jggWeb: El Blog de García-Gálvez

Johann Gudbjargarson is a 33 year old amateur photographer from Iceland. He spent the first years of his life in Hafnarfjordur but moved to the capital Reykjavik 6 years ago. He has a BS degree from the University of Reykjavik in Computer Science and currently holds a position as a Development Manager at a software company in Iceland.

As a young boy Johann spent all summers in a farm in western part of Iceland and there got his first interest in photography when he borrowed a small automatic 110 film camera from his father. The interest was rekindled when he bought a Canon EOS-500n camera in the summer of 1999. Johann became really interested in photography with the digital revolution and bought a Sony-DSC 717 camera in the spring of 2004 and from that moment there was no looking back.

About 10 months ago he bought Canon EOS-20D and today his camera bag contains the following items: Canon EOS-20d, BG-E2 grip, 6 Canon lenses (35mm 1.4L, 17-40mm 4.0L, 24-70mm 2.8L, 70-200mm 2.8L IS, 50mm 1.8 and 100mm 2.8 macro). Other accessories are Canon EX-580 flash +ST-E2 transmitter, Epson P200 image bank, Gitzo Carbon Fibre tripod and 4gb of Compact Flash memory. He is planning to buy studio lightning when he gets bigger apartment and the new Canon 5D with the
24-105 lens.

Photographing people and travel photography is his favourite subjects in photography and he has travelled with his girlfriend (Sonja which shares his passion for photography) a lot in Iceland, Europe and Asia with his camera. In the summer of 2004 they travelled for 5 weeks in Eastern Europe (Poland, Ukraine, Romania and Hungary) and this summer they travelled with the Trans-Siberian railway from Moscow to China and travelled further in Asia on that trip. They are still working on the pictures but a selection has appeared on Johanns photoblog (joephotos.net). Next summer he plans to travel to India and Italy with his camera.

Last summer he won a photographic contest in Iceland largest newspaper which was called Summer Picture of the Year 2005. His photoblog has gotten rave reviews since it started last June and he has signed with two photo selling agencies.

As a Software Engineer he is interested in the software part of digital photography. The programs he uses in his workflow are
Photoshop CS2 for post processing, RawShooter Essentials (eagerly waiting for RawShooter Premium soon to be released) for RAW conversion and IMatch for categorizing and adding XMP and IPTC information. He takes all his pictures in RAW format.

His favourite photographers are Steve McCurry, James Nactway and RAX (the most famous photographer in Iceland) along with few others. To follow what is happening in the field he buys about one book a month about photography and subscribes to National Geogarphic, EOS magazine and Professional Photographer. His faworite websites are Luminous Landscape, Fred Miranda forums and Rob Gailbrath forums which he has learned much from.

As an advice to people who are taking their first steps in this fascinating hobby is to not be afraid to experiment with their equipment and also experiment with the post processing. The internet is full of resources to learn from and forums contain lots of talented people who are willing to explain and help.