Back to work

I did this image for berghansen and it was featured as a fullpage ad in DN last saturday.



Here are some articles about Gullsnitt showing all the winning pictures.
Fotopia
Foto.no
Kreativt Forum

Wheee, yay, jippi.....

Last nite it was the Gullsnitt awards, the only competition for commercial photography in Norway and it turned out great for me. I took home the Grand Prix which is the main award as well as gold and bronze in advertising photography and bronze in the category for advertising agencies. That was very unexpected and great fun. Yeah.

I won with the jobs for Radio Norge and Litteraturhuset.

Tobogganing

I think that is the correct word for it?
Nonetheless it is fun. Spent the weekend in the snow up north with my girlfriend and kiddio. Had a great time.

Finished the pictures for Human Heat today, they are playing at Gloria Flames tonight by the way if you wanna check them out. I'm heading to the Gullsnitt party on friday, it is a competition for commercial photography and I have sent in some images. Would be sweet to get some kind of price although I won't get my hopes up. Hopefully it will be a nice evening anyhow.

Aking = Stemning from Espen Nersveen on Vimeo.

Vinmonopolet

I shot some images with Try for Vinmonopolet and here they are. We shot the sweetest employees they had and tried to make them look angry with a touch of humor. Hopefully they will scare you to show id without having to be asked. The original photograph to the left and the final image on the right.

One week has flown by...

....since my last post, and although not that much has happened I had a really nice shoot on wednesday, shooting Human Heat. A very promising pop-ensemble. I got the chance to head-bang and kick ass with some guitars myself and it left me wondering why I'm not a super-famous rock-star. What a shame.

Bon Weekend

Use this friday to check out some exhibitions at Gallery Storck and Cyan Studio.
Peace out.

No, she is not my sister as several people have wondered. She is my girlfriend and I love her. And so would you if you knew her.

Not exactly so........

I guess every photographer(the men at least) gets into photography thinking that life as a photographer is the same as the life of Terry Richardson.

SlowRoll

It's been a rather quiet start both on the blog and work-wise this year. The shoot I did for Vinmonopolet turned out pretty funny, I believe it will be in all stores from mid-february. There are some really interesting stuff coming up though. Meanwhile my assistant has done some great work in the studio, building walls and re-arranging my entire office. It's superb.

The last ad for DFDS is out as well so here it is.

Shoot

A couple of days doing office work this week. Not to mention my fabulous assistant who has built an entire wall around my office. It looks great and professional. I am both proud and impressed, way to go Gabriel. Tomorrow and Friday I'll have my first shoot of the year. Some pictures to be taken with Try ad agency for Vinmonopolet . I won't get paid but I can shop freely at all their venues the entire year so that is a fair deal I must say.

I've spent some hours putting together a new picture in my animal series as well. This time it's a Zebra. The image consists of pictures taken in Amsterdam, Cape Town, Egypt and Trondheim, feel free to guess what comes from where.

Making Of - Zebra from Espen Nersveen on Vimeo.

2010

Yes, a new decade is in the making and I am back to work. Not that it is much to do these days but hopefully something will soon turn up. I guess I'll start this new year by posting my final work of last year. Three pictures I did with TBWA/Oslo for Helsedirektoratet. They wanted to use famous people as models and as you can see we photographed Samsaya, Christina Vukicevic and Erik & Kriss. They were all a joy to work with and even though the clock worked against us that day I'm happy with the result.

2009 - Reviewed

After finishing the final pictures of the year, sending out the last invoices and paying off the few remaining bills, I felt that a good way to finish off 2009 for my blog is to make a post that sort of sums up the year.

I can't deny that it has been a very good year professionally. I've been busy more or less the entire year with just some weeks after my summer holiday being somewhat quiet. I've been assigned to a lot of great jobs with a lot of challenges both on the creative side and in the pre and postproduction aspects of the job. I feel like I have improved very much as a photographer this year and as a working photographer with everything that come along with the profession that has nothing to do with taking pictures and I feel way more secure while working with advanced retouching than I was in 2008. I believe the reason for this is that I have put in a lot of hours to improve myself this year.

Some of my work never saw daylight, some jobs were turned down by the client even though the ad-agency loved it, some work I'm not too happy with what I managed to come up with but fortunately enough most of my jobs made the client, the ad agency and myself feeling happy. I guess I can't expect every job I do to be better than the last, even though that is my goal. I won't quit even though I might have to take a step or two backwards every now and then, as long as the finishing line is miles ahead of where I started I'll be happy.

All in all this has been a truly fantastic year, hopefully next year can be equally challenging, funny and rewarding.
I'd like to thank all the creatives out there who believed enough in me to hand me work, hopefully I didn't let you down so we can keep working together further on into the future. Hopefully I'll get some new people to shout out "Heia Espen" and hand me some exciting work as well. I'd also like to thank my mum, my dad, my girlfriend and the man upstairs. Love you all.

Cheers everyone, I wish you a merry christmas and a happy new year. See ya all in 2010.

Feel free to take a trip to my portfolio and check out my work - Heia Espen.

The Last shoot

of 2009 was completed yesterday. Evolved into a rather stressful day as the time flew by us, fortunately we managed to finish not long after scheduled. Barely had time to get back to Oslo and take a shower before it was time for the annual christmas party with the photographers and assistants at our studio. It was a great night. I'll finish this last shoot with postproduction on monday and tuesday and then it's holiday. Wheeee.

My assistant checking the lights, he'll be with me fulltime 5 days a week next year. Hopefully I'll get to keep him busy.

Finito

With the job I did for Statoil today, might be some changes after the client has seen it but hopefully that will only be some minor details. I have some postproduction to be done for Agrodata and a shoot on thursday and then I'll be hanging out with father christmas for a couple of weeks. Sweet.

Here are the still images from the Hansen & Dysvik shoot, these will be used in DM's and on their website and such.

Dodge & Burn

Spent about 8 hours on tuesday to get ready for yesterdays shoot. Used 7 lights to get the look that I wanted. Had two assistants with me to make it effective, cleaning the cars and taking care of everything that needed to be done. Because of the very thorough preproduction the shoot yesterday went rather smooth. Today I've been working at my mac, lot of work left and I have to deliver all the pictures on monday. Because of the extensive postproduction I had to cancel the lunch I had scheduled with Will Smith and Obama, guess I'll have to reschedule so I don't hurt their feelings.
This is Gabbe filming some behind the scenes footage, slight size difference between us.

Huuuge studio

Preparing tomorrows shoot, a couple of cars, several people and looots
of equipment!

Christmas @ Hansen & Dysvik

My last film for Hansen & Dysvik is currently showing on norwegian television. So if you need something new for the bedroom head over to the nearest store. :-)
Just like the other films I have made for H&D the job was assigned to me by Los & Co ad agency and the postproduction is done by Toxic.

Hansen & Dysvik - Christmas from Espen Nersveen on Vimeo.

Here are some behind the scenes footage from the shoot in my studio.

Behind The Scenes - Hansen & Dysvik from Espen Nersveen on Vimeo.

FreeDay

Things are starting to get sorted out for the Statoil shoot I'm having next week. That's good and hopefully I'll be able to relax this weekend. My mind is not too good at relaxing while there is work to be done, always pondering and thinking about everything. Even though I'll not be able to do a thing about it until Monday anyway. Bad habit that one.

Some more pictures for DFDS is out now. Here they are.

Married Couple

Hopefully I'll get to marry my beautiful girlfriend one day like my beloved friends Guro & Victor did this summer. I took some pictures of them in my studio with a pink backdrop. I think it suits them both as persons and on this picture. Ebony & Ivory. Love you both.

More Work

After a couple of intense months I decided to take it quite easy last week. Some work on monday and then almost taking the rest of the week off, just a couple of hours in the studio on friday. It felt great to just relax, sleep a bit longer and recharge my batteries. And while taking it easy I got assigned to two new jobs, one of which is probably my biggest one yet, at least considering it might be used in several countries. I got assigned by McCann to do a rather large shoot for Statoil and TBWA wants me to take a couple of pictures for Helsedirektoratet, with celeb-models.
Fancy. :-)

This will be a perfect ending of an insane year.

Behind The Scenes - Freeze

Here is some behind the scenes footage from the shoot with the freezing people.

Behind The Scenes - Freeze from Espen Nersveen on Vimeo.

Sølve Sundsbø

By far the greatest photographer to come out of Norway of all time is doing a very rare interview to ShowStudio, check it out. He has some really nice thoughts about photography.

Interview

Check out his incredibly fantastic portfolio.

Portfolio

Making Of - Freeze

2 days shooting, 3 days with postproduction, 170 layers, 5,8 gigabyte file, 1 picture. Here is the Making Of video of the former image. Hope you like it. :-)

Making Of - Freeze from Espen Nersveen on Vimeo.

Unpublished Work #1

This is one of the jobs that will never get published. Personally I think it might be my best job so far, at least the most advanced image I've had to make. Later i'll be posting a video showing how the image has been made in photoshop.



closeup

Depressed

I'm sad, what happened to my karma? My last two jobs will not be used for reasons I can't say. What I do know is that it is not because of what I delivered. But politics within a large company can be a bit of a challenge sometimes. The sad thing is that I'm really happy with both jobs with one of them being one of the best works I've ever made. I would love to see it published. I'll probably be able to publish it on this blog as long as I remove all info about the client and such but it still sucks. My work means very much to me and if I could choose to have these jobs published and not get paid instead of getting paid without having it published the choice is too easy. I would be a poor photographer with images all across town any day.

Agrodata Portraits

These are some of the images I took recently for Agrodata with Making Waves. They will be used as ads, on their webpage and whenever they are promoting their company in some way. Most of my work consists of lots of lights, lots of retouching etc. so it's quite a challenge to photograph with nothing but the camera. In some ways I think it is much harder actually.

post-postproduction

I'm stuck at the mac. As always.
I wonder what the analog photographers do during working hours, they have to have an immense amount of spare time. I wish my machine had some kind of clock to count how many hours it has been used during 2009. Still a couple of hundred hours of work on it before it's christmas. Finished three jobs at the moment with the one for Ernö being quite the time-consumer. I do think it will turn out nice though and then it's worth all the hours. Easily.
I changed the header on my blog today, felt it represents the blog better than the black and white nature picture that was up there before.

Untitled Sunday

I've had a very nice weekend, thanksgiving dinner on friday with classmates from Norsk Fotofagskole, it's a couple of years between each time we see each other so that was very nice. I have managed to take some time off as well so that my body could rest a bit but I didn't manage to stay away from the studio the entire weekend. So now I'm sitting at my office working a bit, doing some paperwork, paying a whole lot of bills, sorting out the pictures from my latest jobs etc. etc.
Heading home in a bit just wanted to publish another DFDS picture, this was featured as a doublepage ad in A-magasinet on friday.

Tiiiired

The shoot is finished. People are happy. I am tired. Weekend. Yeah.

Farmers

Went on another trip today shooting farmers for Making Waves. Brought my friend Marius with me as an assistant even though all he did was filming and driving. Still though, more fun with two than traveling alone. After a full day shooting we spent a couple of hours setting up the lights for tomorrows shoot. Just a bit renaming and backing up of my files now before I head home. I have a very challenging shoot ahead of me tomorrow, can't wait.

There is a new dog in town

his name is Walter and he is the meanest, scariest dog you've ever met. He is 8 weeks old and is already settling in in the studio. About time we got a dog to watch our and our equipments back.