iStockphoto

For the past 15 years, I have been working very hard on improving my photography skills. The result of my efforts for the past couple of years can be seen on my flickr account. I found the basic technical side of photography quite easy. Aperture, shutter speed, iso, focal length and white balance. It's really not that hard to learn. The hard part has been getting my mind into a state where I actively think about these things every time I press the shutter.

After getting confident with the technical aspects of photography, I reached my next level when I bough a Konica Hexar Rangefinder. When you look through the viewfinder of an SLR camera, everything you see will be part of the final image. Working with this kind of camera got me into a habit of more or less just making sure that my main motive was part of this image. When you look through the viewfinder of a rangerfinder you see a set of guidelines which shows you a subpart of the viewfinder that will become the final image. For me that meant that I had to actively think about exactly what I put in the image, but more importantly, what I left out. Once I realized this, I decided to go one step further and stop cropping my images. Forcing myself to think my composition through before I press the shutter.

The step I'm at now, involves integrating with the way I work on my art with the way I take pictures. Part of that is technical aspects such as composition and color theory, but an even bigger part of it is the way I use my art to express feelings, but as I said.... this is something I'm still working actively on :-)

Working on photography for all of these has accumulated a massive archive of images. Most of them pretty shitty, but some of them not that bad - especially from the last couple of years.

After thinking about it for a while, I decided to start trying to sell some of my images as stock photography. There are many different places to do this, but I decided that iStockphoto sounded like the site most suitable for my work and the amount of time I have available to work on it. If you have not yet had a look at iStockphoto, I would definitely encourage you to do so. The photos are royalty free and the prices are low enough that you can buy the images you need without budget changes. If you use the following little button, I might even get a referral fee if you ever end up buying anything through it.

So how is the world of stock photography going for me? Well, not too bad. I have only been submitting pictures for a few months now and I'm slowly seeing a month by month rise in the number of sales. Not huge amounts of sales, 9 so far this month, but it's great to see it increase with the size of my portfolio. Check back a year from now and I will write a follow up post :-)

Floating Ink

I'm currently staying at a Marriott hotel a bit outside of Chicago. I was hoping to get a bit of sightseeing done, but its extremely cold outside and I have been stuck in bed with a high fever for most of the week. However, I did spend some time playing around with some colored inks in the bathroom sink.

There is nothing new about taking pictures of ink in water, but I was quite surprised at the results I was able to achieve under bad lighting in the bathroom with one hand holding the camera and the other the ink.

Ink floating in water

Later I fetched a couple of buckets of ice to try taking some pictures of ice with ink dripped on it. I was hoping the ink would flow smoothly around the ice, creating a stunning visual of colors being reflected and refracted in the ice. Instead, the porous surface of the ice from the machine here at the hotel, made the ink collect itself in little lumps giving it an almost dirty look.

Ink dripped on ice

The inks I used for these experiments are from Sennelier. I suspect you could get similar result with just about any kind of inks, however the higher the viscosity of the ink, the more easier it will probably be to get good pictures of it before it completely blends with the water. You might also successfully be able to add some thickening agent to the water before adding the ink :-)

The Big Sellout!

I have never been unwilling to sell my art, but I haven't exactly tried to sell it either. Somehow, it has always felt like it wasn't quite ready. Lately however, I have been focusing very hard on a single style based on ink and watercolors. I have become so happy with the results that I have decided to start actively selling them.

There are many places on the web that will allow you to sell your art in an easy way. I ended up choosing etsy.com which is a super easy to use system for setting up your own store to sell handmade products. You can find my store at pamandkasper.etsy.com. Currently the store features a little selection of my paintings along with some cheaper aceo cards and a variety of handmade products by my wife. If there is any thing specific you would be interested in seing in the store, drop me an email at kapper@narcissisme.dk.

Ink and watercolor pastels

I have been playing around with a combination of dip pen ink and water soluble pastels for the past couple of months. It's very close to the process I used for plain ink and watercolor, but I have really come to like the more dirty colors I can achieve with the pastels. I will be writing more about the process in the future, but for now I have uploaded a small video of me painting a picture using this technique.... enjoy :-)