An Interview with Eolake Stobblehouse

Eolake Stobblehouse was born in 1963 in the small town of Karrebæksminde, Denmark. His father was a house painter, and his mother an artistically inclined bohemian out of Sweden. From early childhood, he exhibited a keen interest in philosophy, technology, and not the least, art. He studied the various techniques and disciplines of fine art avidly, and when he got a camera at age 11, he became absorbed by the possibilities of the photographic medium.

Stobblehouse has won many titles and medals for his fine photographic work, work which he later has expanded and refined in the digital realm. He also maintained an occasionally-successful career as a fine arts painter and draughtsman.

Beyond that, Eolake Stobblehouse is a writer of science fiction short stories for acclaimed American publications, and is currently writing about art and Macintosh computers for various magazines. He is published in the USA, the UK, France, Denmark, Germany, Australia, Italy and Spain. He is working on a book about art, creation, and aesthetics, and how they relate to the universe.

Norm: Eolake, you seem to have an eye for seeing the ordinary in life and turning it into an extraordinary photograph. What's your strategy here? Do you plan your shots beforehand, or simply carry a camera around with you wherever you go and shoot whatever catches your eye?

Eolake: Very kind of you. Well, I know photographers who work by putting on a camera like a shirt in the morning. But it never worked for me. If I'm not particularly looking for pictures, I rarely see them. Making photos is a intense mental process for me. I have to "kick the motor into gear" when I do it. Sometimes when I close the camera down and decide I'm done for the day, I can almost feel those high-velocity flywheels start to wind down.

So it's rather wearing, I can only do it when I'm fresh and I've specifically decided to do it.

I don't usually have specific pictures planned ahead, it comes about as a "collaboration with the world."

I often find that the pictures from one session tend to follow a thread, and be of similar mind and compositions. Maybe there's a particular Inspiration that one taps into and plugs into the world when one works like that, and the products reflect it.

Norm: What are your favorite cameras and lenses, and why?



Eolake: Oh boy, I can go on about that. (And sometimes I do on my blog.) My home is full of cameras, many of them classic ones bought cheap on eBay just for decoration. All of those are metal bodies, which you sadly almost never find on new cameras these days.

Back in the film days, camera evolution was slow enough that you could keep a Favorite Camera for ten years. But here in the first decade of the millennium and the digital camera revolution, things are going so fast that even good cameras seem obsolete practically after a week. This will surely level out after a while though. Maybe.

What I tend to like is cameras and lenses which let you work fast, and give high quality images. Especially when combined with a portable camera. So my ideal camera would be shirt-pocket sized and make pin-sharp wall-sized pictures, and take photos hand-held at night. It may take a couple decades for us to get that one.

I like compact cameras, because I'm usually a walk-around photographer, and a big camera gets irritating after a while, and attracts attention.

I also like automaticity. Auto-focus and auto-exposure allows me to concentrate on the composition. Of course, if you need to do special looks like a very blurred backgrounds for example, you need to know what the camera is doing and control it tightly. So automaticity will only take you so far.

Norm: It intrigues me that you run Domai, a website featuring lovely figure photography, and yet your own work seldom contains people. Can you explain why this is?

Eolake: Ah, that changes back and forth. I've done quite many pictures with people in the past, and I'll probably do so again. It only takes a bit more time to arrange and do properly.

Norm: Your photography seems to encompass the entire spectrum of emotions, but in a subtle way. For instance, here is humor, sadness, loneliness, and aggression. Do you find that your own emotions inspire your work, or steer it in different directions?

Eolake: I tend to work with pictures in visual terms, forms, lines, colors, textures, light. But people will always invest emotions into pictures, just try and stop them.

Norm: I personally enjoy your "theme" photos, for instance, your "Study in Scarlet" series is an awful lot of fun. Do you consciously seek to create themes in your photographs, or does it happen spontaneously?

Eolake: Often spontaneously, but it varies. In the case of the Scarlet series, I noticed it happening, and started looking for more subjects with red in them.

Series are fun. If you're lucky you get a bigger-than-the-sum thing happening. And they also make you work more consciously with the pictures, and grow.

Norm: Do you have any advice for beginning photographers who wish to learn more about the craft? How can they learn to be more creative with the photographs they take?



Eolake: These days there are hundreds of web sites where you can see pictures or discuss photography with other happy amateurs.

This may lead to the blind leading the blind though, so I also advice to go to the library and get all the books on photography they have, and also all the books with art photography they can deliver. (You may have to use the service where they get books from other libraries, since photo books are quite expensive, and each library don't have many.)

You can also join a local club. If you're lucky it will have some people who are really interested in pictures. Many people are mostly in it for the chat and coffee though, so you never know.

It is very important to enjoy and study the works of photographers who are better than you. If you can't find anybody better than you, you don't have a problem. Or maybe you do.

See more of Eolake's photos here.

Artist Profile: Ingmar Bergman

In each of our lives there are a handful of individuals who made a real impact, who by direct influence or by example helped to explain the world and shape our character. For me, Swedish film director Ingmar Bergman was such a person. He died today, age 89.

Along with my parents, a few family members and close friends, Bergman taught me much of what I know of the world, the human psyche, love and sacrifice, hard work and craft, balance and composition, movement and timing. By exploring its many contrasts, he helped me to comprehend art's many facets and its incalculable value to human beings.



Through his films, stage direction and writing, Bergman explored the full spectrum of the human condition: love and death, madness and compassion, raw selfishness, bitter hatred, joyous optimism, faith and despair. As he said through his character, Eva, played by Liv Ullman in his film, Autumn Sonata:

To me, man is a tremendous creation, an inconceivable thought; and in man there is everything, from the highest to the lowest, just as in life..."

In a Seattle interview six years ago, Woody Allen -- who frequently gave homage to Bergman in films like A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy and Interiors -- said:

There's no question in my mind that Bergman is the greatest of all filmmakers. No one else even comes close. His accomplishment is that immense. He is the only movie director to ever probe the human psyche on such a (skillful) or profound level. He's the first director to dramatize metaphysical issues. His body of work compares to Proust's cycle of novels or even the plays of Shakespeare. In art, there's good and there's great and there's genius -- Bergman is genius.

I will leave a detailed examination of Bergman's many works to others more qualified. But let me give you one personal example of his amazing talent.

In 1985 a Strindberg play called Miss Julie was performed near my home in Los Angeles. Cast and directed by Bergman, the play was performed entirely in Swedish. A day prior to the performance, however, I read an English translation of the play and so had the plot fresh in my mind on the evening of the event. Soon after the curtain rose and the play started, I found myself asking a series of unusual (for me) questions:

What is happening between the lines -- or perhaps, in spite of them? How should an actor move across the stage? What should he be doing with his hands -- his body language -- when another actor is speaking? What might be done to enhance the vision of the play? What action may be introduced by the characters that may either promote or contrast with the words being spoken? Scene by scene, moment by moment, how might color and light be used to best effect?

These were questions that had never occurred to me before seeing this production, and as the play progressed it became increasingly apparent that the raw words of the play were being manipulated by a genius. Bergman's direction doubled the play's assets and halved its shortcomings. Like a master illusionist, he took the sparse lines of the play and breathed life into them. It was not only Stringberg's play I was seeing, it was Bergman's as well.

To me these insights were breathtaking and profound, and I never forgot them: a drawing or a painting should be a picture of not only the subject, but the artist as well.

For a complete list of the films and stage productions of Ingmar Bergman, go here.

Artist Profiles: Leopold & Rudolph Blaschka

During the late 19th century, the Dresden studio of LEOPOLD BLASCHKA (1822-1895) and his son RUDOLF (1857-1929) produced beautifully detailed glass models of exotic plants and bizarre sea creatures for natural history museums and aquaria all over the world.

For over a century, thousands of people have peered into the cherrywood cabinets in the Botanical Museum at Harvard University to see hundreds of astonishingly life-like glass replicas of exotic flowers. Each flower was made thousands of miles away from Harvard in the German city of Dresden by the artisanal glassmaker Leopold Blaschka and his son Rudolf.

The Blaschkas not only supplied Harvard’s Botanical Museum with some 4,400 replica flowers, but over a period of 50 years they created thousands more remarkably realistic glass flowers and sea creatures for natural history museums as far afield as the National Museum of Wales in Cardiff and India.

At a time when the public was entranced by the bizarre plants unearthed by explorers and by the splendidly surreal creatures discovered beneath the sea (since the invention of the submarine and deep sea diving kit in the mid-1800s) the Blaschkas offered a glimpse into those exotic worlds.

More Information about the Blaschkas

More samples of the Blaschka's work

Photographer Profile: Alen Sislen

Alen Sislen is passionate about photography; not just the finished photograph, but also the photographic process of visualizing and then creating the printed image from the millions of pixels, that when combined represent what he experienced when looking through the camera's lens. For him, the photographic process is not complete until he tries to convey to the viewer his excitement, whether produced by the play of light and shadow, by bold colors, by subtle tonalities, by rich textures, or by the intensity or even the calmness of the overall image. His goal is for the viewer to be moved or intrigued by what they see, regardless of whether their reaction is the same as what motivated me to make the image.



While he uses the most modern digital photographic equipment, his style and technique are traditional. In the digital "darkroom" it is not unusual to spend hours "processing" and printing an image that may have taken just 1/30th of a second to "capture." Although he takes advantage of state-of-the-art equipment, digital manipulation is kept to a minimum.



Through photography, he tries to communicate what motivates him to press the shutter release. The writer uses words; the musician uses musical notes; the painter uses brush strokes; the potter uses clay. Photography enables Alen to present the world around us in a way that stimulates more than the sense of sight, but hopefully, also evokes our emotion and imagination.



His greatest influences have been those with whom he has studied, including the well-known British landscape photographer Charlie Waite, widely published former National Geographic photographer Bruce Dale, digital expert Thom Hogan and fine art photographic artist and Photoshop master John Paul Caponigro.

Visit Alen Sislen 's website.