Vikingship on a winter’s morning

I am leaving for Paris tomorrow to attend the Art Shopping Carrousel du Louvre. I am pretty excited about it, and thought I would share with you, the two pieces I am going to exhibit.

The first one is my ‘Viking ship on a winter’s morning‘, which seemed to be an instant classic, and one I have had a lot of success with since I made it 3 years ago.

I had just got home from New Zealand to a winter clad Denmark, and the Viking ship ‘The Sea Stallion’ sat on land with lights on. On the first day I went down there, I had the wrong lens with me. The next day there was newly fallen snow, and I went down during the blue hour and got my shot. The newly fallen snow was a nice improvement.

During the post processing I removed all blue colors, which is what makes this image so special. It doesn’t work on all images, but on this one it certainly did.

The second one is ‘Tower Bridge and City Hall under the Stars‘:

Tower Bridge and City Hall under the Stars

The photo of ‘Tower Bridge and City Hall under the Stars‘ took particular long time to create. It is a composite with a Swedish set of stars in the upper left-hand corner. It took me a long time because the photo kept lacking something magical, and I couldn’t find this magical component, but I didn’t give up. I played with this photo during a period of several months, and then suddenly one day, things started moving. I had found the color theme, I wanted to use, and when I noticed a handful of stars in the corner, I instantly knew what my magical component would be; stars in the corner. I used a shot of the Milky Way that I shot in Sweden earlier.

I make my photos into artworks

Art is about communication. I could have settled for a normal post processing on both of these images, and they would have looked more or less like, what it looked much like when I was there, but it would have been less interesting photos. It’s a different story I want to tell, than the ordinary story. I want to take the viewer on a journey into a land between the real world and the surreal world. Let the viewer ride the mountain ridge, with the valley of reality on one side, and the surreal valley on the other side. The viewer must be fascinated with the amount of details, colors and the different presentation of reality. The viewer might even question if it is a photo at all. That is my aim with what I do.

This put’s a lot of restraint on what photos I can use. The single most important element in my photos is the light. If the light isn’t right, I can’t use the photo. And when I have the photo shot in the right light, I will spend time finding the journey I want to bring the viewer on. Sometimes this comes fairly easy, at other times, this can be very difficult.

Because of the high standards I require of myself, I can only produce a smaller number of artworks.

–Jacob Surland

London Tower Bridge and London City Hall shot on a rainy night. See the original image further down.

For some reason, I always find myself much more creative, when I come home with photos shot under difficult conditions. A particular evening like this in London had a light drizzle. Not a lot of rain, but enough to get the ground wet, and the lights reflect a bit. That can turn out pretty awesome.

Almost all photos I shot on this evening, have turned out difficult to process because of the lights. They all have this not too pretty smog orange color, and it’s difficult to get a natural looking image out of it (not that I do natural looking, anyway). And after working with a photo like this for a little while, I get creative. My mind works this way, that it gets creative when solving problems.

This is one the original 7 bracketed shots I used for my HDR image.

As you can see, I have taken out the orange colors, and I have increased the details in the ground, giving the image a much more dark noir futuristic look.