The Crown Princess Couple of Sweden

I've been hired to make pictures of Victoria and Daniel, the Crown Princess Couple of Sweden, during a visit at the defense and security company Saab – not the car company, that is. The inside images were taken with very low levels of fluorescent light in a room painted dark grey, with no possibility to use flash or other lighting – not too easy. I got by with some help from the computer screens, and my trusted friends 35/1.4 and 85/1.2.

Luckily, I didn't have to fight among all the other photographers showing up; phew! I've never seen such a mayhem of flashes when everything went off, it looked like a giant continuous light source, but made up of 30+ flashes from a similar amount of photo journalists. Scary to look right into all that and still have to look unaffected and calm – not an easy job.

I was allowed to move pretty freely while the other photographers had to stand in a special fenced area, only allowed to attend during the arrival. So it wasn't a very fair situation among us; I could follow during the whole visit, though in a discrete way, and with limited number of clicks.

Here's Daniel holding a countermeasure capsule – it's used in fighter aircrafts to confuse incoming robots, hopefully making them lock onto the flares this thing sends out, instead of the jet itself. This countermeasure thing was actually the real deal, according to Saab - guess they was pretty sure it wouldn't go off, considering Sweden's royal throne will be Victoria's and Daniel's in the future.

Sometimes pretty simple images can get more complicated to make because of the surrounding circumstances, but still, it was a lot of fun to get the opportunity to do this!

And now, weekend – yesss.