Seven days - seven images

The rules were simple: one image per day, for seven days. The forum challenge didn't specify subject matter, location, or gear. Just: go out and bring something back.

It was July 2008. I was 32, living with my family in Garphyttan, a small village on the western edge of Örebro. Transport was a bicycle. The location was Kilsbergen - the forested hills west of Örebro that locals call Blå bergen, the blue hills, for the way they look from a distance in hazy summer air.

In the middle of Sweden in July, the days are very long and the nights barely exist. The sun sets late and rises again before you feel like you've slept. Getting out at the edges of the day - the only time the light is worth anything - meant either staying up past midnight or setting an alarm that felt unreasonable. I did both. Most of the images here came from those margins: the blue hour before the sky goes fully dark, the first warm raking light across a field, the moment between night and morning when the world is still and you have it to yourself.

What I didn't have was an excuse to stay home. The project made that decision easy.

Day one. This tree stood in the blue twilight with the moon just visible through the clouds to the right. The bare, twisted branches spread out like arms - or something reaching. It was the kind of tree that looks unremarkable in daylight but transforms completely once the sky drops to that deep blue. I didn't compose this so much as recognize it when I saw it.

Day two. A small pond with water lilies, shot straight down at golden hour so the frame becomes entirely the water surface - the sky reflected below the lily pads, the actual sky absent. Two yellow flowers break the surface. The lilies float on orange and blue at the same time.

Day three. A boxwood in the garden, close up, shot into the early morning light. The dew drops along the leaf edges catch the sun and turn into small points of light, almost like sparks. The leaves themselves glow yellow-green where the light passes through them. You don't need to go anywhere for this - you just need to be outside early enough.

Day four. A field of grain in low evening light, shot with a longer focal length so the depth compresses and the bands of light and shadow stack on top of each other. There's no horizon, no context - just the texture of the grass in amber and dark gold. By this point in the week, I was starting to notice that the best light only lasts about fifteen minutes. You learn to be in position before it arrives.

Day five. A ladybug on what I think is wild carrot - the tiny flower clusters still closed. The subject is small in the frame. The background dissolves into soft green. There's something about the scale of this image that I like: the ladybug is doing something completely its own, indifferent to being photographed.

Day six. A roe deer, just its head above the barley, in golden morning light. I was some distance away with a long lens - long enough that rows of grain blur into each other in the foreground. The deer is perfectly still, watching. These things happen when you're out early enough and quiet enough. The image doesn't work technically, but it doesn't need to.

Day seven. Two trunks standing close, bark covered in lichen. A single small branch reaches from one to the other in the gap between them - the only thing in the frame that isn't vertical. I found this in the forest on the last day, after a week of going out twice daily into the same landscape. By then I was looking at things differently. You start to notice the small gestures.

The project placed first in the competition, though I think that was more about the consistency of going out every day than any individual image. The judges said something about creativity. What I remember is the tiredness, and how good it felt to be that tired from something like this - a one-year-old at home, a bicycle, and seven mornings and evenings in the blue hills.