If you are in Stockholm this weekend, the St Patricks Day Festival is on in Kungsträdgården. It is always a great day out and hopefully the weather will smile on us. A parade, great music and dance on the big stage, food, drink and craic.
I will have a little stall there and will have a small selection of prints and cards on display and for sale. Pop by if you are in the vicinity!
I AM EXHIBITING AT PLANKET 2024
I will be attending and exhibiting again at Planket (https://planketsthlm.se/) in Stockholm on Saturday 17th August from 12:00 to 17:00. Planket is an outdoor photography exhibition on the red wood plank walls at the south western side of Sofia Kyrkan (Church) on Söder. I had a great time last year, I met so many lovely people and had some interesting discussion about photography and art in general as well as conversations on my images. And I am very grateful for those who chose to purchase some of my photographs. Thank you again.
This year I will be showcasing my Murmurations photographs as well as new work on traditional Irish Sean Nós dancing some of which have been featuring on my Instagram account. Like everyone, I will have a space of about 1 metre wide, and 1.6 metres height. So I won’t be able to display everything on the wall, instead I will have a folder of other photographs that you can peruse through.
Like last year the photographs are available for purchase.
If you have the chance, do visit the show; there will be many many good and great photographers exhibiting either on Saturday and Sunday. In my case, I will be exhibiting on Saturday, but I will be around on Sunday to have a good look around, and if you catch me I would be delighted to chat.
Murmuration photographs
It has been a hard winter. As the light disappears, small and large flocks arrive, starlings streaming over the shadowy hedges and join hesitatingly into larger and larger groups. Soon I can’t make out any individual birds. It is a single lithe being - swooping, sweeping, twisting, turning, separating then coalescing back into a dense mass.
"Each starling keeps an eye on seven others to stay in its position." A. says to me. An algorithm to live by.
In the cold there is the whispering, murmuring and swishing of thousands and thousands of wings. This sinuous creature continues to circle, dance and weave high and low over and around the forest then, just as the light disappears, it melts into the darkness of the trees.
February 2024, Co Kilkenny, Ireland
I will very shortly be offering each of the murmuration photographs for purchase. The images can all be seen in the MURMURATIONS gallery of the website. A few of the images will be offered as limited editions and the majority will be offered as open editions. Details will follow shortly.
Absences and Departures
I have been away for a while now, nearly a year.
It has been a difficult time, caring for my elderly mother took time and mind space. A wonderful woman who lived a rich and varied life, leaving Japan to live in Ireland in the early 1960s. I am very lucky to have received so much from her. She passed away earlier this year and it has taken a while for me to come to terms with her departure, celebrate the richness of what she left behind and come back to my photography.
In that time one of the most memorable experiences that I had was the chance to see and photograph the murmuration of starlings in County Kilkenny in Ireland. It was a break and yet it felt like a fortuitous counterpoint to all I was feeling and quite spiritual. I will write more about these images in a subsequent post.
Remembering Dreams
First I would like thank all the wonderful people who called in to me during Planket a little over a week ago. It was so encouraging to talk to everyone and to listen to great feedback. And also a huge thank you to a number who purchased images. I am so blessed.
In the course of talking to some of you, there was a bit of discussion around the images I call the "Dreams" series. I think of them as triggers for memories of dreams, or half remembered thoughts or feelings. I deliberately don't put any description around them, I don't want to impose my thoughts on any feelings you might have about an image. We all have our own experiences, memories, thoughts and ideas. So what I think about an image will be different to what you might, if you indeed you have any feelings for it at all!
I deliberately print these small, A5 size, and am toying with the idea of printing even smaller. I think this fits in with the idea that these have a personal, perhaps intimate, value. I had one of these printed mounted in an oversize frame, to allow the viewer to sink into the image close up. One or two commented favourably on this.
Thank you.
I am exhibiting at Planket
I will be exhibiting a few of my photographs as part of Planket (https://planketsthlm.se/) in Stockholm on Saturday 19th August from 12:00 to 17:00. Planket is an outdoor photography exhibition on the wooden plank walls at the south western side of Sofia Kyrkan (Church) on Södermalm. I will be one of 150 odd photographers on Saturday, with another 150 on Sunday. Like everyone, I will have a space of about 1 metre width, and 1.6 metres height. If you have the chance, do visit the show, there will be a number of well known and a host of other photographers exhibiting on the day with amazing images guaranteed.
And I would love to have the opportunity to meet you and to talk photographs in general. And I can tell you a little about my photographs if that is of interest for you. And for the first time I will be offering my photographs for sale.
I am planning to show a small selection of dance photographs as well as some of the "dreams" images that you can see elsewhere on this website. I will write a bit more about the dreams images in the next post, as they are very special for me. The dance photographs are, of course, special as well, and I will be displaying them as relatively large A3+ size images.
Given space constraints, I will only be able to display a small number of photographs, but I will have some additional photographs separately in boxes for you to have a look at.
Planket will continue on Sunday, I will not be exhibiting, but I will be walking around enjoying the work of all the photographers exhibiting on the day. Do stop me if you want to chat.
I would be delighted to see you there if you get the chance to attend.
In a different light
Back in February, when snow still blanketed Sweden, I took part in a Fine Art Portraiture taster workshop run by award winning photographer Therese Asplund at her studios in Avesta. A very long busy day squeezing in 4 different shoot stations, each with a different model, dress and lighting setup. We photographers were divided into four groups of about six each, and we rotated every hour through each station.
You really only have about 10 minutes of shoot time at each station with little chance of altering the lighting setup. The main effort and difference is in directing the model and perhaps choosing a different prop. I got pretty much what every other photographer had got for my first three stations. There really is no other way to do it, and it is still a very enjoyable and challenging experience.
For my fourth and final station I asked to go last within the group. When it was my turn I set my camera on a tripod to shoot long exposures and switched off all the flash units. I used a torch I had brought to paint light based on a technique that Paolo Roversi, a well known fashion photographer, uses. As it was nearing the end of the day, I managed to squeeze a few extra minutes. I got two portraits that, given it was a new technique to me, I was very pleased with.
I had no time to develop any real rapport with the young model, Vilda Wall, so it is a credit to her that there is a little intensity of presence in these images. Perhaps having to hold the pose for a number of seconds helped to develop that. In any case something to explore further.
A second portrait of Vilda is in the Portraits section of this website.
I would like to write again soon about portraiture as it can be a fascinating, difficult and rewarding genre of photography.
Original images by Kazi Ushioda, Collages by Nima Krudtaa
A start in dance photography
Sometimes the universe just smiles at you.
A few years ago I was in Kungsträdgården with a camera trying to do something with the cherry blossoms. There were so many of us with smartphones and cameras all shooting the same shots. Late in the day a colourful group of dancers made their way onto one of the blossom lined avenues and set up to shoot some promotional dance photographs. All the bystanders, me included, got ready to take bystander shots. The photographer of the dance group was also trying to set up a Behind The Scenes video camera, but was not able to find a good setup. I offered my tripod but she smiled, just handed me the camera and asked me to shoot video. After I handed the camera back to Nima we had a nice little chat and she said it might be possible for me to do some documentary work with them at some stage.
One of the more difficult things for a photographer is getting access to interesting or unusual subjects. It is why you see a lot of landscape, nature and street photography. Though not a specialist dance photographer I was generally proficient. Here was fortune offering me an amazing opportunity to shoot something exciting and different.
So eventually I asked if we might do a creative dance photoshoot at some stage. Nima is a very good dancer and along with her friend Raydel we planned and did a ballet shoot in Stockholm City Hall at the end of summer. That worked out wonderfully - I have a photograph from then elsewhere on these pages - and that led to other shoots. As Nima runs a film production and talent agency, she was able to provide some amazing artists for several shoots we have done since. I continue to collaborate, non exclusively, with Success Management on ideas for shoots and we plan to bring you more beautiful dance related images. In particular, I am intrigued to explore how to portray the movement and emotion of dance.
Nima's company www.suxessmgmt.com and on instagram
If you want to message or comment please go to the related Instagram Post or Facebook Post
Välkommen, Welcome, Fáilte, いらっしゃいませ
Céad míle fáilte! A hundred thousand welcomes!
This is a new website to showcase my art photography work. In addition I will keep you updated with my plans and from time to time put down some musings and thoughts. In due course I will be offering some prints for sale, if you are interested.
I have been photographing on and off since I was in my early teens, I still remember the slightly pungent smell of fixer in the dark room and the magic of seeing the first faint image on a print appearing in the developer bath. Magic. I was hooked. After college, family and life considerations meant that I remained an only occasional snap-shooter until well into the current millennium. Digital photography was the catalyst for me to take up photography again as a serious hobby. Of course there was a steep learning curve to master the tools and techniques to be able to craft the image in such a way that satisfied me.
And over the years I have loved looking at the work of the good and great photographers, and I think that fine tuned my tastes, adding perhaps to some Japanese aesthetic sensibilities.
So now I am holding my breath and making the leap to the next stage of this journey, where I will be trying to understand if what I do is anything of value to anyone else.
If you want to comment or message me, you can do so on my related Instagram Post or Facebook Post
Stockholm, July 2023