fresh year has been born. And with that change follows hope and new energy. The year we have left behind, will be one to forget in silence, one with too many disappointments and setbacks, a year that knocked the world over and brought it to a standstill—at best. For many people it turned out to be a disastrous year.

We are still not in safe heaven, far from. The virus that came upon us last year, is still making havoc, in fact in many countries, is creating more mayhem than it has so far. Nevertheless, we are facing the prospect of better times again. Hope is back. As new vaccines are put in production and more people are being vaccinated, although it will take time, we are on the track to some normalcy again. Slowly by slowly we will get there.

Personally, I am going to embrace the new year with aspiration and anticipation, both creatively and socially. I believe in changes and that any demise, even a worldwide pandemic, can be used for positive changes. As the saying goes, what doesn’t break you makes you stronger. New possibilities will arise in 2021. I will be ready to grab them, and even instigate new opportunities as much as I can. The waiting is over.

I hope you reader is ready, too. To get going again, if only slowly, as the world gets back on its feet. One thing I hope to accomplish is to be of some sort of creative inspiration with this blog. The blog has always been about creativity, but this year I want to focus even more on the creative part of photography—after all my own craft.

As some of you have noticed, I slipped away from the blog sphere part of last autumn. I needed a break and also to find a new direction. Towards the end of the year, I was slowly getting back in to blogging again. However, I admit I didn’t reciprocate your visits. That is one of my goals for the new year, to visit your blogs again. It does take a lot of time to comment on other blogs, so I need to restrain myself a little, but I want to be more active again.

I wish you all the best for 2021. What plans do you have for the new year?

Happy Holidays

In my part of the world and in my culture we are about to enter the celebration of Christmas, as many others around the world are about to do. It’s a time of the year when we often try to summarize how the year has been. And usually look forward to a week of holidays together with family and friends.

This year has been rather special and will be during the Christmas holidays, too. The reason we all know too well: corona or covid-19. The pandemic has set restrictions for how we can live and act, and will do so these last days of the year as well.

The consequences have come in many forms and shapes. Photographically, for instance, this year I have captured about 58 percent of the amount of photos I would do in a normal year. Not that quantity in itself is important, but the number still indicates something about the limitations.

I have hardly travelled this year. Which is also rather unusual. Normally I would have something like close to 200 travel days during a year. This year, I was only away in January and in the beginning of February. A fate many have shared. If nothing else, the environment and the climate have benefitted from less travelling.

As we move towards the end of the year, things slowly start to look brighter, even when numbers of infected increase many places in the world. The quick developing of a vaccine, or actually a handful of vaccines, brings hope for next year.

This will be my last post of the year. I wish you all a pleasant and safe couple of days, whether you celebrate Christmas or not. May you all enter the new year with hope and may it be the turnaround point we all desire. Thank you for having followed my blog. It’s been encouraging, not the least during the period not long ago when I lost the energy for blogging. I very much appreciate all the support and wonderful feedback.

See you all in 2021. Stay safe. Be Happy. Spend time with those you care for. Photograph a lot. Wish you all the best.

Into the New

We are about a week into a new year—well, that is for those of us who live by the Gregorian calendar at least. Usually entering into a new year is a time when a lot of us make up status for ourselves and formulate new goals for the year to come. However, New Year’s resolutions are easy to put down on paper, but much harder to follow up and actually put into life. As such, every new year is but a trail of broken resolutions left behind.

Nevertheless, personally I think it’s important to make up status for ourselves and make some goals for what we want to achieve over the next year. Having learned by repeated experiences how hard it can be to follow various New Year’s resolutions, I believe in positive goals.

Making yourself exercise more when you hate to exercise or eat healthier when you would rather not have salads at all or don’t want to abandon sugar, is going to be hard to follow up. In order to make it happen it’s important to find ways around the goals so that they come out as something positive, as something you would actually love to do, rather than forcing yourself through a regime you only hate, anyway. The latter approach will only last so long before you abandon it.

As for myself, I exercise quite a bit and eat quite healthy so that’s not a problem for me. Luckily, I could add. One of the problems I am facing—as I wrote about in a post last year—is a media business, which has faced and is still facing big structural challenges. As a photographer working for various magazines and publications, I feel this very much, with fewer assignments and less work. This disruption—as economists talk about—is by far new, but really hit me for the first time at the end of last year.

My usual solution would be to work harder, put more energy into fighting the tides, because I am sure this is only tide, too, albeit a whopping one. However, this year I have decided to go down a different path. Instead of fighting against the tide, I will rather let go of the reins. I am going to do things I want to do rather than things I think I need to do to keep my business running. I want to explore various creative paths, let myself have fun and find ways to my most creative self. Maybe in the end it will also result in a more stable business for me, but, of course, it’s not given. However, I don’t want to waste my life—or at least this year—doing tasks that I feel is not worth spending time on. At the same time, I see that I am fortunate in that I have sufficient funds and savings to be able not to worry about a loss of income, for a period at least.

One of the goals for this year is putting more effort into writing books about creativity and photography. This is not a new thought, but after the encouragement a lot of you, my readers, gave me last year, I have decided it’s really time to do more than think about it. Thus, I want to thank you for pushing me in this direction.

Talking about the blog, over the next couple of months I will restructure this blog, and launch new ideas and thoughts for it, which I hope will make it more interesting to read and enjoy. Over the holidays, I have had a couple of weeks off from blogging and it’s been good. There is always some pressure in keeping a blog alive, and taking time off, have brought back the inspiration and lust to develop it in new directions and adding new substance to it. I hope it’s going to reflect my new approach to let myself be more creative.

As an extension of what I write here, I want to thank you all for the patience during the time I have been away from cyber space. It’s time to get going again, and I hope we can have a fun year together exchanging thoughts and ideas. I wish you all the best for the new year.

Facts about the photo: The photo was taken with a Panasonic Lumix LX-100, the lens set at 10.9 mm which is the equivalent of a full frame 24 mm. Shutter speed: 1/250 of a second. Aperture: f/13. The photo was processed in Lightroom and Photoshop.