Minimalist photography — tips from a pro
Our interview with Marcus Cederberg
Instagram, despite being a platform for sharing your own photos is also an incredible platform to aid discovery of new photographers and ideas. Typically we’ve been interested in portraits and landscape photos and have recently started to up our game by releasing small quotes each day. It was through the platform that we discovered Marcus Cederberg.
Marcus is a minimalist photographer from Sweden who has been developing his skills and passions through instagram for the last number of years. He was a suggested user and saw his following grow which boosted his confidence and made him delve more into minimal photography. His website now acts as a place to not only share his own photos but also as a place to share minimalist ideas and tips and tricks for those just starting out.
We took him away from his camera the other day and asked him a few questions with regards to minimal photography and how creatives can get involved.
All photos shown were taken by Marcus.
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We’d love to hear how you go involved in photography and how your interest in minimal photos started?
My father was a photographer so I was hanging with him in his dark-room (Google that kids!) and therefore I have always been interested in photography, even though I was taking mainly random pictures without any particular theme or so.
My interest in minimal photography took off in the early stage of Instagram when I went to a public pool with my family and I took one shot of a pair of swimming googles hanging on the wall, and it received more attention that I could imagine back then. I started to explore all the hashtags and hubs regarding minimalism and after that I was hooked. But I’m a kind of minimalistic guy when it comes to home decoration so it was not that giant step to take for me.
It’s great to hear that exploring hashtags is how Marcus jumped further into minimalist photography as that’s exactly how we began wondering how he went about taking all these great photos ourselves.
Do you have any tips for people looking to capture minimal photos is it all about what you see with your eyes or cropping images to fit the theme?
Interesting question, for me its been both actually. Initially I mainly published (and sold) pictures of what I saw with my eyes but over the years I have developed a way of taking pics where I sometimes see the finalised work already when taking the picture, meaning that I have done some mentally editing already when taking the pic from the start. But if you want to develop as a minimalistic photographer, I think you should go with what you see with your eyes.
There are unlimited minimalistic motifs around you, as you will discover if you put the ”radar” on. Mine is constantly switched to ”on”.
Where is your base currently, does being where you are help with your photography?
I’m living in the central of Sweden, in a mid-sized town called Örebro. I love to travel and have fortunately been able to take pics around the globe, where some of my favourite spots have been Dubai, Barcelona and New York. For my kind of photography it helps to be in urban environments, its harder to get minimalistic photos out in the nature, at least the typical nature here in central Sweden, its mainly forests.
Often buildings are a key focus of your photography, but when there aren’t any buildings what advice would you have for someone going out to shoot minimal photography?
I would say try to use the sky as a negative space instead of walls.
All items, from a small branch to a part of a playground etc become minimalistic when you put it with a clear blue sky in the background.Or maybe just one single cloud, or just a few of them… Also when in nature, look for open spaces and search for distance variations, lonely trees etc where you can get a minimalistic effect simply by using the environment around you.
You’re talking to a younger version of you, what would you do differently to get to where you are now?
Oh, lovely question! I think I would say ”have patience” or “things will get better”, it will be okey. And since I would have liked to started earlier in my life with this kind of photography, I would say go young man, go!
