I ordered the Voigtländer 21mm f/4 from MPB, clicked buy on a Wednesday, and by Friday it was already at my door. Ridiculously fast. The kind of delivery that doesn’t give you time to second-guess… until you actually mount the lens.

And that’s when it hit me. This is way too wide.

You come home after a walk, open the files, and there it is. That photo. The one that makes you tilt your head like a confused dog. The horizon is crooked. The framing is awkward. Something is cut off that clearly shouldn’t be cut off. It looks… wrong.

And yet you don’t delete it. Because something about it works.

In 2025 the camera that joined me on most of these walks was the Leica Q2 Monochrome. It quietly became my photo companion. Not because it is the most advanced camera in the world, but because it is simple and honest. Black and white. No distractions. Just light and shadow.

Phones are convenient, but they don’t quite replace the feeling of using a camera. With a camera you frame, move, and think about composition. Even a tiny compact pushes you to look at the edges and build the image instead of simply tapping the screen.

Maybe that is the strange role mannequins have in our cities. They are silent stand-ins for us. Models of a life we might step into if we buy the jacket, the shoes, the identity hanging behind the glass.

Some brands have been part of your life for so long that they feel almost like old friends. For me, Fjällräven is one of those brands.

So when we got the opportunity to create an ad together with Fjällräven in Oslo, the answer came instantly. No hesitation. Just a simple yes.

How do you capture silence?

None of us had really explored that area before. Tommy had been there, but Kim and I hadn’t. So we jumped on the metro and headed east while staring out the windows like hopeful weather prophets.

The sky was still heavy and grey, but far on the horizon there was a thin strip of blue.

The sensors from 10, 15, even 20 years ago were not bad. They were limited by what surrounded them. Storage was smaller. Processing power was weaker. Software was primitive. If your image was noisy or too small, there wasn’t much you could do.

Today that’s different.

I don’t really know how to explain it, but there’s always a moment when things just fall into place while you’re taking photos. Sometimes it takes a cup of coffee and a sandwich, and then 30 minutes later you’re suddenly in the zone, seeing things you would normally have walked past.

Just sitting with coffee and talking about photography, like we always do. Sharing ideas. Small tricks. Good locations. Why a photo works. Why it doesn’t.

Honestly, that’s one of my favorite parts of these photowalks.

Film scans that suck (and how to fix them)

I don’t know how many times I’ve packed other cameras and left the D-Lux 8 sitting quietly in the bag… only to switch to it halfway through the photowalk.

“What started as a professional tool gradually transformed into a deeper artistic research.”

People and fast-moving subjects were out of the question. No more run and gun. Like a kid with my first camera, I tested it again. How does it look used like this? How shallow is the depth of field on signs, trees, walls, benches, and all the items that surround our urban life?