It's In The Details

It’s In The Details

THE INTERNATIONAL ISSUE

STOCKHOLM SCHOOL OF PHOTOGRAPHY

Image Designer

The Image Designer higher vocational programme at Fotoskolan STHLM is ideal for people looking to create, retouch and design images and animated materials for different clients.

Images are everywhere, and every image we see has been processed in some way, which is why the industry is constantly on the lookout for capable image designers and retouch artists with a range of skills. Image designers enjoy creating or enhancing images and solving problems for others. A good eye for an image, sensitivity, professionalism and technical knowledge are four of the cornerstones of becoming a good image designer.

The programme is founded in photography and photographic digital post-production, including

colour developing, retouching and colour matching. You’ll learn how to enhance the composition of an image using digital tools and turn the client’s basic concept into reality. Image designers also learn how to animate still images and transfer their knowledge of still images to the tools of the animated image.

At Fotoskolan STHLM, you’ll also gain a wide contact network, which is invaluable when it comes to finding a job after the programme. The retouching agencies in Sweden are also aware of the programme as a large proportion of the industry’s retouch artists and image designers attended Fotoskolan STHLM themselves.

The programme is free of charge, lasts for 2½ years, and participants are eligible for student aid.

Commercial Photographer

The Commercial Photographer higher vocational programme at Fotoskolan STHLM is ideal for people looking to work in the field of commercial still and/or film photography.

The work of a contemporary commercial photographer can include anything from fashion, advertising, lifestyle, interior and product photography to the equivalent elements in animated imagery. In short, it includes almost everything in the commercial photographic field of image production. For this reason, the photographic industry places high demands on knowledge and experience and an increasing number of professional roles are expected to be specialists in their fields.

To work as a contemporary photographer, you need the right knowledge of the professional life you’re about to experience, skills which are difficult

to acquire without training. If you’ve decided that you want to work as a photographer and with people who share your drive, then the Commercial Photographer programme is for you. As a student in the Commercial Photographer programme, you’ll receive a broad introduction to everything that the profession involves, and we alternate between theoretical and practical elements. One day you’ll be taking photos of food, the next you’ll be introduced to digital photography software, do an internship abroad, listen to a lecture, or take photos for a client. You’ll study the history of photography, learn how to cut and colour film, show your photo portfolio to a professional in the industry, and much more. Your route into the photography profession also requires good contacts in the industry, which we can help you with at Fotoskolan STHLM.

The programme is free of charge, lasts for 2½ years, and participants are eligible for student aid.

Text: Nicole Kling, Emma Jarvi

Production manager: Emma Jarvi

Cover: Zelma Schelin Editing: Frida Wikar

Production Fotoskolan STHLM: Mikael Cronwall, Julia Hallengren, Olof Cardelús

Design: Hummingbirds

Printing: TMG STHLM, Bromma 2023

Photo: Lova Nygren

Photo: Kajsa Svensson

Retusch: Evelina HellbergHair/Makeup: Evelina Hellberg

The world is more connected than ever, and during the long pandemic period we learned how to work remotely on a large scale. In short, opportunities to make the whole world our workplace have never been better. At Fotoskolan STHLM, we’ve been committed to internationalisation for many years and accredited by Erasmus, the EU’s student exchange programme, since 2021. This has enabled us to offer even more students international internships in even more countries – in addition to the other EU countries, Erasmus also has so-called partnership countries, including the USA and Japan, among others.

Swedish photographers are considered by the rest of the world to be good at using light, and a lot of the images produced by international photographers for foreign magazines are processed in Stockholm. By equipping our students with international practical experience, global networks and the tools to work remotely, the labour market available to them grows and their employment opportunities increase. By extension, this means that it’s perfectly feasible to live in Sweden and work in an international context. Like the rest of society, our industries are becoming increasingly adept at working remotely, which saves time and money and protects the environment. In a world where costeffectiveness is a must, digital opportunities become tools that enable just that.

Visual culture is in constant flux, and at Fotoskolan STHLM we consider norm-critical thinking to be a prerequisite for maintaining its relevance and promoting a diversity of perspectives. With this in mind, we have successfully tried to

broaden our students’ experience by deliberately recruiting people from different backgrounds. We’ve noticed that Fotoskolan’s programmes stand up well in international competition – we employ modern, industry-specific technology, prepare our students for contemporary assignments and equip them with future-proof skills. The photography industry is still highly competitive, but the future for professional photographers and image processors looks bright and the job market has probably never been better.

The history of the Fotoskolan STHLM stretches back to 1962, when the school was founded by Christer Strömholm. We’ve always taken our responsibility for photography seriously. And we intend to continue.

Fotoskolan STHLM collaborates with Fujifilm Nordic, Fotografiska, Wacom, Epson, Eizo and Capture One, among others. All the camera-produced images in this magazine were taken with a Fujifilm GFX 100s camera.

Mikael Cronwall, Education Manager for Fotoskolan STHLM

“Our labour market is much larger than Sweden”

Photo: Mikael Cronwall

Photo: José Calvente

“The paintings had faded a lot over the years, and the underlying wood had suffered damage and surface deposits that we wanted to see if we could reduce or remove”, says Nina.

The process began with one of the paintings being photographed in a studio, after which Nina did a lot of work in Photoshop. First, she digitally restored the wood and the background and then she enhanced the painting itself and its colours using layer masking and brushes. She also used sketches and old photos to help her see what the painting might have looked like once upon a time.

“One of the challenges was working with something that someone else had created in the first place. There were obviously expectations of what it should look like, and lots of questions and opinions

Nina Sandberg is a retouch artist who completed a higher vocational FLEX programme at Fotoskolan STHLM. As a freelance with lengthy experience in the industry, she had the opportunity to study courses on subjects that she hadn’t previously experienced in her work. As a participant in the picture restoration course, she was one of the students who digitally restored 100-year-old paintings at the Stockholm City Hall.

about what was right and what was wrong. It was also tricky to access historical material that was of good enough quality to be used as an aid.”

The actual restoration methods didn’t differ that much from the type of image editing that Nina usually does.

“Making skin or a wooden panel look smoother works in roughly the same way. The difference is probably that you have to do a bit more research and take in all the information available. It’s a bit like piecing a puzzle together with information and pixels”, says Nina and adds:

“The biggest benefit is that you can try and preserve paintings that might disappear completely otherwise. It gives us the opportunity to preserve or recreate a major part of our history in a new way.”

Nina Sandberg Digital restoration

In collaboration with the City of Stockholm and Big Image Systems, during 2022-2023 the Image Designer higher vocational programme is conducting a major digital restoration project in Stockholm City Hall, a reproduction of Axel Wallert’s 100-year-old paintings in the colonnade down to Riddarfjärden.

Currently, not much of the paint is left, but the paintings will be digitally restored using digital image processing, printed on fabric, and then re-installed in the coffered ceiling. Fotoskolan STHLM has developed a method that recreates copies of the now very faded artworks using high-resolution image files, charcoal drawings, sketches and colour samples, among other things.

The work is an element of the programme’s picture restoration course and involves more than 40 students. It is the largest and most unique project that the programme has conducted so far.

Watch a film about this project at vimeo.com/fotoskolansthlm/culturalpreservation ▲

Photo: Caroline Andersson Renaud

It was the part-course in After Effects that sparked Marcus Sandgren’s interest in animated montage. A lifelong interest in images recently resulted in him graduating from Fotoskolan STHLM’s Image Designer programme, and now Marcus is looking forward to a future that he hopes will be characterised by creativity and flexibility.

With an eye for montage

Marcus changed his career path in mid-life. He’d previously worked in the music industry and at sea, but always with a keen interest in images. In December 2021, he graduated from Fotoskolan’s Image Designer higher vocational programme and is now looking for assignments in his new calling.

“My dream would be a freelance existence in which half of my assignments consist of straight image processing jobs based on customer orders and the other half my own projects in animated montage,” he says and elaborates:

“The most enjoyable thing about animated montage is that you get to create something that doesn’t exist already and let your creativity flow. It’s a very satisfying process to visualise your own ideas. But it takes a lot of energy to work that way, which is why I think a mixture is best,” says Marcus, who as a dad with small children is very aware of the benefits that the flexibility of freelance life can bring.

“Animated montage means that image processors can make still images come alive using different effects – subtle elements that move in the image, or camera movements. The technology offers great opportunities”, and Marcus spontaneously thinks about animated

environments in digital children’s books – or adult books for that matter – and the new market for NFTs*.

“I like to start with something that exists already and make something more out of it. It was when we took the After Effects course that I could see all the new opportunities that it opened up and right away thought that lots of customers would probably find that the approach provided great added value. With a good layer structure in the images, the step to an animated montage is not that big”, he points out.

When Marcus thinks back to the programme and what he gained from it, it was the good work structure that he took with him, as well as the solid technical foundation and the stimulating learning environment.

Good organisation is incredibly important when you’re working on large projects, partly to enable the handover to others and partly to maintain a good workflow for everything from folder structure to layer structure.

* A non-fungible token (NFT) is a unique digital identifier that’s recorded on a blockchain and used to certify ownership and authenticity of, for example digital art.

Marcus Sandgren

Photo: Marcus Sandgren

Center Spread:

Image by Stefan Johansson, Image Designer programme. The image is created in 3D.

Image by Marcus Sandgren

Ville Mäkäräinen

Model, soldier, fashion photographer

Ville Mäkäräinen’s route into the photography profession has been via his participation in Finland’s Next Top Model and military service in the Finnish Defence Forces’ combat camera unit. He completed the Commercial Photographer programme in December 2022 and has been doing a year-long internship in 2023 with photographer Daniel Stjerne in Copenhagen, funded by Fotoskolan’s Erasmus Pro programme.

Ville has been interested in photography his whole life. It all started with the skateboarding films and photos of his youth, after which he competed in Finland’s Next Top Model and had to stand in front of the cameras a lot. Following his participation in the TV show, military service awaited him at the combat camera unit, where he got to use professional camera equipment.

“That’s where my interest took off. Previously I’d thought that you didn’t need any training to work as a photographer, but I still decided to apply to Fotoskolan and I got in. I’m very glad I did because I’ve changed my mind completely. I’d never have got to where I am now if it hadn’t been for the school”, says Ville, who moved to Sweden from Finland in March 2020 to attend the programme.

Ville did the first half of his long “Learning at Work” internship in Copenhagen and the other half in New York with Swedish fashion photographer Mikael Schultz, who has previously visited the Fotoskolan programme as a guest teacher.

“Yesterday I got to assist Mikael during a

photo shoot for a German fashion magazine, with jewellery from Tiffany’s as part of the styling. There were security guards on set and one of the necklaces was worth two million dollars”, says Ville and adds:

“Being an assistant is a great route into the industry and I love it! I get almost as big a kick out of it as taking the photos myself. It’s so exciting to be able to create images with someone else, build lighting, retouch photos and be part of the process. It also gives me the chance to work on larger shoots and with professionals who could turn out to be valuable contacts going forward.”

Ville developed both his portfolio and his network during his time as a student at Fotoskolan. His dream is to work on a variety of large campaigns and editorial assignments as well as with clients in high fashion.

“Fashion photography is free and creative and you don’t have to explain your photos. They can be completely crazy and anyone who looks at the image can form their own opinion.”

Photo: Mikael Schulz

Right page Photo: Ville Mäkäräinen

3D isn’t limited by your wallet

Financial accessibility is one of the reasons that Lova Nygren likes 3D so much. Her dream is to use the technology in different types of art project and build magnificent worlds and environments that aren’t limited by a budget.

During her first year on the Commercial Photographer programme, all the students had to complete an assignment based on the design of their final degree project. They had to select a company, analyse the company’s visual profile and then produce material in the same visual spirit. Lova chose Klarna, the Swedish fintech company, and after analysing their communication materials, created her own interpretation by combining photos, animated images and 3D in her work.

“I was inspired by Sing-Sing, who’ve produced advertising for Klarna. They have a colourful, pink aesthetic that I like and that I replicated in my work”, says Lova and goes on to say that in the final year the students are given the same exam assignment, but that they then have to contact the company they want to work with.

Lova has always created, mostly with a focus on animated images. She studied film at upper secondary school, has directed short films, and is

interested in film and photographic effects. It’s also in this field that she sees her future career path.

“If I allow my imagination run free, I’d like to work as an artist, exhibit my images and make more short films. And to support myself, I think I probably need to combine my artistic activities with a job in advertising, which also feels appealing.”

Lova sees lots of advantages in being able to use 3D technology in the creative process – above all, its financial accessibility.

“I’ve built rooms in 3D that I couldn’t build physically. It’s only my imagination that limits me, rather than my wallet, and 3D offers far more opportunities than if I had to pay for real rooms”, she says and finishes by saying:

“Not only that, I like the fact that 3D is rule based and requires you to come up with technical solutions to different problems. That suits me perfectly!”

Photo: Lova Nygren

Photo: Kevin Domfeh Owusu

Photo: Peter Olsson, Retusch: Hanna Paino, Styling: Adriana Meunie / Odeminui (Mallorca), Hair/Makeup: Anya Yarullina, Model: Ainhoa / Francina models (Barcelona), Work for Odeminui, Mallorca, Spain.

STOCKHOLM

SCHOOL OF PHOTOGRAPHY WHERE VISIONS BECOME REALITY

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