A plate of meatballs, an orange sky.
How an unplanned stop in Stockholm led to one of my favourite photographs from Sweden.
I wasn’t looking for this photograph. I was simply enjoying an evening of Stockholm photography, taking in the city and seeing what caught my eye.
I just had some amazing meatballs at the famous Meatballs For The People, and was travelling through Stockholm on a scooter with my brother, planning to head into the centre and carry on with the evening. Nothing especially photographic was happening. I was simply enjoying being somewhere new, taking in the city and enjoying the freedom that comes with Stockholm photography, you never quite know what the city is going to give you.
Then the sky changed.
What had been an ordinary afternoon suddenly turned into this huge wash of orange, copper and deep violet. The kind of light that doesn’t wait around for you to finish what you’re doing.
I knew straight away that I needed to stop. Find somewhere with a clear view. Get the camera out. Don’t overthink it. Just make the photograph before the light disappeared.
I found a spot, dropped on the ND filter and set up for a long exposure. The water was calm, the city was starting to disappear into silhouette, and for a few minutes Stockholm looked completely different from the city I had been riding through.
This is the resulting image: The Nordic Glow.
The sky changed. I stopped. The photograph happened.
What I love about Stockholm photography.
That’s one of the things I enjoy most about photographing places rather than planning every photograph in advance. You can have an itinerary, a list of locations and a rough idea of what you want to shoot, but light has a habit of changing the plan. It’s one of the reasons Stockholm photography is so enjoyable, the city can change character in a matter of minutes.
I could easily have carried on into the city and missed this completely. Instead, I pulled over, slowed everything down and followed the light.
The ND filter gave me the chance to stretch the exposure and let the water settle into that almost glass-like look. The movement in the sky remained, while the city itself became a dark, simple silhouette.
I wasn’t trying to make Stockholm look spectacular. It already was. I was trying to hold onto what it looked like for those few minutes.
Sweden wasn’t all orange skies. And that’s exactly why I loved it.
After the pace of Stockholm, I spent time hiking in Tyresta National Park, around 20 kilometres south of Stockholm. It was a completely different experience. No traffic, no streets, no reason to hurry anywhere. Just old forest, cold air, rocky ground and small lakes that made it feel a world away from the city.
I sat beside the water for a while and simply enjoyed the quiet. Tyresta is known for its old pine and spruce forests, rocky landscapes and small forest lakes, but what stayed with me most was the feeling of being able to slow everything down. Those are the moments I find myself remembering just as clearly as the dramatic photographs.
It was there that I came across the Lonely Shelter. It was simple, isolated and surrounded by exactly the kind of stillness I had come to Sweden for. You can read more about the park on the official Tyresta National Park website.
A completely different kind of photograph.
There was no dramatic sky here. No city skyline. No obvious spectacle. Just an old wooden shelter, the lake beyond it and a pile of logs waiting for someone to make the most of the quiet.
I think these are the photographs that often become more important over time. They don’t shout for your attention. They give you somewhere to settle.
The experience of sitting beside that lake is probably a big part of why I still like this image. The photograph isn’t just a record of what the shelter looked like. For me, it brings back how peaceful that place felt.
And then there were the photographs that simply caught my eye.
Not every photograph needs a story before you press the shutter.
Sometimes something just catches your eye. A shape. A colour. The way someone is moving through a space. A building framed by a gap between two streets.
This one was about the contrast. The tower standing cleanly between the buildings, the deep blue sky, the warm facades and then the bus cutting through the bottom of the frame. Everything was moving, but the composition held together for a moment. Moments like this are a big part of what I enjoy about Stockholm photography, especially when the city gives you a frame you couldn’t have planned.
I didn’t need to know what the photograph was going to mean. I just knew I liked what I was seeing.
Why this one belongs on paper.
The more I photograph, the more I find myself thinking about what happens after the image is made. Some photographs work because they are full of detail. Others work because they give you somewhere quiet to look.
The Nordic Glow is one I keep coming back to because of the way the long exposure strips everything down. The city becomes a silhouette. The water becomes almost abstract. The colour does most of the talking.
That is exactly the sort of photograph I wanted JTP Prints to be about: something that can sit on a wall and still give you the same feeling long after the trip is over.
The journey was ordinary. The evening wasn’t planned around photography. But for a few minutes, the light gave me something worth stopping for.
A trip. Three photographs. Three completely different reasons to stop.
That’s probably what I took away from Sweden more than anything. The photographs I came home with weren’t all trying to say the same thing. One was about light. One was about stillness. One was simply about seeing something at exactly the right moment.
And maybe that’s what I want JTP Prints to become. Not a catalogue of one particular style, but a collection of photographs that made me stop, wherever I happened to be. That’s what keeps drawing me back to Stockholm photography, there is always another corner, another moment of light or another unexpected scene waiting to be noticed.
The trips will change. The places will change. The photographs will change. But that feeling of seeing something and knowing I need to stop for it probably won’t.
This one just happened to begin with a plate of meatballs and an orange sky.
JTP Prints