Previous years, the package contained one psd-file for each month, each with different layer groups containing the specific texts for each language. This was rather cumbersome to maintain and modify. If you wanted to change the font for a text, this had to be done in each file, i.e. 12 times. So more advanced changes in the templates could give you much repetitive work. Not to mention the work needed to be done by me to create new templates for each new year…

Enter Photoshop variables and data sets

This years version (2013) uses Photoshop variables and different variable sets. In short, each text layer is defined with a variable and by using different data sets it is possible to change the text content for each text layer dynamically. The data sets can also control if different layers should be visible or not. So for each month, in each language, there is a different data set defined, setting the month text, all the days names, each individual date, the week numbers, etc and also showing the correct background area to match and gray out the previous and following months.

By using variables and data sets you can use the same basic master file (2013 Lightroom calendar preset), and create different output files for each language and each month by applying different data sets. To modify the look of the template, the modification only needs to be done once in the master file. After that the new templates can be “generated” using the data sets. More on that a little later.

I’ve linked to some basic information/tutorials on Photoshop variables and data sets further down for reference.

Template file layers

But first, let us look into the different layers in the fully layered template file.

Starting from the top:

• Set – This is a hidden layer holding the data set name. It should always be hidden, so no modification of this is ever needed. It is needed as a placeholder when loading data sets from a file.
• Year – Holds the year text (’2013′)
• Month – Holds the main month text (‘January’, ‘February’, etc depending on language)
• Weekdays – A layer group that holds the individual layers in the top row holding the weekday texts (Monday, Tuesday, etc)
• Hide last row – Most months only contain dates during five consecutive weeks, but some have dates during six weeks. This layer holds a vector mask that hides the bottom rows information (week number, dates, grid, etc). So for most weeks this layer is visible, but for months with six weeks, it is hidden. This layer is displayed and hidden using variables and information in the data sets.
• Weeks – A layer group holding the week number texts on the left. If you do not wish to show these, just hide this group in your master file.
• Main grid – Holds a number of vector mask layers (with a 2 px stroke in it’s layer style) that makes up the main grid in the calendar. Not very pretty, but it gets the end result done.
• Start-End Grid – A layer group that holds vector mask layers that gives the background colors for the weekends as well as the background color for dates in the preceding and following months. These areas will shift depending on the number of days in the month and when the month starts. There are different layer groups defined for all needed combinations; 28 day month starting on a Friday (Fri-28), 30 day month starting on a Saturday (Sat-30), etc. These are displayed and hidden using variables and information in the data sets.
• Dates – A layer group containing one text layer for each date in the calendar grid. The actual text in each layer is controlled by the data sets.
• Background – Sets the main background color and contains additional vector masks to control the area and background color for the shadings behind the week numbers, week days and the top month text areas.

General update process

The main idea is that you should not need to change/update the actual texts in the template. See these as placeholders for the text with an example month to start out with. Do any layout changes (change fonts, move the texts, change colors, change text size, add your own logo layer, etc) with the example month as reference. You will then generate all the twelve templates files (one for each month) using the data sets that is included in the template file. When doing this, Photoshop will replace the example texts so that the correct dates, month text, etc are displayed.

Making adjustments

You can make just about any modification to the calendar template file, as long as you

• keep all the text layers
• keep all the layers in the “Start-End Grid” group
• keep the “Hide last row” layer
• Don’t rename any of the above layers

Apart from that you can change fonts, texts sizes, move around the texts, change colours, add new layers (not using the same layer name as the above mentioned layers), add layer styles, etc.

If you change the date and/or week number texts (font, size, colour, etc), don’t forget the sixth week! A good idea is to hide the “Hide last row” layer when modifying the master file to display these when working. You do not need to worry about the actual texts (month, weekdays, dates, etc). These will be changed when we apply the data sets.

I would recommend that you create a copy of the master file before starting with the modifications.

Applying the data sets

For the included languages, the calendar template already contains all the data sets needed for 2013. So there is no need to define any variables or data sets , that has already been done.

To try out your modified template, select Image -> Apply Data Set…

• Select the data set you would like to apply. They are clearly labeled with the language ISO code, year, and month. Either select “Preview” (to keep the “Apply Data Set” window open) or “Apply”. Warning: Photoshop will go through some mayor spasms for 20-30 sec while applying the data set. Don’t worry. It’s suppose to do this, it will pass…

When Photoshop settles, the week days and month should be set according to the selected language and all dates and background colors should be set according to the month.

Saving new template files

When you are content with your modifications and have applied the first data set (January for a specific language presumably) it is time to save your template for that month.

• First save your new modified master file, for example to “My 2013 calendar layout master.psd”. You can create as many different layout masters as you wish.
• Go through and apply the data sets for each month in your preferred language and save (“Save as”) a template file for each month. This can be as a jpg-file or a psd-file, both will work in Lightroom.

Exporting data sets

An alternative to manually apply and save each data sets you can use the “Export” function. Select File -> Export -> Data Sets as Files…

This will give you the option to export a single Data set (select in the drop down list) or all existing data sets in the master file (the main master file contains 11 languages with 12 months each which will result in 136 different template files).

Select a destination folder, set a naming schema (using the data set name is a good start) and hit ok.
I have noticed that exporting to psd files results in files that can’t be read by Lightroom directly. You will need to reopen and resave them in Photoshop before importing them into Lightroom. This has to do with the compatibility mode used in the Photoshops export function.

Removing data sets to simplify export

You are probably not interested in all the languages that have been defined in the original master file’s data sets. If you want to use the “All Data Sets” option when exporting and not have to wait while exporting and then delete the majority of resulting template files, you can delete data sets that are not of interest for you.

You can remove datasets by selecting Image -> Variables -> Data sets…

• Select the data set you wish to remove and hit the trashcan to the right of the drop down list. I you need to undo, use the History panel…

Removing none necessary data sets will reduce the export time when using the export “All Data Sets” option.

You can even define new languages in the Data Sets window. Select a data set to create a new set from, hit the disk icon (create new data set from selected) to the right of the Data Set drop down list and then edit the variable values. Make sure you create new data sets using existing data sets representing each month. For each month you will need to update the ‘Month’ variable and each of the weekday variables (‘Mon’, ‘Tue’, ‘Wed’, etc).

For more information on Photoshop variables and data sets:

Layers Magazine: Adobe Photoshop Variables (Video with Dave Cross)

Adobe: Photoshop, Creating data-driven graphics

Go and get the free versions in any of 12 languages. New for this year is Polish!:

• Danish
• German
• Norwegian
• Finnish
• Swedish
• Italian
• French
• Spanish
• Portuguese
• Dutch
• English
• Polish (new!)

Download them here and create your own 2013 calendars using Lightroom’s print module.

Or buy the fully layered psd-files and make your own templates. Change fonts, colors, etc using Adobe Photoshop.

More information regarding the 2013 Lightroom Calendar Templates, free as well as fully layered templates, the ISO sized Lightroom Print presets and how to use them.

I’ll make a post in a couple of days with more detailed instructions on how to modify the templates using data sets, etc.

Many thanks to two great friends for letting me use some of their images in above examples (head portrait and ring image are taken by myself):

• Chamonix/France based photographer Alexandre Buisse, a great mountaineering and adventure photographer.
• West Kootenays/British Columbia/Canada based Ursula I Abresch, an art photographer whose creativity and photographic eye always inspires.

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As the pie did it’s thing in the oven, I set up my portable studio to test some food photography. So in todays post you will get two recipes: one for making the pie and one for lighting the photo.

Recipe, Thomas spicy apple & pistage pie

This will give you a delicious pie with much tast. The roughly chopped pistage nuts in the dough will give you a nice crunchy feeling

Ingredients, 4-6 servings

4 apples
50 ml (1/4 cup) sugar
5 ml (1 tsp) ground cinnamon
5 ml (1 tsp) ground ginger
1 ml (1/4 tsp) ground nutmeg

Pie crust:
150 g (5 1/4 oz) cold butter
100 ml (1/2 cup) pistage nuts (not salted)
300 ml (1 1/4 cup) wheat flour
50 ml (1/4 cup) sugar

Directions

Heat the oven to 225° C (435° F). Slice the butter in a bowl and chopp the pistage nuts coursly. Add these and the additional crust ingredients to the bowl and blend it roughly by hand.

Remove the seed housing and slice the apples in thin slices, no need to peel them. Mix the apple slices with the the sugar and spices and spread the mix into a 25 cm (9-10 inch) buttered pie plate. Spread out the crumbled crust on top.

Bake in the middle of the (preheated) oven for 20 -25 min. Let it cool a little and serve with cold vanilla ice cream or custard souce.

Lighting recipe

I wanted to take an image of my delicious pie and simulate a soft window light. Problem is that this was in the evening and I feared there would be no pie left to the next day… The top image is lit with two lights (Canon 580EX II), three if you count the faint light from the table light (see below). The main light is placed behind the subject, tilted down at about 45 degrees, facing the camera. The fill light is placed at camera right. On the main light I’ve used a 36″ Lastolite Hotrod Octa Softbox. It’s placed just above the image top, only 30-40 cm (1 ft) from the plate. This to maximize the size of the light source to give a nice soft light. Just the kind of light you would get from a window with no direct sunlight. On the filllight, used to bring up the shadows, I used a 40″ Lastolite Umbrella Box. See the image below right for the lighting setup.

I used Pocketwizard to trigger the flashes. A MiniTT1 on the camara as transmitter and a FlexTT5 on each flash as receiver. To control the flash exposure I use the AC 3 ZoneController. Super easy to control and set the flash ratios. And with full ETTL!

Started out with setting the base exposure to take away most of the ambient light. There is a tungsten light hanging just above the table and I set the exposure to keep little of it’s warm light in the image. An alternative would be to use CTO filters on the flashes. Exposure in the camera was sset to f/2, 1/30 s and ISO 100 which gave the basic exposure without flashes as in the image below left.

After that it was time to get the slightly cooled pie, spoon up some ice cream and turn on the flashes. Exposure was done using full ETTL and the ratio between the main and fill light was controlled by the AC3. Main light was set to 0 EV and the fill was dialed down to -1 2/3 EV.

Camera equipment: Canon 5D Mark II and Zeiss 100 mm f/2 Makro Planar.

Take a look at the two images below. Chances are that you can see no difference between them. Good for you then. But some viewers will experience them very differently when it comes to colors. Not so good if you want your images to be viewed in the way you intended.

Color profile embedded, sRGB

No color profile embedded, sRGB

In fact, the above images are identical when it comes to it’s content. They are both jpg images using the sRBG color space for its encoding and were created using the “Save for web” function in Photoshop CS5. The only difference is that the top image file has a color profile embedded in it and the second does not.

And what is really an embedded color profile? Well to simplify it a little it’s some meta-information in the file stating “this image file is encoded using the color profil xyz”. In the above case xyz happens to be ‘sRGB’ (in reality the meta-information also holds the actual color profile itself as well as it’s name, but that is out of scope for this text).

To understand why this little piece of information can make such a difference, we need to take a step back and understand how colors are encoded in an image. You probably know that when using a RGB color space, colors are encoded using values for the red (R), green (G) and blue (B) channels (hence the name RGB). Each pixel will have a rgb value attached (130, 20, 160 for example) describing it’s color. The numbers gives the ratio for the different channels. If the file is a 8-bit file we will have numbers ranging from 0 to 255 for each channel. The rgb-values 0,0,0 is complete black and 255, 255, 255 is white. 255,0,0 would be the reddest red and 0,0,255 the bluest blue, etc. 256 values per channel gives the possibility to define 16 777 216 different colors.

But what colors? This is where the different color profiles/spaces come in. If I want to describe a color to you by giving you an rgb-value (for example 130,20,160) it will not be enough to define exactly what color I want to describe. Depending on how we define the reddest red, greenest green and bluest blue, this rgb value will define different colors. And the thing is that different color spaces (AdobeRGB, ProPhotoRGB, sRGB, etc) define these ‘most saturated colors’ different… So the above rgb-value of 130,20,160 is some kind of purple color, but represent different purple hues depending on if it’s the AdobeRGB, sRGB or ProPhotoRGB color space we are referring to.

It is like when trying to communicate the speed of a vehicle. If I tell you I drove my car at the speed of 55, how fast is that? Well it will depend… An American would probably interpret that speed value as 55 mph and think it’s a rather good speed while I, who live in Sweden, intended it to be 55 km/h which is a rather moderate speed… Same figure, two totally different speeds. Same goes with color values; without knowing the color space used, an rgb value is not enough to define the color.

Back to our images above. They both contain the same rgb values for each and every pixel in the image file. The difference is that the first includes what color space is used by it’s embedded color profile. This enables the software used to view the image (your browser) to interpret the rgb-values correctly, as I intended them to be. Without the embedded profile (second image) any software that wants to display the image need to make an assumption on what color profile to use when interpreting the rgb values. Some will assume it is sRGB, some will use some monitor profile, some will fall back to a Generic RGB profile defined in the OS, etc. The end result is that different system will display them differently depending on these assumptions.

The bad new is that embedding a color profile is not a guarantee that the image will be displayed correctly. Not all software and browsers are color managed. Some software can not read the embedded software or just don’t care doing it and make their own assumptions on what profile to use. Not much to do there, is it? Bottom line, you can not control all the way how your images are displayed, but you can raise the probability that it will be displayed correctly.

• As a content provider, the best chance you have is to include the used color profile in your images. That way you give the displaying software the chance to interpret your files correctly.
• As a content viewer, make sure you use a software/browser that is color managed so that the images are displayed as intended and not on some fall back assumption in the software.

So how do we embed the color profile in our jpeg files? The above files where created from a PSD-file that is encoded using ProPhoto as color space. I used the “Save for Web” function in Photoshop CS5 to create the two jpeg copies.

'Save for Web' function in Photoshop.

Not that the following two settings:

• ‘Embed Color Profile’ is checked (this is the key in the context of this article)
• ‘Convert to sRGB’ is checked (this is the ‘standard’ color profile used on the web. Using this enhances the chance of your image to be displayed correctly in software that is not color managed.

The second example image above is save in the same as above but with the option ‘Embed Color Profile’ unchecked.

If you want to double check what embedded profile an image file has you can open it in Photoshop and look under the Info panel (make sure you have ‘Document profile’ checked in the panel options). As you can see below, the first file has the sRGB profile embedded whereas the second does not (‘Untagged RGB’ is displayed in the Info panel).

Info Panel shows 'sRGB' as embedded color profile

Files with no embedded color profile are displayed as "Untagged RGB" in the Info Panel

Looking at the original and the two jpeg files together we see that they are displayed the same color wise (embedded color profile to the left and no embedded color profile to the right. Original PSD using ProPhoto colorspace in the back). But this is more pure luck than something controlled. Photoshop has no idea what color profile the right image is encoded with and is making an assumption and using either sRGB or a generic rgb profil that is very close to sRGB to display the right image. If I scrutinize the two images I can actually see a difference on my wide gamut screen between the two jpeg images (probably not visible on the below screen capture). The file without embedded color profile has slightly higher contrast.

Original PSD together with created jpeg images (embedded color profile to the left)

The background for this post is a question on a forum where a photographer noticed that images on her Facebook fan page looked different from the one on her blog. The difference was visible on one of her computers but not the other. Some viewers from the forum reported that they looked just the same whiles other saw them very different. The photographer used the same basic file to upload to both Facebook and her blog. It was a mystery… After downloading the files we noticed that the one on her blog was missing the embedded color profile. We double checked the process of creating the file and uploaded again but with the same result. The file on Facebook had the embedded profile while the one on the blog did not. Our conclusion is that it is the blog platform that she is using that strips the file from the embedded profile when it is uploaded. So if you are a photographer I would double check how the platform you are using treats the image files you upload…

Som start har jag använt en psd-fil som har färgrymden ProPhotoRGB. Jag har använt Photoshop CS5 på OSX för att hantera orginal psd och för att skapa jpg-filer.

Två jpg-filer har skapats genom att i Photoshop använda funktionen “Save for web & Devices”, enda skillnaden är att “Embed Color Profile” är vald respektive inte vald. Observera att “Convert to sRGB” är vald.

Resulterande jpg-fil med “Embed Color Profile” vald:

Resulterande jpg-fil med “Embed Color Profile” ej vald:

Dessa bilder kan upplevas lika eller olika beroende på vilken webbläsare man använder, dess grundinställningar, operativsystem, etc.

Öppnar man jpg-filerna i Photoshop ser man att de har olika färgprofiler i sin metadata. Den där “Embed Color Profile” var vald visar korrekt ‘sRGB IEC61…’, dvs det framgår av filens meta-information att det är en jpg fil som är kodad med färgprofil sRGB. En webbläsare som kan hantera och tolka olika typer av färgprofiler och som är korrekt inställd kommer visa denna fil korrekt.

Den där “Embed Color Profile” inte var vald visar dock ‘Untagged RGB’, dvs det framgår inte av filens metadata vilken färgprofil som den är kodad med. Det är då upp till webbläsaren på klienten där man tittar på filen att välja hur den ska tolka rgb-värdena i filen. Beroende på vilken färgprofil respektive webbläsare antar att filen innehåller, kommer de visa filen korrekt eller fel.

Nedan visar hur filerna visas i Photoshop när de ligger sida vid sida. Photoshop tolkar båda filerna korrekt som sRGB kodade filer vilket gör att den visar upp filerna med samma färger. Dvs Photoshop “antar” att filen utan meta-information om använd färgprofil är just ‘sRGB’

För högsta sannolikhet att bilder visas i webbläsare med korrekta färger så bör filen innehålla meta-information om vilken färgprofil filen är kodad med. Det är dock ingen garanti då inte alla webbläsare kan läsa/tolka/använda denna information. Men med den informationen ger man mottagande webbläsare åtminstone möjligheten att tolka och visa filen korrekt.

Sedan beror presentationen av färger även på hur visande skärm är kalibrerad. Men det är ett annat ämne…

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Jonas & Janas preshoot

• Danish
• German
• Norwegian
• Finnish
• Swedish
• Italian
• French
• Spanish
• Portuguese
• Dutch
• English

Download them here and create your own 2012 calendars using Lightroom 3′s print module.

Or purchase the fully layered psd-files and make your own templates. Change fonts, colors, etc using Adobe Photoshop.

More information regarding the 2012 Lightroom Calendar Templates, free as well as fully layered templates, the ISO sized Lightroom Print presets and how to use them.

A couple of weeks ago I had the privilege to fly over to New York and photograph a wonderful wedding in Manhattan together with my good friend Markus Dagnell. Not the every day assignment so to speak… Flying in a couple of days ahead gave us the possibility to follow Ben & Katherine’s final days of preparations before the big day and create a imagery that hopefully will let them experience their wedding over and over again…

Ben and Katherine, it was a pleasure and delight to be with you these days. Thank you for sharing your special day with us!

The images are still resting on my hard drive for final treatment but here is a quick sneak peek post with some of the images from your big day!

Don’t forget to check out Markus images from this New York Destination wedding!

Last night before the wedding was of course shared among friends arriving from all over the place. Canada, Los Angeles, Germany, Australia…

The girls had their nails done for the wedding at Dashin Diva on 72nd st.

Curly hair? No problem if you live in New York since it of course exists a salon that specializes in curly hair… Mike at Devachan Salon did the hair styling for Katherine.



The wedding ceremony was held in the Church of the Good Shepherd in northern Manhattan, New York.







The reception was at the New Leaf Restaurant at Fort Tryon Park. And the party went on and on and on. And when it was over, the party left for the after party at Ding Dong Lounge. The city never sleeps you know…

Besides following and documenting Ben & Katherine’s wedding day we did have time to experience the great city of New York. I’m ready to go back. Any day…

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Meeting clients for pre-shoot sessions are so much fun! Today I met Jana & Jonas, who are getting married in August at Djursholms kapell. We met at Villa Pauli were they will have their reception, to get to know each other better, plan the wedding session and to try out how it is to stand in front of the camera. I am so much looking forward to August, can hardly wait be there on their big day. I know already that Jana & Jonas will look great…

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Adela is the daughter of some nice friends of mine. Such an adorable little girl who was only 14 days old when these images where taken. Joel and Jennie invited me to there apartment and we had a great time shooting these images. And they even treated me with a great lunch!

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Some personal images I’d like to share with you. We had some heavy snowfall the other day here in Stockholm, receiving more than a foot of snow. Everything turned crisp white and winter is back for sure. Today the skies were clear and we had an amazingly beautiful winter day, temperature dropping to -10° C (14° F). We had a really nice walk on the ice covering lake Mälaren in the afternoon, just as the sun set to rest for the day.

On the technical side, all images are shot with the Canon 5D MkII and Canon 50 f/1.2L. Processing is done in Lightroom, only using Photoshop for resizing and sharpening for the blog.

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Update: Calendar templates for 2012 2013 are now available.

The other week I posted about some calendar templates that can be used in the Lightroom print module to create your own calendars. The original idea was described by Matt Kloskowski on his Lightroom Killer Tips blog.

I changed the original layout to make the weeks start on Mondays instead of Sundays, but only mad them available in Swedish.

I have now updated the fully layered psd-files to include a number of different languages. It is easy to select what language to use, the text layers that are language dependent are included in different layer groups. So if you want to make changes to the color scheme, change font, etc download the fully layered template files and go wild!

Below you can also download the calendar templates as flattened psd-files that can be used as described in Matt’s blog post above. I have also included a link to the Lightroom Print module templates I created for those using A4 paper size, as shown on the images besides and below, more on that in my original post.

Calendar Templates in Danish
Calendar Templates in German
Calendar Templates in English
Calendar Templates in Spanish
Calendar Templates in Finnish
Calendar Templates in French
Calendar Templates in Italian
Calendar Templates in Dutch (thank you Leendert van der Hoek)
Calendar Templates in Norwegian
Calendar Templates in Swedish

Download Lightroom Calendar Print Presets (A4 paper size)!
Note that print margins are dependent on printer type, the presets might need adjustments to fit with the printer you are using.
Download layered calendar template PSD’s! (Get the 2012 latest version)

Now go and print some beautiful calendars!!!

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Update: Calendar templates for 2012 are now available.

Interested in printing your own calendars using Lightroom 3?

I can recommend a great article by Matt Kloskowski at Lightroom Killer Tips: Lightroom Presets – Calendar Print Templates.

The original templates/presets are done by Ed Weaver and Matt wrote a great article on how to install and use the presets in Lightroom 3. Go and check it out!

Swedish calendar templates and new presets

Only “problem” is that Ed’s calendars are “American style” with weeks beginning on Sundays (who came up with that?) and in English of course.

So I’ve made new calendar templates in Swedish, which also include week numbers. I’ve also made some new Lightroom print presets for the paper size A4. Both the two Ed provided in letter format (’1 month’ and ‘Full Year’) as well as two additional ones. These are ’1+2 month’ presets, showing a head month as well as previous and coming months (in smaller size). One is for vertical aligned images and one for horizontal.

The Swedish calendar templates follow the same size and aspect ratio as Ed’s, so they should work well with the the presets he provides for larger format papers!

Swedish not good enough for you?

Update: For additional languages (German, French, English, Italian, Spanish, etc), see my follow-up post!

In the calendar/preset download file I have provided flat psd-files for each month to use in the print templates. In the layered download file are the full layered original psd’s. You can use these and translate to any language you like, provided you want week numbers and use weeks starting with Mondays, to create your own calendar templates.

I couldn’t figure out what font Ed used but found some similar. If you want to translate these templates in Photoshop, you will need to install the following fonts:

• Futura Lt BT
• Futura Thin

You can always change the font in the templates, but that will probably give you some extra work aligning the texts :-).

Download Swedish calendar templates!

Download Lightroom Calendar Print Presets (A4 paper size)!
Note that print margins are dependent on printer type, the presets might need adjustments to fit with the printer you are using.
Download layered calendar template PSD’s! (Get the 2012 version!)

Matt’s article gives great information on how to install and use the templates and presets!

For additional languages (German, French, English, Italian, Spanish, etc), see my follow-up post!

Update 2011-01-29: New versions of download files with previous error in July template fixed.

Here are some images from a portrait session previously this fall. I’ve had the privilege to take images of Oskar before, taking some portraits of him before Christmas last year. When Daniel and Ulrika contacted me again and asked my if I could come up to Uppsala again and portrait Oskar in the nice autumn colors, the answer was of course ‘yes’.

Oskar is a really nice little guy and we had lots of fun during the session. To play with colorful autumn leafs is of course an adventure for any kid in this age.

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Would you like to model for me?

I’ve recently invested in some new gear that I will use for on location portrait sessions. New flashes, remote triggering devices, softbox umbrellas… Lots of fun geeky photo gear :-).

So I’ll be trying all this gear out in the near future but I guess it will not be fun taking images of my home walls for that long. So why not take the chance to practice and test under a more realistic conditions and in the same time get to meet some old or even new friends?

I get to practice and test the new equipment, you’ll get some new portraits and all of us will have a fun time! Formal or relaxed? Family, couples or solo? Does not really matter, I’m open to suggestions!

So if you feel like meeting up and do some fun photography with me, just contact me through the contact form and lets see if we can arrange something.

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Julia and Patrik said YES to each other in beautiful Vaxholm. Preparations were done at Waxholms hotel, the ceremony at Vaxhoms church and the reception was held at Vaxholms Hembygdsgård.

Patrik & Julia, thank you for letting us share your most special day. It was a delight to photograph you both and we had such a great time together with you!

Makeup was done by makeup artist Jenny Möller.

The weather forecast was unfortunately correct on this day. By the time for the wedding ceremony, the sky opened and it started pouring down. One of the heaviest rains of the year past the Stockholm area. But as they say, rain on the wedding day i suppose to bring good luck…

Who needs babysitters when there are iPhones..? :-)

The photography session was, as many times before, done together with Markus Dagnell.

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We manage to take some classical portraits of Elisabeth & Samuel while the kids were running around investigating the surroundings…

It was so much fun shooting Erica and Mikael, it was smiles and laughter all the time. The sun and clowds chased each other all day, giving great light and wonderful conditions for photography. And the ceremony, that was held outside in the gardens, was perfectly timed. Just as Erica and Mikael walked out of the orchard after the ceremony, eighteen JAS 39 Gripen fighters from the Swedish Air Force flew over there heads to congratulate them on there great day!

Don’t forget to check out Markus images from Erica and Mikaels wedding.

Two of my many favorites from todays session. Erica and Mikael where very spontaneous and there was no problem in finding good photo opportunities…

Mikael will probably not forget his wedding day for a long time. But should he forget the date he only has to check the for the occation specially made cuff links… It’s all about the details!

After the mingle after the ceremony we joked with the bride couple and said “Now is the time to take the portraits”. The sun was setting giving a wonderful soft warm glow. “Sure thing, lets do it” said both Erica and Mikael! After sipping on the champaign and with the ceremony all done they could really relax and deliver some really cool poses.

The reception was held at Rosendals Trädgård.

It was so much fun and a great experience to be able to follow Linda and see her work. I picked up many tips and small details on the way and there was some time for technical chats as well. And Linda could of course borrow the 50mm f/1.2 lens I had with me…

The gardens of Ulriksdals castle or great for photography and Helen and Jonas did a wonderful job in front of the camera. It was impressing to see how easy Linda got them to relax and how she with very simple and few instructions made them forget the camera and make great poses. And this shows in Lindas wonderful images from Helen and Jonas wedding at Ulriksdal.

Linda, a huge thank you for giving me the opportunity to follow and assist you this day!

Well, between the carrying of umbrellas and acting as a voice activated stand for diffuser panels I got the opportunity to take some images myself.

Helen was assisted by her bridesmaid with the last preparations at Ulriksdals Wärdshus

Linda showing how tip #43 of the day is done: During the session, show the bridal couple how fantastic they look on the pictures! It will increase their confidence and give new energy to the session.

It is all natural light from our large windows. We covered the window with a Lastolite SkyLite diffuser panel to soften it even more…

]]> http://aurora-foto.se/lang/en/2010/04/springtears/feed 0 http://aurora-foto.se/lang/en/2009/09/mezmerizing-eyes-malin-at-hummelmora http://aurora-foto.se/lang/en/2009/09/mezmerizing-eyes-malin-at-hummelmora#comments Sat, 26 Sep 2009 19:45:44 +0000 Thomas http://aurora-foto.se/?p=251 These portraits of Malin was shot during our session with her daughter Alicia. But the images of Malin turned out so well that they deserve a post of it’s own :-).

This is one of my personal favorites from the session. We had been shooting for a while and taken a break when I noticed while talking to Malin that Alicia had found a plastic cup that she was exploring. I managed to get a couple of shots before Alicia lost interest of it after a couple of seconds and wondered of to explore new areas in the surrounding.

I had brought my soap bubble machine with me. We started it in the end of the session and Alicia was mesmerized.  After not standing still for more than half a second she now sat still for 15 minutes while trying to figure out what these strange things were flying through the air…

I got time to shoot some images of Gustav and Malin as well…

…but Alicia was not far away for very long. She wanted to be part of the action as well. I truly love this image. The love for Alicia really shine in Gustav and Malins eyes.

Annika and Peter manage 32 Rum o Kök, a very nice hotel and restaurant in Sigtuna. Naturally the bridal party was held there with it’s great view out over the lake Mälaren.

As many times before I photographed this wedding together with Markus Dagnell. Don’t forgett to check out Markus images from Annika and Peters wedding in Sigtuna.

Charlotta and Markus wedding was held in Hälsingland on a beautiful summer day. The portrait session was made by a beautiful little lake in the woods.