How we met...

Reading the subject you might think I'm about to tell you a lovestory... Not quite, unless we are talking about a mutual love for photography and a great friendship.

But if you haven't noticed, the "How we met" section is online under "About Us", so go there to read how Martin and I met. :)

And for all those who have been thinking "What the heck is all this about", you will get your question answered sometime tomorrow when the section "the trip" will(ed. finally) be online. :)

Good News

At the moment we are in close contact with a major danish newspaper.

The idea behind the future co-operation is that we on a regular basis will send information about our trip to the newspaper.
The information will consist of text about our experiences in the US, along with some of the photos we shoot.
This is clearly a brilliant opportunity for us to tell many people about our project, and it will be possible for all people in Denmark to read articles about our tour in the US.

In the beginning of next week we will reveal the name of the newspaper and the further details about the co-operation. It's safe to say that we are very excited about this.

We're still smiling...

We just received another sponsorship which we are very excited about. As soon as we receive a logo you will be able to read more about it.

All in all it seems that the people we are in contact with are very excited about our project which we are very pleased with. But ofcourse this whole project can't be realized by only receiving product sponsorships - But we hope to receive some financial support over the next couple of months.
Though I should point out that we are NOT expecting others to pay for the entire project on our behalf - We will fund a major part of the costs out of our own pockets. :)

Writer’s cramp and the taste of stamps

Last time was only a minor attack against the Danish postal services. But today we prepare the main assault with more than 50 applications for grants.
This is not the end and within the next couple of days we are going to apply for grants from some of the major foundations in Denmark, so if all goes well we might receive some financial support this summer.

Profiles online...

We've finally managed to put some content into the "About us" section, so now you can read about both of us. The subsection "How we met" will have it's contents added tomorrow and hopefully "The trip" will also be done in a few days. Some images showing our work should also be coming soon.
Enjoy :)

Where's the pictures?

We've been getting a few questions asking where our pictures are. To answer that question we have to say that first of all this website is still being worked on and will hopefully soon show some of our work, but since this website is primarily about our trip to the US and we haven't left Denmark yet the "image overload" wont happen until September.
But as I said, we hope to show you some of our work in the near future as soon as we get around to it - We got a looong list of things to do :)

Humor and donations

As you might have noticed in some of our posts we sometimes use humor in our way of telling things. This is normally considered a good thing, but to avoid any misconceptions from sponsors or readers we just want to make absolutely clear that even though we might use a lot of humor, it doesn't mean we aren't serious about this project or photography in general.
Both me and Martin are very serious about our photography and also this project. Currently we are spending somewhere around 30-40+ hours a week trying to get everything sorted out so we can realize this project.

We still need a lot of help realizing this project, so we hope to receive your help. So if you are interested in giving a donation for the project or become a sponsor, please don't hesitate to contact us. You can find our email address in the sidebar under "the contact"

The Danish Photo Museum

We have just spoken with the curator of the Danish Photo Museum, Bjarne Meldgaard. He seemed very interested in exhibiting the many photos we shoot in the US, however the exhibition schedule of the museum is booked till January 08.

None the less Bjarne seemed very keen on showing our exhibition in the beginning of 08, therefore we are going to keep in contact with him telling him about the development of the photo series.

Online again...

As you can see by the post i made last night, im finally online again. It took the better part of two days to backup all my data and reinstall the computer.
What brought me down was the most annoying piece of spyware/spamware - A small box kept showing up in the corner saying my computer was infected. Whenever i clicked the box it opened a website trying to make me pay for some software which should be able to clean my software... Well, if that #?¤% company hadn't installed that spamware without my consent in the first place i wouldn't need to buy their stuff.
Needless to say that i didn't buy their software, but after spending half a day trying to remove the spamware using every conceiveble software and technique without luck i decided to reinstall the entire computer. I'd like to tell you the name of the company so you can avoid them, but i don't want to give them any kind of publicity so i just hope you don't experience the same.

This unforseen downtime means that we'll be a day or two behind on getting some information on the last pages.

Another one bites the dust!

We've had the fortune of receiving another sponsorship.
This time we received a sponsorship for some greycards. Well that's the simple way to say it. WhiBal is a lot more than just a basic greycard - Not only is the cards individually measured to be as neutral as possible, but the cards also feature both a black and white section. Something that gives you a great tool to get the exact whitebalance in your photos, which any photographer will tell you is extremely important.
But there is much more to these cards - Not only are they available in different sizes(we received the combo kits which is ideal for both studio work and travel), but they also come with a very practical stand, carry case and lanyard. On top of this there is also special software available which allows fine control over the whitebalance.
You can read much more about it on the WhiBal webpage.

We are grateful for the sponsorship provided by Michael Tapes, the creator of WhiBal, and we look forward to posting more indepth information when we have had a chance to get some experience with it.

Welcome to the US...or not

Because of the fact that we are going to stay in the US for more than 90 days, we need a visa. But what kind of visa do we need and how do we get one?

Today we spoke with an employee at the US embassy in Denmark and tried to explain her about our tour to the US. She wasn’t very chatty and kept repeating that we had to visit their website.

Well we did… the site is not very well-arranged and it took some time before figuring out how to get a visa. We have to fill out a formula, but that’s not easy when you don’t know where you are going to live for 6 months.
In the end we wrote a mail to the embassy telling them about our project, we trust our luck that we receive better service by mail than by phone…
Did somebody say service?

A small delay

I'm experiencing some computer trouble right now so I need to reinstall my entire computer. This might delay updating the website for a day, so you have to wait a few more days before being able to read more about the project and who's behind it.
I can also tell you that we have actually received another sponsorship but more on this as soon as I'm up and running again.

When I return I'll show you how it looks when me and Martin are working on this project, which is more or less every day :)

First sponsorship received!

We've had the fortune of receiving the first sponsorship today - It's a minor sponsorship but none the less exactly what we had requested.

When we planned this website it became obvious that the scale of the project(website, the trip, exhibition etc.) would require some good statistics software which can provide us with some basic information about our visitors.

We found a small piece of software called Mint. It has a great looking interface and is able to record the basic information we need - On top of that it also has a plugin architecture which makes it possible to extend the software so it can track and show even more things than it does standard if we should ever need it.

We contacted Shaun Inman, the creator, and explained about our project and requested a sponsorship - Not long there after we received a positive response from Shaun.
It took about 5-10 minutes to install the software on our server and update the pages that we wanted to track and so far it works great.

So if you need a cheap, small and easy to use statistics software which has a great looking interface, then you should take a look at Mint.

Minor update

We've been updating the website and have added some more sections.
Currently only the travel plan section has content in it, but the other sections will follow during the next couple of days.

We have also been working hard on writing applications for different sponsorships which we will send out soon. So wish us luck as we hope to recieve some positive feedback :)

We got the grant blues

To make it possible for me and Martin to travel in the US for 6 months the way we've planned, we need a lot of money and since neither of us have a rich uncle we need to get more money than what we have ourselves - So to get this we are applying for a lot of grants.



This is what nightmare looks like. 200 pieces of paper, 50 envelopes and 50 stamps needs to be folded, stuffed, closed, stamps put on and addresses written by hand. All this after we have spent a week or two getting our schedule and budget figured out.
And to make things worse - This is just the first batch of applications - I sure hope that we get something in return for our work :)

I just talked to Martin who has finished with his - The only advice he could give was to listen to some good music and take breaks every once in a while.

BTW. Martin will be posting here shortly as well - We just need to get him set up which should happen sometime tomorrow.

Domain ready

The domain usphototour.com is now ready and will be the address for this blog from now on.

The website will be extended to include information about the trip, who's behind it and lots more.

First post!

Hi and welcome to our blog.

This is the first post in a large project which revolves around a 6 month long trip to the US for two danish photography students, but much more on this later.
Right now we are in the planning phase of the project and as you can see - starting the website about the project.

This blog and website will be reachable on usphototour.com, as soon as the domain is ready.

Thats it for now but keep coming back to follow our adventure, read more about us and the project or maybe meet us.