Highlights of 2019

This year there has been filled with fun photoshoots, and I am grateful for all the opportunities I have had to photograph together with so many great dancers. It has been a real treat! As 2019 is coming to a close I thought it was time to create another highlights blog post, so is a selection of photos from this past year. If you click on a photo it will take you to that particular blog post where you can see more from that photoshoot.

Annika Alarotu dancing on the ice at Brunnsviken. For this photoshoot I brought my old and heavy 200 mm f/2 lens, but it paid off as it renders the scene so beautifully. I love how well the colours go together in this picture. Annika is from Finland, so she felt at home on the ice. With her was Javier Rojas from Cuba, and it was his first time on ice. More about that in the blog post if you click on the photo.
Nora Svendsgård in my Green Room. We were playing around with the scarf, trying to capture it hanging in mid-air.
Javier Rojas. I think this was our third photoshoot together. We met up just around sunset, and after the sun had crossed the horizon we spent the rest of the shoot chasing lights in the city. Here we had just found a big bright light panel outside a house, and used it as backdrop for Javier’s expressive hands. I am not really sure how he manages to bend his little finger like that.
Annika Alaratou floating in mid air. I like how effortless she makes the jump look.
Fanni Pennanen. This was one of the photos just before we unleashed feathers in my Green Room. I then kept those feathers lying around for a week or two and used them in multiple photoshoots. Feathers get everywhere, and to this day I still occasionally find feathers in my apartment.
Kale Lazarick. After sunset it quickly gets darker, and you can then either add more light artificially, or you can increase your exposure by changing your settings. Here we decided to use a longer shutter time to capture Kale’s movement.
Javier Rojas standing like a Greek statue. I have photoshopped the background to create a cleaner image.
Camille Chanial. The cherry blossom only blooms for a short while, so one early morning beginning of May we headed out to try and capture a few photos as the sun rose. Turns out we were not the only ones that had the same idea. There were so many photographers there, some had shown up hours before sunset to get ready. So we got this and a few other photos before moving on to a less crowded place.
Eline Larrory. This year the IBAGS conference took place in Biarritz. I managed to get in touch with some local dancers through some friends. One afternoon after the conference I headed out for a beach ballet photoshoot. This was my favourite photo from that shoot, it is crazy how high Eline managed to jump.
Elisa Lons from the Royal Swedish Ballet. You can see the progress of my renovation throughout the photos of 2019. Here the walls had been done, but the floor was not yet finished. I like how raw it makes the photo look. Elisa made an amazing pose, and when we added the hair twist it all came together into this beautiful photo. One of my top photos from this year.
Cecilia Liu and Helle Carlstedt. Nine months pregnant and pole dancing, why not? It is amazing what the human body is capable of.
Kale Lazarick from the Royal Swedish Ballet School walking on water. We have done several photoshoots together, and Kale has a great sense for dance and creative poses. This location is another of my favourite spots that I been using a lot this past year. It is a short walk from home, and each time I go there I keep finding new angles and ways to photograph. The water level changes quite a bit from time to time, and here there are a couple of stones out in the water just below the surface that Kale is standing on.
Kale Lazarick and Matthea Pedersen. I was trying to just pick no more than one photo from each blog post, but I made an exception here.
Tereza Dragomir from the Royal Swedish Ballet School. This old umbrella has been with me more than twenty years. I have found that sometimes a photo becomes more interesting by showing less, which is why we have Tereza hiding behind the umbrella. For this part of the photoshoot there was quite a bit of wind and some rain. I think the photo just after shows the umbrella flipping over and the rain pouring down. Click the image if you are curious.
Evelina Gommel is a rhythmic gymnast from Uppsala. I photographed her and her sister in Näsbypark, and we had such great weather that day. Lots of fun!
Isabella Larsson from the Royal Swedish Ballet School. She was one of the first ballet dancers that I started photographing with. This is another of my favourite locations which has amazing light.
Luiza Lopes from the Royal Swedish Ballet. This might be my favourite portrait from this past year. Photographed with the 200mm lens from the beach. Swedish summers are warm, but not by Brazilian standards. However, I am so happy that we managed to get this shot in the water.
Malin Vängelin. Not sure how she managed to get into this position, but I love it!
Hera Norin in the water. If I remember right this was the photoshoot we started at 9:30, had a break for lunch and then another break for dinner, before finishing at 21:00 in the evening. That did include picking which photos to edit also, so it was not all photographing, but we had so many pictures to choose from. A long, and very fun, day!
Nora Ekman on a windy day. The muted colour pallet in this photo works really well with the dress and the poses.
Silje Wøhni in Hagaparken. The red dress and the light make Silje’s pose really stand out against the background.
Johanna Primavera in the water at Brunnsviken during sunset. This is from the same photoshoot as the picture above. The long sleeved dress looks great with the water dripping from it. Between takes Johanna dipped down into the water to refill the dress with more water to get the droplets falling.
Inka Keränen and Kale Lazarick. It is fun to photograph with two dancers at the same time, because you can have so many more variations in what you create.
Coralie Aulas is another dancer from the Royal Swedish Ballet. We did a photoshoot in Gamla stan. Love the pose, she makes it look so effortless. Click the photo to see the blog post with more from that shoot.
Javier Rojas. The Cuban ballet dancer that continues to impress. This photoshoot was in September, and the water was not warm, but we got some amazing photos.
Tahlia Kumlin and friend. For this photo Sara Runfola was holding up the coat, and the letting go while running off to the right. We needed a few tries before we got this photo.
Jeremie Neveu from the Royal Swedish Ballet. Here we had the opportunity to photograph in the Rotunda, which had a really high ceiling, so we were making the most of it.
Emilia Fridholm with some fairy lights from our photoshoot with her and her little brother. If you want to see some great sibling photos, check out the blog post.
Nora Ekman might be the most flexible dancer I have photographed. This was shot around sunrise in Näsbypark. It might be a pain getting up this early, but it is so worth it when you get such beautiful light.
Maëva Cotton is another talented dancer from the Royal Swedish Ballet, here in the Green Room. As you can see the parquet floor is now done.
Heidi Salminen and Julien Keulen. I love the autumn colours, so it was so much fun to get a chance to photograph these two amazing dancers in Hagaparken.
Linn Vecchiattini and Noah Rengart from the Royal Swedish Ballet School. This was another really long photoshoot, and we got so many beautiful photos.
Lucinda Rosell. Love the colours and the pose! We have done a few photoshoots together now, and she is always fun to photograph with. Here I have used photoshop to replace the background and paint in the shadow to create a cleaner look for the pose.
Lucinda Rosell. The window in the Green Room faces west, so sometime in the afternoon the sun starts to peak through. Normally I prefer indirect light as it is much softer, and I find the patch of sunlight distracting, but for this photo we instead incorporated it into the composition and I feel it enhances the photo.
Isabelle Maia is another amazing dancer from the Royal Swedish Ballet. I photographed with her and Mackenzie Farquhar, and there are many more photos with them in the blog post (check out the cover photo of that blog post).
Cornelia Andersson. This photo was taken during the indoor part of our photoshoot. Cornelia has this amazing long hair that we started experimenting with.
Sumin Han and Tove Lesterlin from the Royal Swedish Ballet Schoolr. It is always fun to play with perspective, here we tried to create an eye with the pupil in the centre.
Sara Runfola. The Green room is not very big, but with a bit ingenuity and Photoshop you can not tell.
Auguste Marmus and Sonia Lautenbacher. “Time for Tea”. So much fun photographing with creative people. One of my favourite things is when you start throwing ideas around, and you help build on each other’s ideas to create something together.
Emilia Fridholm returned for a photoshoot among derelict buildings out in the woods. It was a bit cold, but really beautiful. Click the photo for more pictures from that shoot.
Elisa Lons. We managed to fit in one more dance photoshoot before the end was over. It is always fun to include some props in the photos.

A big thank you to everyone that participated in the photoshoots during 2019! Looking forward to seeing what we will create together in 2020!

Here are the highlight posts from previous years.

— Johannes

Written by:

Be First to Comment

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.