Each year along the banks of Oslo’s Akerselva river, the day-to-day lighting is turned off and a festival of light celebration begins. This is Elvelangs. There are fire-eaters, dancers, performers, art installations, costumes and they all have lighting as a common theme.

It’s a wonderful experience in the form of a walk that takes you from the North of the city into the bustling heart.

I had the pleasure of attending last year, and here are two of my favourite pictures from the event.

I have recently been on a photoshoot with this gentleman.

Model, make up & outfit via Stein

Composition is key

During the course of my education the aspect about art that captured my imagination was composition,  and as I grew as an artist/photographer I strived to perfect the skill of framing a picture just right. Composition is key, a well made picture or well taken shot will be absolutely stunningly beautiful, breathtaking and every single pixel or millimetre will be important.

Now, when I take pictures – I first look at the scene and try to visualize what it is that I would like to capture exactly, and most of the time I will spend a lot of time trying to frame the perfect shot; trying to fit in the background, the foreground the object of focus, but sometimes I’m working to a deadline and have limited time, or sometimes I just simply take a picture that I regret not just moving slightly to the left or to the right.

Cropping

I think quite a lot of people take cropping for granted, it’s just something they sometimes do without really giving too much thought about it, but sometimes cropping can really breathe life back in to images that just slightly miss the mark. In these following pictures I have employed a simple square crop in order to cut out unwanted space on either side of the focus points. I find square cropping a particularly fascinating technique as it yields fairly unique and quirky results reminiscent of polaroid shots.

In the next shot, I had just left the office and the sky suddenly went this incredible colour! It was the most beautiful sky I had ever seen and I was in literally the WORST and most boring place – the carpark. I quickly took a few shots and then moved to a better location, but by that time the sky had changed and just wasn’t the same.
So after taking the pictures home, I felt that the only way to do this incredible natural beauty justice was to employ a crop to take out most of the annoying stuff at the bottom, leaving the sky.

So, long after the camera has been put away, it’s useful to have an arsenal of editing techniques in order to save work. The most important thing though is to evaluate where the picture went wrong and try to learn from your mistakes.

Never stop learning.

Meaningful

I’ve always found the stories behind things interesting, all manner of things: for example – if I meet a new person and they have a name I haven’t heard of I will immediately want to find out what their name means. It’s the same with nicknames, or phrases in languages and it especially applies to art and design.

It is truly fascinating sometimes to look at a picture and take in the surface-value, knowing full well that there is always a lot more to an image than what your eyes can see. There are meanings within any image, thoughts that the creator had during creation and thoughts that an observer will have after the piece is finished.

So I thought it would be fun to discuss my current logo and the some of my thoughts during the production:

2011 Craig Jackson logo

2011

I began work on a new logo because I wanted better representation of my abilities and serious tone than I previously had. I recently moved to Norway and no longer have the advantage of speaking the native language fluently, so I need to let potential employers see what I am, who I am and what I can do. I began by evaluating what it is I actually am, what DO I do? I’ve not done anything for long enough to really say to myself “Yes, I’m a photographer” or “I am a graphic designer” or even “I’m an ex-BBC web assistant with a background in art and design”.

The truth of the matter is my degree was very varied and I have learned a lot of different things and in my previous job I actually managed to continue to work in many different fields at the same time. I AM A Photographer and I CAN design and I CAN write but how does one condense all these abilities in to a simple title? Creative Handyman? Jack of all Artistic Trades?

I came to the conclusion that the connecting quality between all of these abilities is that I have a huge enthusiasm for good composition in pictures and words and that I use my eyes to work in all of these fields, so I started thinking to myself perhaps I can market myself as an “eye for hire” (from the expression ‘gun for hire’).

From this thought grew the shape of my logo – I wanted an abstract cross-section of the human eye, almost a perfect circle but with a small peak on one side for the lens.

Development

The logo, originating from the concept “eye for hire” then began to evolve and came to include my initials. I also wanted to keep something from my previous branding to have a sense of self development and I still really fond of the pale blue colour in my self branding from 2009, so I decided to use a slightly different, more crisp-looking, pale blue for my new logo but this time I dropped the yellow and the dark background.

 2009

Self-branding from 2009

In 2009 my self-branding was quite simple, the logo itself was just an abstract C and J but after I was finished with the shape of the logo I began to think of colours. I have always been a fan of washed-out pastel colours [Charles Rennie Mackintosh too, hmm I wonder if it's a Glaswegian thing...] and I feel that my logo should have colours that I am a fan of. During the process of looking through palate after palate of different tones I suddenly noticed that the logo itself resembled a tear drop so my first colour became a pale blue.

Does it matter?

I’ve heard a couple of different opinions on explaining publicly where your ideas stem from and mapping the development process. Some people think it’s very important to show clients and potential employers, some people think you should guard your secrets closely and some people don’t care either way. I think that no matter what your opinion is on sharing your ideas, you should at least open your mind to the multiple interpretations that any image has to offer. You might be surprised to find inspiration or perhaps you might even learn something.

Hello and welcome to www.craig-jackson.net.

I’m currently building this site to host my blogs, photography, design, films and artwork.

C