skjalm's photostream  

Ever since I was a kid I have been fascinated by photos and photography. But I never really did anything about it until a few years ago after a trip to Australia. When I came back I found that by far the majority of the pictures I took Down Under were not very good. In hind sight it was probably quite silly to expect a small compact camera to be able to take decent photos of the Aussie rain forest.

The year after (2006) I was planning a trip to my beloved Norwegian fjelde (or mountains as English speakers like to call them ;-) and decided that I should either get a good camera or not bring one at all. After much searching for different models (not to mention cash to pay for an SLR) I decided to get a Canon EOS-350D and I have been most satisfied with it so far. It felt like I might actually, one day out in the future, be able to capture what I saw in the real world.

Since then I have spent some time learning about how photography works on various levels. Being an engineer (with experience in computer graphics and vision) I have some technical interests in the optics of cameras so it's not just the composition and such that I like about photography. It really is all of it.

Most of the pictures here are unmodified, they are what I managed to capture. Some have been touched up a little or experimented with for various effects, but these are (hopefully) clearly marked as modified.

This is not done because I have anything against post processing. Far from it! It is possible to get incredibly wonderful pictures and really enhance and elaborate on motives - but post processing is not something I have a lot of experience with (yet) and, more importantly, I am actually trying to learn how to make the photos look good when I take them rather than fixing them afterwards. So most of the post processing I do is to experiment with altering/skewing the original image rather than cover my inability to get the lighting right ;-)