Gil Shaham

What an incredible positive force of nature. A seasoned artist, but yet so youthful in his music making and always so connected with his fellow musicians.

A week and night to remember, for sure.

Leif Ove Andsnes

One performer, one perspective.

I wanted to see if one could tell a story of the rather intense and intimate rehearsal process, from only one perspective.

The great Leif Ove Andsnes rehearsing works by Debussy and Franck with the Trondheim Symphony Orchestra in May 2024.

Documenting this part of the artistic process is in many ways as interesting as photographing the end result, the performance where everyone with a ticket can attend.

La Bohème, a Scandinavian edition.

Maestro Massimo Zanetti

• Concept, stage design and stage direction

  José Cura

• Current direction

  Victoria Bomann-Larsen

• MIMÌ

  Elsa Dreisig

• AUGUST STRINDBERG/RUDOLFO

  Stefan Pop

• EDVARD MUNCH/MARCELLO

  John Chest

• TULLA LARSEN/MUSETTA

  Lina Johnson

• EDVARD GRIEG/SCHAUNARD

  Magnus Berg

• SØREN KIERKEGAARD/COLLINE

  Petri Lindroos

• BENOIT & ALCINDORO

  Ola Marius Ryan

• JULBOCKEN/PARPIGNOL

  Arnstein Morken

• TRONDHEIM SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA AND CHOIR(S)

Up-close with Klaus Mäkelä, the Oslo Philharmonic and The Nordic Conductor´s Forum.

Péter Eötvös in Stavanger

I spent a day in Stavanger observing and documenting noted composer and conductor Péter Eötvös working with a selected number of participants from the Norwegian conductor’s program (Dirigentløftet/Talent Norge/Sparebankstiftelsen).

Maestro Eötvös was this season’s Composer in Residence of the Stavanger Symphony Orchestra, also conducting his own works.

Here are a few impressions from their last workshop day.

Two days at the Opera House in Oslo.

I was recently back in Oslo making portraits of orchestral and choral conductors that take part in the Norwegian conductor’s program (Dirigentløftet/Talent Norge/Sparebankstiftelsen).

The sessions were held inside the beautiful Opera House. As a lover of architecture, it was a treat to have the textures and shapes of this iconic building as my backdrop.

Here are a few samples from these sessions.

Three days in Oslo photographing 10 conductors.

The talent program for young conductors from, or based in, Norway (Dirigentløftet/Talent Norge/Sparebankstiftelsen) recently hired me to make new portraits of their current roster of talents.

The sessions were held at Sentralen in Oslo. Even with such a cool location, it was still a real challenge to make one location work with no less than 10 distinctive individuals.

Here are a few samples from our chamber music like sessions.

Berlin meets Røros, through music.

I have a passion for music, obviously, and for photography. When those two worlds meet, then I’m really in my “happy place”. That happened recently in Røros (Norway), a wonderful place in so many ways. It’s a town of great beauty and character, and consequently included on the UNESCO World Heritage List. Combine that with just as welcoming and dedicated locals, world class musicians from the Berliner Philharmoniker mentoring young talents from Norway and it would be hard imagining a better day out in the field.

The day started at 4AM, catching an early train to Røros and ended back home again at around 11PM. The client, “Vinterfestspill i Bergstaden” (a festival being held in March each year), wanted promotional images of Røros, the people involved locally and the visiting artists. A real challenge fitting all those things into a single day of shooting, but seeing the different images now appearing on the festival’s website and social media platforms, I think that the collaboration went quite well. Take a look at https://vinterfestspill.no and judge for yourself.

I’m delighted to be going back to Røros for the festival in late March.

Portrait session

I had the pleasure of doing a studio portrait and “lifestyle” session with chief conductor of the Trondheim Symphony Orchestra & Opera, Han-Na Chang, recently.

This session continued our collaboration from last year, when we made a series I called “Han-Na Chang in Trondheim”.

All these images are now the visual backbone of her website and press material:

https://www.hannachangmusic.com

I have now switched to an all Leica-setup, and I am delighted with how this system works for me both on location and in the studio. Like everything, it has its quirks but the gorgeous image fidelity makes it all worth while. I enjoy that the images coming straight out of the camera is so close to where I want them to be, the editing is more about tweaking than completely rebuilding the image file.

Our planned “conductor on stage and in action”-session sadly had to be postponed due to the Covid-situation, but will hopefully happen later this spring.

Gear used:

Leica SL2s

Leica Vario-Elmarit-SL 24-90mm/f2.8-4 ASPH.

Leica Vario-Elmarit-SL 90-280mm/f2.8-4 ASPH.

3x Profoto B10 studio strobes with various light modifiers.

Han-Na Chang in Trondheim

I had the pleasure of photographing the chief conductor of the Trondheim Symphony Orchestra & Opera on the streets of (exactly) Trondheim this fall. In the spring of 2022 I will capture her in action with the orchestra as well as doing a studio portrait session.

https://www.hannachangmusic.com

In the spotlight

Principal double bass of the Trondheim Symphony Orchestra & Opera Aaron Olguin in the spotlight.

James Gaffigan

Publicity images of principal guest conductor of the Trondheim Symphony Orchestra & Opera, James Gaffigan.

A group portrait with a grand backdrop

A quick group portrait of the Trondheim Vocal Ensemble, after the performance of the Christmas Oratorio. When you have a backdrop as grand as this one, I wanted to incorporate as much of the surroundings as possible. That led to this somewhat unusual portrait at 18mm.

Christmas in the cathedral

A few images from the performance of the Christmas Oratorio by J.S. Bach at the Nidaros Cathedral. Due to the ongoing corona-situation, the whole setup of the orchestra and choir was different and movement was restricted, but I kind of like the framing and “peering through”-feeling those challenges presented.

Musical architecture and more

The Trondheim Symphony Orchestra & Opera recently performed the Christmas Oratorio by J.S. Bach at the Nidaros Cathedral in Trondheim, a tradition before the Christmas holidays.

The cathedral has just finished installing a completely new lighting setup, which really showcases the (vast) space. This was also the first time that I could test my latest lens purchase, the Leica 18mm Super Elmar for the M-system.

All these shots were captured handheld using the Leica M10 and the Visoflex typ 020 electronic viewfinder. This lens may be tiny in its stature, but it’s a beast when it comes to perspective and performance. These images can almost be considered as snapshots since no tripod was used (shutter speed of 1/30s) and subsequently the ISO-values were pretty high at 6400.

It was exciting to finally be able to take in so much of the architecture, in one single frame.

The impressive organ pipes served in my mind as “musical architecture”.

More images from the performance and a group portrait will follow shortly.

A Journey with Mozart

Leif Ove Andsnes preparing an all Mozart-program with the musicians of the Trondheim Symphony Orchestra & Opera in October 2020.

It is an absolute joy to stand “ringside” and hear the results of that intensive listening process and the subsequent interaction between the soloist and the orchestra. A journey of discovery that never ends.

Watching a legend at work

I got to witness and photograph the legendary Finnish conductor and composer Leif Segerstam at work on Friday night. He has been in Trondheim this week conducting both the Trondheim Symphony Orchestra and the Trondheim Sinfonietta. I'm on sick leave from playing at the moment, so I didn't actually get to play under his leadership in the orchestra, which is sad of course but such is life. I'm happy that I have another artistic outlet to turn to when playing isn't an option.

He is quite a unique figure in the music business, in almost every possible way. We might all think that we're special and highly personal in the way that we “conduct” ourselves. However, in Leif Segerstam we may have met our master.

The lighting at the venue was less than ideal for photography, which meant both strange shadow patterns and absurdly high ISO-values. The light was mainly focused on the conductor's hair and not his face. Problem? Yes. Artistic opportunity? Could be.

It took me a while to decide how to best bring these images to life, but I ultimately decided to go for a desaturated look and feeling. The lighting was basically harsh spotlights in front and multicoloured stage lights at the back of the ensemble setup. I could have gone for a black and white edit of course, but I liked this silvery “in between”-look. The facial expressions and the “human patina” come to life in this way, in my opinion. Like the “Segerstam-way”, it's a personal artistic choice on my part bringing my take on the occasion to the viewers.

For this shoot, I wanted to test two camera setups. I brought my own Sony A7RIII and a Sony A9ii-loaner. The lenses were primarily the 24-70mm f2.8 GM and the 70-200 f2.8 GM. I did also fire off some shots with my Sigma Art-lenses (85 and 135mm). I'm not the biggest fan of zoom lenses, but this time I wanted to see if my feelings on the matter could be proven wrong. Preliminary verdict: The A9ii is significantly better than the A7RIII in these kind of conditions, giving me cleaner files with no apparent banding issues (which is the main reason for this test). Zoom lenses, well, great for versatility but the ISO-values at f2.8 compared to f1.4-1.8 are hard to swallow. Maybe an A9ii for fast paced performances in low light and the Leica SL2 for those high resolution and high fidelity portraits and personal projects? Dreaming is allowed, right?!

Anyway, I'm glad that I had the opportunity to experience Maestro Segerstam and to do some gear testing this weekend.

Ole

On stage

I had one piece off in last week’s concert programme, so I took the opportunity to make some test shots with my current camera setup. I found myself almost instantly limited by a few factors, such as a combination of access and focal range, but in the end I’m quite pleased by the results that these limitations yielded.

For this kind of scenarios I’m currently shooting with a Sony A7RIII and lenses ranging from 24 to 400mm. I’m primarily a prime lens shooter (whenever I can). I find that prime lenses give the subject more character, and subsequently me more artistic opportunities to express that character. One is of course limited to a fixed focal range, but as seen in these images I think that with a little ingenuity that is rather a creative opportunity rather than exclusively a crippling limitation.

Most of the images seen here were captured with a Sigma Art 135mm-lens for the Sony FE-mount system, either in full frame or in crop sensor format to gain a little more reach. To be as unobtrusive as possible, not disturbing the rehearsal process, I positioned myself quite far back on stage and mostly out of sight. This meant that I couldn’t get the usual close ups of the conductor, but ended up doing sort of “environmental action portraits” instead. This resulted in a combination of a cinematic(ish) view of the stage along with the subject separation and compression that you get using a telephoto lens.

I chose to incorporate light reflections of a grand piano and a Wagner tuba to hopefully create some depth and definition to the images. The edit is also centred around the main subject, making her mental and visual connection with the musicians of the orchestra as apparent as possible.

You probably know by now that I absolutely love my Leica cameras, but i have to admit that the Sony system really shines in this kind of scenario. Great dynamic range and autofocus capabilities are pretty essential for shooting in dim/contrasty locations with this much movement. I would love to try the Sony A9ii with the behemoth 400mm f2.8 at some point, that should be pretty amazing for this kind of stuff.

But for now: “Practice, practice, practice..”

Ole

Visual harmony in beautiful Busan

My two Leica cameras saw a lot of action on our day off i Busan, the second largest city in South Korea. I was especially eager to test the latest addition to my arsenal of camera gear, the Leica M10, in a real world scenario. I’m happy to report that this old school manual camera has been featured numerous times professionally during this tour, which I didn’t expect going into this assignment. The split second images captured with the M10 might not be as crisp and technically “perfect” as those taken by its more modern counterparts, but there’s a special feeling when capturing and looking back at an image that you have taken without any of the modern conveniences. That is very similar to playing a classical instrument, as mentioned before on this blog.

I hope that you will enjoy this little taste of Busan, in full manual mode.

Ole

The artistic process

A close look (literally) at the conductor’s role in a rehearsal situation, as observed from the co-principal viola chair of the orchestra: Greeting, looking, listening, coordinating and generally having fun making music together.

Featuring Han-Na Chang, chief conductor of the Trondheim Symphony Orchestra & Opera, at work with the orchestra in Seoul.

Ole