The latest weekend I attended a StarCraft II event at Annexet in Stockholm - the Nordic Nationals championship qualifier hosted by DreamHack. It was great meeting a lot of people and friends. Also got to play some Heart of the Swarm.
However, one of the crazy cool things is that, the really famous and amazing fashion photographer Zhang "zemotion" Jingna was in Sweden and also attended the event, watched some of the matches and - we got to meet her! Here's a snapshot taken by Yami B. of me, Zhang, Hampus, Emma and Brita.
It was all great fun and I'm so happy that I got to meet up with one of my idols. Earlier in my life I've met Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux, and Christer Fuglesang, the first Swede that went to space. Shaking hands and meeting Zhang Jingna is equally as cool. :)
Looking forward to the next SC2-event in September in Globen, will be sweet. Here's some pics from the day.
And last out, two tired gamers after the tournament, EG iNcontroL and Brita.
Carl Oscar Aaro
,
04:59 the 2nd of August, 2012
Yesterday I went to the VOLT festival in Uppsala Konsert & Kongress together and together with Brita and Nelle we listened to all kinds of different electronic music. I had really fun and it was nice to go around with the camera snapping a few photos.
There were some cute robots roaming around the area, built by David Wätte. Here's one of them asking you to take you with it in the escalator.
I uploaded an album with more pictures from VOLT at http://carloscar.se/photos/view/id/1763-volt_2012#/
Carl Oscar Aaro
,
16:18 the 10th of June, 2012
About a week ago I ordered a bunch of new business cards from MOO. I wanted something up to date to give out when I'm shooting during the j-convention UppCon the 15th - 17th of June. I decided to create a few different versions of the cards to highlight that I shoot many different things, like Cosplay, Fashion, Alternative, Weddings, Events, etc. (and a few more funny ones too.) All in all I ended up with around 30 different sets of cards and I'm actually quite satisfied with the end result.
Tiny? Yes! They are MOO's "mini cards", and are half the size of a classic type business card, meant for graphics-people, creative artists and photographers.
Now I just have to get my thumbs out and start using some of the services that I've featured on the back of the cards. :)
Carl Oscar Aaro
,
20:47 the 3rd of June, 2012
The sixth day have now past and I've managed to publish four sets of photos as well as a blog post, during the past week - and it feels so good to finalize this stuff, I really need to do this more often!
Tomorrow I'm leaving for the ski resort Ã…re for 8 days with 10 friends - to party, ski and of course to take a sauna or two (prolly will be like every day though). Will be loads of fun, beautiful nature, muscle fever, etc.
Hopefully I can get a few moments over tomorrow evening to upload the first of the sets that I shot with Ophelia Overdose in August; if not, maybe I can manage to do it during the coming week!
One of the many photos from the shoot; outfit, make up, styling by her self.
Glad tur!
Carl Oscar Aaro
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23:35 the 4th of February, 2012
This week I'm running a little experiment on myself. I have to upload an album (or post a blog post) each day during the week. Lately I haven't put much time into developing old photos and the pile of work just keeps growing, so this is a way to help myself to actually get stuff done!
Monday I posted the Kuroshitsuji cosplay photos featuring Stephanie and Josefin. On Tuesday evening I uploaded a black and white album from Dreamhack in November. Tomorrow the plan is to upload some martial arts photos taken together with Mattias Brandt, Emil Trägårdh and Eric Pütter in Nässjö. Here's a few previews already!
Originally I thought about posting some really old event photos today but I couldn't pinpoint where I've stored them so instead I'll post this entry, explaining my work this week so far. So now what to choose for Friday, Saturday and Sunday then, so much to choose from!
Carl Oscar Aaro
,
23:51 the 1st of February, 2012
In my last entry I wrote about the new camera lens that I got. Shortly thereafter Brita and I went out to Berthåga, nearby where we live, and took the lens for a test run. She's wearing a second-hand dress and jacket that we got really cheap. Second-hand could be such a great place for modeling outfits, so much cool (and many more weird) stuff!
These photos are all shot with f1.6 and ISO 50, and the only things adjusted are some colors, vignette (actually the lens did most of the vignette job though) and post-resize-sharpening.
Last one at the fence is my favourite, and Brita's too I believe. :)
I have a bunch of more photos to finalize, pics of Steph and Jözz, Ophelia, some more from an other shoot with Brita and some cosplay sets. Currently no photo jobs which actually is a good thing right now, makes me able to have some more motivation and extra spare time to actually clean up the backlog. :)
Carl Oscar Aaro
,
22:06 the 24th of October, 2011
Finally! Today I finally got my most-precious-of-my-dreams lens, the Canon EF 85mm, with the very wide maximum aperture 1,2. Pretty much the best portrait lens there is for a Canon user.
Lately I haven't published a lot of photos, mostly due to much at work, much at home, some photo assignments, etc. However, I still get photography requests but I've been forced to say "nope, can't." or "sorry, later", due to my backlog of photos growing all the time. So, my current project is to finalize the majority of all the pics laying around before I'm allowed to take on new assignments. Well, maybe except for a small test shoot with this new cool lens of course. :)
And about the new lens. Due to the paid photo jobs lately I've been able to purchase it today. I have probably longed for it for a couple of years already - however I had the opportunity to borrow a friend's (Bernhard) 85/1,2 earlier this year, when I shot with JúlÃa in Gothenburg - and that's pretty much when I decided on this - I need one myself!
I bought it over at Rajala Pro Shop (link to the lens on their site) in Stockholm together with a protection filter. I'll post some pics later on when I've tried it out for real. I'm so very happy and excited about this!
Carl Oscar Aaro
,
22:34 the 21st of September, 2011
Last week I had the pleasure to shoot together with multi-talented German model Ophelia Overdose (@miss_overdose), while she was visiting Stockholm and Sweden - she's not only an awesome model but also a costume designer, make up artist, hair stylist, etc. Here's a few previews from our session.
I was quite nervous before she arrived at Emil's place (thanks for letting us be there btw!), but I'm really glad I got to meet her; she was very sweet, helpful and GREAT to work with.
We shot two different outfits. First a set with her own designs, in an area that were a bit steam-punk-ish / post-apocalyptic. From this set I have a whole bunch of photos that I really love. It was below a bridge that I go past twice every day, commuting.
Afterwards, Ophelia changed into a army style latex dress from the fashion brand "Westward Bound" and we went down to Gamla Stan and "Riksdagens hus" for the second set of the day.
More photos will be up when I'm done sorting and picking out my favourites. There's so many of them! However, I wished that I would've had more time to plan a cooler setting for the shoots - next time! All in all, it was a great experience and it was so much fun to meet a model that I've followed, both on deviantArt and Facebook, for quite some time.
Carl Oscar Aaro
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19:43 the 18th of August, 2011
I'm having a hard time falling asleep tonight, and all of a sudden the whole bedroom are starting to fill with orange/red light. I ran out to the living room and snapped a photo of the sun starting to rise over Uppsala city. Love this view.
Time for another try at sleep. G'night!
Carl Oscar Aaro
,
05:39 the 18th of August, 2011
Last week I attended the NärCon convention held at the University of Linköping. I worked as a part of the "photography and film" team, shooting pretty much everything at the event. We shot cosplays, stage performances, people playing in the nice weather, in our studio and people bathing in a pool. TukTuk also rigged up some cool laser and we tried to snap a few cool shots - something that we totally should try some other time, when we have more time.
The rest of all the NärCon photos can be found on konventsbilder.se. (and my selection at my own album Convention » NärCon 2011)
All in all, the event was pretty nice, mostly due to all the nice people being there. Oh, and many thanks to TukTuk, Nelli and Christian for letting me and Brita crash at your places. <3
The day after returning from Linköping I had a shoot planned with German model Ophelia Overdose, in Stockholm city, so currently I'm working on fixing a few previews from the shoot that I'll post here in a separate blog post. Back to work, work!
Carl Oscar Aaro
,
14:28 the 12th of August, 2011
How to enable the +1 button on mobile devices like iPhone, iPad and Android. Here's the fix!
Google+ is the new thing that is like facebook, but not facebook. Now site owners can put up +1-buttons on their pages which is pretty much the same as facebook "like" buttons, but for Google+. They look like this (press it and you'll +1 carloscar.se)
However, these plusone-buttons doesn't show up on mobile devices, like iPad, iPhone or Android unless you load a different JavaScript when going mobile. I'm posting this just because I had a hard time myself finding a somewhat nice solution to all of this.
Start off with removing the line <script type="text/javascript" src="https://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js"></script> entirely from your project and instead paste the following code on the very bottom of your <body> element:
<script>
(function () {
var s = document.createElement('script'); s.async = true;
s.type = 'text/javascript';
s.src = 'https://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js';
if (typeof(navigator) != 'undefined'
&& navigator.userAgent
&& /iPad|iPhone|Android/.test(navigator.userAgent))
s.src = "https://ssl.gstatic.com/webclient/js/gc/" +
"22224365-adc8a19e" + // changed whenever Google make changes
"/googleapis.client__plusone.js";
(document.getElementsByTagName('HEAD')[0]
|| document.getElementsByTagName('BODY')[0]).appendChild(s);
}());
</script>
And that's it. Now the +1 button will show up on your iPad, iPhone or Android device too. But please note that the string "22224365-adc8a19e" should be changed whenever Google makes any changes to their plusone-button-code, the old version will still be available since they're not removing anything but it could be good to keep up to date, until they actually enable use of the +1 button for all platforms.
In case you were wondering, since I'm a web developer, I'm sneaking in this little post about something else than photography and that's why I'm writing about this weird stuff. Well, here's an old photo so it's not totally out of context. :)
If you're missing a Google+ account and want to try it out, give me a shout and I'll throw an invite your way. A cool community-like service isn't as cool without the users you care about.
Carl Oscar Aaro
,
00:46 the 4th of July, 2011
Hi,
So I've slacked off a bit on the blogging. Mostly since I've had quite a lot to do during the last month and when there's been a few moments over, I've pretty much spent them by resting. So this will be some kind of catch-up-post just to post some photos of what's happened the latest month.
I have had a photo session together with Stephanie S. and her girlfriend Josefin "Jözz" S. They were cosplaying Ciel Phantomhive and Sebastian from Black Butler / Kuroshitsuji. Here's three photos from the set as a preview - the rest will end up in a separate album.
UppCon:11 passed. I worked in the photo team together with Gustav "TukTuk" K., Annie "Jinxiz" B., Joacim "Roboman" S. and Bernhard "zwc" H. - In total I think I shot over 6000 photos / 120 GB. The (not as many) developed pics are up at konventsbilder.se.
In connection to the UppCon:11 convention, the Swedish championship in Cosplay were also held. I linked the promo-photos we produced in an earlier post. The pics could be seen on around one third of the city-buses here in Uppsala during a two-week-period. Quite nice. :)
Around two weeks after UppCon we went away to DreamHack, a computer festival in Jönköping. I worked in the Creative-team, arranging competitions in graphics, photography, music and animations - computer art - demoscene stuff. We had a really small team this event but everyone in it was so freaking great. It was quite a good event and we've got pretty much everything set up until next time. (so it'll be even better!)
I didn't really have any time to plan something special for the DH photo competition so I submitted an old photo of Brita for the photo competition and placed fifth (photo below). Brita on the other hand, won the whole thing with her entry "DreamHacks bubblare"! Grats!
More over, we've moved to a new appartment (in the same building - and same floor, though). Boxes still haven't unpacked themselves but it's going in the right direction. Soon enough we can actually invite people over!
Oh yes, almost forgot, some of my photos of Jenni "pixelninja" K. were recently featured in the third issue of the cosplay-magazine Cosplay Gen. (Sorry about the bad iphone-photo of the magazine, all my camera lenses are currently in Iceland with my girlfriend.)
And that's it! Now when I have this blog post away from my todo-list, I can focus on new stuff. Didn't mean to be TLDR, hope it's not!
Carl Oscar Aaro
,
20:29 the 3rd of July, 2011
This is an evening full of inspiration - and I'm using it to edit some more of my photos of Verena; maybe I can even finish off the whole album so I'm ready to publish it tomorrow? I won't promise anything but it's going great right now, this is the flow that I need!
While Brita is full of coffee (she's usually sleeping this time of the day) and also in photoshop-mode, I'll give you one more preview of the set. A bit more "highressed" than usual even!
Behold!
Carl Oscar Aaro
,
22:37 the 18th of May, 2011
About a week ago we shot a campaign for the Swedish championship (SM) in Cosplay, so we invited a bunch of cool cosplayers that we know. Modeling in the banner is Josefin, Verena, Karl, Gustav and Linn. The event "Cosplay SM" will be held during Sunday at UppCon in June.
For the promo-shots we hired a photo-studio in central Stockholm. I shot the actual photos and with the incredible Tobias Ahlin editing the pics I believe the result is pretty nice. The second photo will be shown on buses in Uppsala and in local newspapers.
Check out the site. http://cosplaysm.se/. And please take a look at the promo video Robert Levelind put together at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b7_Jc6jauY8
Carl Oscar Aaro
,
21:24 the 24th of April, 2011
My photo of Brita got accepted to the photo competition and was just shown on the big screen at Revision. In total there were around 30 entries, some really good, some were bad - so quite a variation. Here's my contribution, it's called "demo dreamland".
I'm totally excited that it was approved and shown. Now just hope that other people here like it and will vote for it. I like it, do you? :) Cheers!
Carl Oscar Aaro
,
17:47 the 23rd of April, 2011
We travelled. For twelve hours we went by buss, airplane, another buss, then train, then switching to a second train and thereafter a short taxi trip. Finally, we arrived at Revision. The first day has been really sweet. I've ate kebap (they spell kebab like kebap), drank lots of beer and a couple of drinks, met nice people, talked about programming, music, graphics and of course beer. :)
I even found some nice beer mixed with cola. Great stuff, why don't we have this in Sweden?
The annual Scene.org awards were as always held... though in Norway (not at the actual German easter party as usual). So we watched a live stream from The Gathering in Norway. Pretty nice, nothing unexpected, but nice.
I also brought the princess with me. <3
Carl Oscar Aaro
,
00:51 the 23rd of April, 2011
In a few hours we're heading to the demo party (computer-art, programming, music, graphics, etc.) Revision, the successor after Breakpoint. This year the party is located in Saarbrücken in Germany. To be honest I have no idea where Saarbrücken is geographically but I believe we'll manage to arrive there sooner or later.
They usually also host a photo competition which I'll try to attend. A few days ago I got the idea to shoot Brita with the white wig with lots and lots of demos. I did something similar a couple of years back where we stapled printed screenshots on a dress - with this photo I placed 2nd at Breakpoint. Let's cross fingers that the photo gets accepted, would be awesomely fun, and if it is, I'll post the final photo here on Saturday. I'm reaaaaaaally really satisfied with the result, I think it looks really cool. But until Saturday, here's a tiny behind the scenes shot from when I was preparing the scene.
Carl Oscar Aaro
,
01:00 the 22nd of April, 2011
Just visited DreamHack's StarCraft II Invitational tournament in Stockholm where eight world-class players competed about 100 000 SEK. Really really great play by all the players. My plan was to snap some photos of the event but I ended up just taking ~40 pics and enjoyed all the matches instead.
For more photos from the event I recommend taking a look at my friend "Hampe"'s photos at DreamHack's flickr-account. http://www.flickr.com/photos/dreamhack/collections/72157626466134624/
Tomorrow I'm off for a small photography-assignment at a local pharmacy in Stockholm. Just some plain shots of the people working there. More off, I'm almost finished with the set with Verena that we shot a few weeks ago, I'm really happy with it so far. :)
Carl Oscar Aaro
,
23:40 the 12th of April, 2011
I've felt totally productive the whole day today. Finished off three new albums (!!); uploaded the photos from Trysil, the revised cosplay pics from Confusion and I've completed the set of Helena. I'll upload those photos tomorrow.
So, since I've worked off some of my photo backlog I now only have the photos of Verena (preview in the last post) and some new photos of Brita left to do (look at the bottom of this post), before I can take on some more challenges. :D
I wrote that I ordered a white wig earlier and yesterday it came to use! I shot together with Brita at home, first some casual nice looking photos and then we spaced out with a red background and white/blonde hair - I'm quite eager to get to work on these photos. :D And here's a preview straight from my Lightroom.
More off I skipped the www in carloscar.se (so it's just http://carloscar.se/ now), and I added some facebook comments to all the albums, could be a nice addition in case someone wants to write something productive. Peace~!
Carl Oscar Aaro
,
00:45 the 4th of April, 2011
Shalom.
Today I shot together with Verena on an ice-queen-themed set, she's the winter fading away. Here's two preview photos until I can get to selecting, sorting and editing the rest of them.
Verena did an awesome job and we also had assistance of Stephanie and Josefin (thanks!) with make up fixing and pose-help. All in all, a great photo day and I'm sure I'll shoot with Verena again.
Carl Oscar Aaro
,
23:09 the 20th of March, 2011
Recently I upped a few shots from my shoot with JúlÃa that I'm quite satisfied with, if you haven't seen them yet, go look at http://www.carloscar.se/photos/view/id/1750-julia___sweet#/.
Tomorrow I'm off to shoot together with Verena in Stockholm, the plan is to do something on the winter/cold-theme maybe with a spring/warm twist. We'll see how it goes, but I'm certain we'll manage to produce something nice.
By the way, I've also ordered a white wig (!!) that should arrive in the coming week that we'll try to make something cool with. Maybe it just sucks, maybe it's awesome kiva! ('kiva' is the new cool word in town.)
Development status. Next up I have to complete the studio photos from Confusion and thereafter the set with Helena. I'm also going to put up some pics from the skiing trip to Trysil where Brita, her mom and I were last week - nothing fancy but it's always nice with great views of nature.
More off, I've made some changes to the thumbnails on the site. Hopefully it'll work better and you should notice quite a difference in load times. Oh, and I've switched the facebook comments instead. So now it's easier to comment (and like!) a blog post. Go do it, try it out. :)
Carl Oscar Aaro
,
00:35 the 20th of March, 2011
Last weekend some local friends and I went down to an anime convention called Confusion, in Gothenburg. It was their first event and was probably quite successful. I worked together with some nice people in the photography team and you can see some of my photos at http://www.carloscar.se/confusion. It was all fun and I met some really cool people that I'll try to hook up some photo-time with later on.
While I was visiting, a friend that I've met through DreamHack, Annie B. (http://anniebeckman.blogg.se/) offered some space in her appartment where I could sleep (thanks!). We also managed to produce a small set of photos with a couple of small LED-lights. Here's a preview.
During the event I also managed to plan a shoot with another one of those DreamHack Crews, this time it was with the cool Julia G. so I met up with her at the museum where the event were held, borrowed the studio some and I think we used almost 900 frames. Shitloads to go through that I haven't had time for yet but here's at least two photos from the shoot.
Just two days after the event I got some fever and felt totally crappy for many days, still coughing. I've pretty much slept through the latest days but I'm finally up and running again. So today the sun was shining and I met up with Helena K. (guess what, DreamHack Crew again) and we went to Lappis where I used to live and shot with a few different sets of clothes. This is what it looked like.
I'll put up three new albums for all these sets hopefully during the coming week or shortly after that. It's nice to have some more people to take photos of, I'm all excited. :D Tomorrow it's time for some work work, nice to be back again. :)
Carl Oscar Aaro
,
23:24 the 6th of February, 2011
Site redesign once again!
Wow, how I really got fed up with working with prototype and all the crap around the old version of the site. Finally I came around and rebuilt the complete frontend, it's not really finished but it's working and out there. Still have some quirks I have to fix, scaling of photos and some work on the album view (it's a bit messed up right now but I'll try to think about something smart).
...oh, and Internet Explorer. Haven't even tested the site with that crap of a browser so I'll have to put some efforts there too, unless if I maybe just skip support for IE6/7/8 _completely_? Yes? No? Yes?
Well, I hope you enjoy the new site. It'll be a lot easier for me to maintain so I might throw some things around during the coming weeks. Just follow my RSS and I'll be happy. And when we're on the subject. The blog is back (yay), I believe this is good news and this time it's actually hosted on wordpress.com so it'll be a lot easier to write down my thoughts whenever I feel like it. We'll see how it works out but I'm confident. I'll try to blog some about photography, maybe some random projects I'm working on. You'll probably see some rant about web development since that's mostly what I do but I'll try to keep it plain.
Fine! Post numero one in place and I guess the site is pretty much live? We're live? Yes! (*psst*, you can send me comments too!)
Welcome.
Carl Oscar Aaro
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04:42 the 27th of January, 2011
