Håkan, tell us how you started with the Art of Photography.

When I was around twenty years old I travelled Latin America and I brought a small compact camera with me which I used like any ordinary tourist. Coming home I found that several of my pictures were better than I expected. I remember in particular one photo from the Bolivian Mesa and some photos from Costa Rica. In that year (1975) a thought was born: I wanted to become a good photographer!

At that time I had a boring job at a papermill at Crycksbo in Dalarna. I thoroughly read photo magazines all of my free time and tried to learn the rules of the profession and get educated by just looking at thousands of pictures. One year later I bought my first system camera and I started my 'Photography Project'.

Being a photographer is a very interesting method of expressing yourself and this art has no limits. I compare it to painting and writing novels as it is a personal way of being creative. When you focus your motive you´ve made your choice... then you click and hope for a good picture.

There have been many excellent photographers during the 100 years of this Art. Which of them have made the greatest impressions on you?

Well, there are many... Josef Koduelka, Cartier Bresson and the Swedish photographer Anders Petersén. And looking through National Geographic always gives me new ideas. They have a high standard on their photography.

The city where I live has a local newspaper which is called Göteborgsposten. In my opinion this newspaper has the best pressphotographers in Sweden.

What kind of equipment do you use?

A Canon EOS camera and the objectives 24mm, 28 - 105mm zoom, 100mm (macro),
70 - 210mm zoom. I use colorslides because I am to lazy to work with black/white. I have all my pictures on Kodak Photo-CDs as a starting point of my digital image editing but I´d really like to buy a Scanner. The software I use for enhancing my photos is primarly Adobe Photoshop 4.

In what way do you change your pictures using Photoshop?

I do the same things that I would have done working in the darkroom. Adjusting the contrast and the grayscale and sharpening the photos. It´s a much more sophisticated way of doing it and by using my Pentium PC the work gets done in a quick and efficient way. The first time I tried this modern method of image editing a thought hit me: I will never work in a darkroom again!!!

To all my colleagues in the photography business which have rigid views on which brand of camera and film they prefer I´d like to add that you never ask a writer what kind of typewriter he uses to create such inspiring and great novels...