Here are some photos from a recent trip just across the Russian border, to the town Nikel.

Nikel is a very fascinating place. It is an industrial town with about 16000 inhabitants, built to house workers in the nearby Nickel processing plant.

This plant is quite controversial in Norway and Finland, due to its enormous emissions of sulfur dioxide. According to Wikipedia, the emissions are around 150000 tonnes per year, which for comparison is roughly six times the total (!) emmisions from Norway.

The consequences of these emmisions are very clearly visible near the plant and the town. The life expectancy is very low — 54 years, according to local sources — and respiratory infections are common. However, at first glance, the effects on the surrounding nature are even more obvious. In a relatively large area around the plant, there is aboslutely no vegetation whatsoever, just an eerie black desert that looks a bit like what I’d expect the world to look like after a nuclear war.

I found this area very interesting, and I’d really like to get back there and photograph it, and the people in it, more thoroughly later. As if the town and the plant weren’t interesting enough, there is also a strange installating nearby where the world’s deepest hole was drilled, presumably for research purposes, at some point in history. Rumour also has it that there’s a potentially interesting abandoned military helicopter base in the area. I’m currently in the process of finding out exactly who to contact to make the necessary arrangements (which are quite a few, the Russian beurocracy is a complicated thing). I’ll get back to this later (to beg for funding), but enough blabber for now. Hit the jump & see the shots.
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I recently was at the Working Class Festival in Drammen to shoot some concerts, and in the process I managed to sneak in to the backstage areas, intending to find some of the musicians to shoot them when they’re not on stage, to get some variation (pictures of bands performing can be a bit boring when there’s thousands of them and nothing else whatsoever). I was lucky enough to find the spectacular Ledfoot, a blues singer and guitarist. I stuck around and shot him backstage before and after the concert, as well as during the performance, and ended up with the following reportage.
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And now, time for some pictures from the Draugen oil rig and Ormen Lange onshore gas proessing facility! A few of them are in this post. A more careful selection will follow, but I’m way too busy to edit and publish that now. You can find some more of these at my flickr – or to be more precise, here, here and here. But some of the pictures here are exclusive, not posted at any of my other sites all over the web. Hit the jump to have a look, and read some probably not very interesting words about the workshop!
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Alright, very short update coming up. It’s been very quiet here at the blog for a while now, due the fact that I’ve been a combination of busy and lazy. I’m just popping in now to announce the fact that I’m heading out tomorrow to shoot at an oil rig with Magnum photog Stuart Franklin.

This is due to the fact that I was lucky enough to get to join a workshop arranged by Nordic Light and Shell, where the participants (a total of 10, to be precise) will be shooting at the Draugen oil rig and an onshore processing facility for gas from the Ormen Lange field. The leader of the whole show is Stuart Franklin of Magnum Photos.

That’s all for now, (I don’t have time to write more right now) but I’ll be posting updates from the workshop as continuously as possible. If nothing else, I’ll put some pictures up by the start of next week.

One last thing though — the last couple of weeks, I have read news stories about the following:

• Two separate incidents on the Draugen rig within one week; a gas leak and a don’t-know-what-it-was that made one heck of a fuzz
• A case of poisonous gas leaking into the cockpit and cabin of a Sikorsky S-92 identical to the one I’ll ble flying with out to the rig
• A case of roofs getting ripped off airliners identical to those I’ll be flying from Oslo to Molde and from Kristiansund back to Oslo

This stuff sounds risky to me. But anyways, if I survive, I’ll be posting some shots and more detailed info here ASAP!

-G

Even in the digital age, good old-fashioned film photography certainly has its place. Sure, digital is quick and practical, but let’s not underestimate the old manual SLRs we all have stuffed away in closets and forgotten about long ago; they have some unique qualities, and for some uses they might be superior to even the umpteen-thousand-dollar dits, despite being slower, more cumbersome and less fancy. Hit the jump for some ramblings about the advantages of film-based shooting.
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There are many strange techniques photographers apply to achieve a special look on their images; some of these methods have gained hordes of followers, like for example the use of toy cameras with plastic lenses, like the Holga, or doing specific things to their pictures in post-processing, like the infamous “Dave Hill technique” – these methods are popular, and used ad nauseam by many people.

There are, of course, also more obscure techniques, one of which is called freelensing. It involves shooting with the lens detached from the camera body, focusing by moving it back and forth. It also allows for tilt and shift, in a slightly more improvised fashion than with lenses made for that purpose. Hit the jump for more tips on how to do this, and some examples of results that can be achieved this way.
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I’ve made some changes to the site behind the scenes again; the result is that the URLs are now “clean”, using fake directories rather than the messy variables and codes that was temporarily in use for a while here.

I tend to miss a few details when doing stuff like this, so there might be a few dead links around. If something fails to load, please let me know so I can fix it up.

Links using the old system will still work, in case somebody for some reason should happen to ave linked to anything here.

One of the most exciting aspects of photojournalism is seeking out the deadliest accidents, most destructive fires, most spectacular mishaps and generally the worst tragedies within reach, then photographing them to earn money from other people’s misfortune. It brings some unique photographic challenges, and is often outright fun. However, the news industry is a tough nut to crack, so if you want to make some money doing it, you’ll have to either be incredibly lucky and be the first to photograph a gigantic distaster, or alternatively deliver consistently good results from the day-to-day accidents. A few things I’ve learned the hard way about how to do the latter, after the jump.
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After an excessive amount of fiddling with databases, file directories and permissions, template tweaking and php fixing, I have finally managed to get this blog back up in working order.

There wasn’t really much in the old blog, just a couple of posts with any meaningful content, which will be reposted at some point in the future, in case I should run out of new things to say. That’s not rare for me when it comes to blogs, they all (and that’s not few!) tend to die after a few posts.

I’ll be back with some new shots and info about them soon, but for now I’ll have to take a break from all this blog stuff; just getting this thing into working condition has been more than enough work

-G