Claes Grundsten is one of the best photographers in Sweden. He is a specialist in mountain photography and has authored or co-authored many books related to mountains and hiking. And since mountains are close to my heart also, Claes Grundsten is naturally one of my favourite Swedish photographers.

Having read many of his books and admired the imagery, I was excited to see that he has also published a book about flowers and mountains, ”Blommor och berg”. It’s a coffee table book with nothing but pictures, no text at all apart from the intro. The idea of the book is to show the contrast in the mountains – small alpine flowers vs big mountains, colourful flowers vs black’n’white mountains. The book is divided in two, the first half is dedicated to the flowers and the second half contains the mountains.

You’d think that this book would be perfect for me, considering that I love mountains and flowers and alpine flowers above all. But it is true that you can’t judge the book by its cover – quite literally, in this case. Because it turned out that the cover picture was by far the best picture in the whole book.

It’s incredibly dangerous to say that ”I can do better than that” because I’m just a rank amateur and Claes Grundsten is an established and respected professional. I’m used to thinking ”I wish I could be as good” when I read his books. But page after page the feeling got stronger, these pictures were not holding up to the standard I expected and I couldn’t decide if it was because I was missing the point or if the pictures were quite simply not very good. By the time I had finished the flower section however, I was convinced that something was wrong.

Of course I can’t show any of the pictures here for copyright reasons, but I can try to explain. Take the black vanilla orchid for example. It’s a tough subject actually, very difficult to compose when it’s really just a ball on a stick. His solution is to use a backlit flower (which is nice in itself) and blue sky in the background. Also nice. But then… he has included the whole stem which means that the flower itself is very small in the frame and there’s an awful lot of empty background which is made worse by the crop which leaves the flower almost touching the frame on top! The same crop/composition problem is evident in many other pictures, as well. Like the common valerian; not just for the crop, but the flower is positioned on the left side of the frame and it’s leaning out! That’s such a big no-no that I can’t even imagine why it was done like that.

Maybe the problem is the shape of the book, it’s almost square which is not suitable for vertical pictures at all. Instead of using 2:3 ratio, his solution has been to crop them to 4:5, a useless format for tall flowers.

And when there’s finally a picture where the crop/format is ok, then the flower isn’t in focus. I mean I love using shallow DOF but the key to make successful shallow DOF pictures is to put the sharpness in just the right part. In the purple saxifrage picture, it’s in all the wrong places and there’s absolutely nothing for the eye to rest on. Had I taken this picture, it would’ve been axed in the first review round in Lightroom.

These are such beginner’s mistakes that I’m in total disbelief.

And then I got to the black’n’white mountain section. Back in the days before colour film was invented, everybody shot black and white for every subject. There was no other option, so it was the standard. When the colour films were introduced and got better, colour photography became the standard and black and white nature photography got marginalised. But you can still find subjects in nature that actually look better in b’n’w than colour, for example if you have a lot of texture in the picture, so I’m not anti-b’n’w as such.

I know that this is a matter of taste, but I claim that not every photograph is suitable for a b’n’w conversion. A landscape picture that looks great in colour does not necessarily look great in black and white, I don’t care what it looked like in the old days when b’n’w was the norm. We’re talking about today, we’re talking about a book that is only a few years old, created in the era of digital photography, the era of digital colour photography. You just can’t take any odd landscape picture and convert it to black and white and publish it in a book under the premise of ”contrast”. It doesn’t work, sorry but it really doesn’t.

I’m sorry for this trashing, but the disappointment was huge because my expectations were sky high, thanks to the previous work I’ve seen from Claes Grundsten. It only leaves me with a question, why Mr. Grundsten? Please tell me it was because of a cash flow problem, because anything else is either cheating or a serious error in judgement. If you intended ”Blommor och berg” as an artistic statement, then it’s a gross misrepresentation of your skills. I still think you’re one of the best photographers in Sweden, because even the best photographers are allowed to make mistakes. However, the right place for those mistakes is the recycle bin, not a book!

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But I must say that something good came out of it, too. The format of the book is simple so it’s easy to put together a book like this in any self-publishing software. All you need is the pictures, and when it come to flowers, I know I have those pictures. At first I had considered of buying this book (thankfully I didn’t but borrowed it from the library) because I wanted a coffee table book for the coffee table in my cabin (-to-be).  Now I realise that I can create the book myself. It won’t sell any copies because I don’t have a name, but I don’t want to spend the money on someone who’s abusing their’s!