I have taken three courses in photography at Mid Sweden University in the past year and have just started my fourth course. It is at A-level and we will do a simple research project. I have several different ideas and find it a little difficult to choose which project to choose. One of them is researching the local environment and I would like to use an interactive map. I'm trying to find someone who doesn't have too much limitations and who I can draw on myself. Don't know if OpenStreetMap is suitable for that, but here's a map anyway.

View larger map

This year, I'm trying something I've dreamed of for a long time, writing stories. I love writing, that's why I have so many different blogs that I manage with varying enthusiasm. What I've dreamed of since I was a kid is writing stories out of my imagination. Life has, for various reasons, gotten in the way so that the time, the time to really go into something, to find the "flow", has not existed.

Since I photograph a lot, I have got some ideas, most of them not very unique really because they are based on old fairy tales, but I think it is a good start.

I'm going to post them on Instagram starting… Now! … like small series with three to six images in each. The goal is one story a week, at least one a month because life still chooses the path and I go along.

Elsa Dorfman (born April 26, 1937) is an American portrait photographer working in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She is known for using a large-format Polaroid camera. It's a fine and well-timed portrait of her life and work. Since she has extensive experience, it is also a historical depiction of photography from the time she started with black and white photography to the present day. Among other things, she used Polaroid's 20 x 24 big screen formats. There were only five copies of the camera and she had access to one that she rented for her portraits.

Some of the famous people Elsa photographed are: Allen Ginsberg, Andrew Wylie, Victor Bockris, Anais Nin, W. H. Auden, Andrea Dworkin, Ed Sanders, Gail Mazur, Audre Lorde and Anne Sexton.

If you have Netflix, it's there. Link to Netflix.Th
e movie is 1 hour and 16 minutes long.

Link to Elsa Dorfman's website

Today I continued looking through my pictures on the computer. It's actually really hard to find new images that I'm happy with. I'd rather have tiveds theme or at least nature-themed but most of the pictures I took in Tiveden last year were so bad. First, I didn't succeed with the light, secondly, the previous lens doesn't fit very well on the camera so all images that aren't zoomed in have blurry vignetting. Therefore, I have also looked a bit at pictures I took with the Raspberry Pi camera but the camera is really difficult to set the focus on so even if the composition is perfect, the sharpness is in the wrong place.

I'm going to go down and put up the pictures on Friday when it's first May and day off, then I'm going to take the opportunity to take some new pictures. Now it looks as if it may be overcast almost all of next week so it may not go so well. It depends on what I find to photograph, sometimes it can actually get better without the sun.

Me and my parents talked earlier this spring that I would exhibit my pictures in Bakstugan in Tiveden this summer. At first I felt like it was so far away in time and plenty of time to plan, then I got sick in covid-19 (pretty sure it was anyway) and then time has just passed. This week it occurred to me that Bakstugan usually open this time of year, but would they open as usual given the covid-19? It hasn't been talked about for a while, we've mostly talked about everyday things and how the pandemic affects us.

Bakstugan opens its doors for the season until next weekend and starts by having open weekends to begin with until the high season starts. I'm going to exhibit there! So now it will be to look through my old prints from Hasselfors and possibly find something new as well. It's going to be so much fun!

Dad has fixed adhesive strips to the floor so that visitors can keep their distance from each other and if it is nice weather there is plenty of room outside where you can sit and have coffee in the sun.

The tips I got from mom when I talked to her – and which I think is good to think about before most shows are:

• It can fit about 10 pcs 60 cm wide paintings
• The paintings are hung by wire from the ceiling
• Number each board
• Give each board a name
• Make a list of the pictures and write what they cost
• Make a presentation of the exhibition on A4 paper

I've listened to this book as an audiobook. It's a book that suits me very well right now. It is about artists' fears, perhaps mainly the fear that one's work should not do in the eyes of others. What is the result of write cramps/write blocking on? Why is it so hard to get started when there are so much ydes? This discusses the authors of the book. It's about all sorts of art forms. I found it comforting to hear that everyone suffers from the same thing and that the important thing is not what others think but to start from what I myself want to say and express. It's something I really need to practice, to dare to stand for what I do, to pick out what I think is good and be proud of what I accomplish when it actually gets good (everything doesn't even get half good, but sometimes it shines to). Here's how the publisher writes about the book:

"This is a book about making art. Ordinary art. Ordinary art means something like: all art not made by Mozart. After all, art is rarely made by Mozart-like people; essentially-statistically speaking–there aren't any people like that. Geniuses get made once-a-century or so, yet good art gets made all the time, so to equate the making of art with the workings of genius removes this intimately human activity to a strangely unreachable and unknowable place. For all practical purposes making art can be examined in great detail without ever getting entangled in the very remote problems of genius."

—from the Introduction

Art & Fear explores the way art gets made, the reasons it often doesn't get made, and the nature of the difficulties that cause so many artists to give up along the way. The book's co-authors, David Bayles and Ted Orland, are themselves both working artists, grappling daily with the problems of making art in the real world. Their insights and observations, drawn from personal experience, provide an incisive view into the world of art as it is expeienced by artmakers themselves.

This is not your typical self-help book. This is a book written by artists, for artists — it's about what it feels like when artists sit down at their easel or keyboard, in their studio or performance space, trying to do the work they need to do. First published in 1994, Art & Fear quickly became an underground classic. Word-of-mouth response alone–now enhanced by internet posting–has placed it among the best-selling books on artmaking and creativity nationally.

Art & Fear has attracted a remarkably diverse audience, ranging from beginning to accomplished artists in every medium, and including an exceptional concentration among students and teachers. The original Capra Press edition of Art & Fear sold 80,000 copies.

An excerpt:

Today, more than it was however many years ago, art is hard because you have to keep after it so consistently. On so many different fronts. For so little external reward. Artists become veteran artists only by making peace not just with themselves, but with a huge range of issues. You have to find your work…

Author: David Bayles & Ted Orland ISBN: 9
780961454739 Language
: English Weight
: 181 grams Publi
shed: 2001-04-01 Publ
ishers: Image Continuum Press – Image Continuum Press Nu
mber of pages: 122

This afternoon I took a photo walk on the town in Örebro. I had decided it would be sun but it didn't turn out quite so, it was pretty gray, cold and ruffled. Almost like there was snow in the air.

Also, I forgot to check the ISO settings so it became very gritty pictures. I'm still quite happy, some pictures of the houses down by the river in the USÖ area became really spooky. It'll be fun to see if I can do something good out of them.