About Kristjan Logason Photographer

The road

The road to perfection is endless. Starting out by working as a press photographer before attending school, gave me probably one of the best lessons I have had in Photography. This was a small newspaper in north of Iceland and I had to do it all. Not only take the pictures but also all developing and printing for the correspondents. On top of that I had to deliver, each weekend the front page. Full size image which had to be strong and artistic.

In a small town there are not all to many front page stories so each and every week I had to have images that could stand for them self as the main image on the front page. This was challenging but taught me a good lesson. I learnt speed from sports photography. I learnt to work fast from deadlines and I learnt how to read people faces from the portraits and communicate with people. All a good education in most all aspects of photography and a fine training for what was to come.

 Following my heart. Following my heart (she is now my wife) I moved to  the capital area and worked as a freelance photographer/writer for Magazines and started nibbling with advertising photography. There was my field. It was filled with difficult problems that needed to be studied and solved. Still I lacked the technology aspect to much for that field and felt that reading (no internet at that time) and experimenting was not enough. Therefor I went to Sweden to study Photography.  

Tricks of the trade. School is nice. You have all the time in the world to dwell on a certain problem and how to solve that. You have the time to experiment and you have the time to learn new things. Digital age was coming. Finally they where here. All those programs that I had been following the evolution of through my work in the computer industry, where getting to your desktop and photography was on its way to go digital. Suddenly there where programs like Photo styler and Photo shop. Scanners and Macintosh.  

Creative solution. The technology made for a change in course and new fields to be explored. All the experiments of in camera multiple exposures and light trickery was to change and move into the computer. I loved this, actually so much that 10 days before the final exam and our graduate exhibition I jumped in to the darkroom of computer age. Every image that I had made and prepared for the exhibition was thrown out and I started working on new images with the aid of a computer.  I wanted to do digital images based on short poems i had written to my wife. The digital cameras that we had access to where not good enough. Therefore I had to go out shoot images on film. Develop, Print and then scan them before I could start working on the final collage. Collage it had to be as the quality of digital printing was not good enough and the capability of computers working on big files was none. There fore my ideas had to be adjusted to the capabilities of the technology. I had to learn, and experiment along the way.

Hard work. It was a hard job and for a while I feared I would not make it. My wife feared I would not physically make it as I was up day and night for those ten days. But what a fun I was having. I manage to do it all. Make the images glue them up, mount and frame. I was going to be the first student of this school to graduate with computer images. And I was. I was proud of my self. I had learnt to tame a new technology. I had prepared my future and actually learnt a lot in school.  

Problems to solve. Still there where lot of barriers to be broken. I never forget the day when the grate street Magnum Photographer Bruce Gilden came to the final exhibition. He was going to look at the images and discuss them. It was some grate time and he was very thorough in his criticism on all the students images. Then He came to mine. Looked at it and said :"This is manipulated". And then walked away. Leaving me puzzled. That same year the Icelandic photographers association refused to show my images at an group exhibition. It was not Photography they said. The new world was here but the world was not ready.  

Final reward. The world is not all bad. In fact it is really good. The advertising world was almost ready. Advertising agencies where heading the same road and liked getting print ready images.  I was getting paid to do what I love. Solve the problem of taking pictures and  digitize them to perfection. On top of that my images where getting noticed and awarded. My graduating images, made in artistic purpose, bought by a company to use as promotional material. My images used in text books in USA on how to do advertising. And my images of Political Party leaders in Iceland are still brought up when ever the discussion of women in politics comes up. Aint life just wonderful