About

I am a Norwegian visual artist how currently works in the Oslo area. Artistically I come form drawing and painting but photography is now the main medium in my practice.

As a photographer I am mostly self taught. I stated experimenting with photography as a medium for art in the mid-1990s. I was a student then at Kunstskolen i Rogaland, which was and still is a tow years foundation level fine Art school in Stavanger Norway. That is also when I bought my first SLR camera. It is a Canon T70 with a Canon FD 50mm f/1.8 fixed lens and a HOYA 52mm UV(0) that I bought as a kit used. I still use it today when I photograph with analog 35mm film. Back then I mostly worked with black and white film and experimented with movement and mirroring in my photo art.

To follow up on my interest in photography as a medium, I studied under the Norwegian photographer Robert Meyer, for one year in the early 2000’s, at his then school for Art, Photography and digital media. Thees was when 35mm film still was commonly in use and like me most of the students preferred this format of film. This school had a forward thinking profile in relation to photography in the digital world and we al learned how to digitize film in al formats. We worked with PhotoShop and a Nikon coolscan V for scanning analog 35mm film on PC’s in Windows 98. Nikon coolscan V scans all 35mm films up to a resolution of 4000 dpi. Currently I am scanning my film work with a Nikon coolscan V ED with the same resolution, that my mother bought it in 2006. The software for it (Nikon Scan IV) is now only compatible whit my old white MacBook (13 inch) from 2007. On that MacBook I also have an old version of PhotoShop. The knowledge of how to digitize my own analog photo’s gives me now full control over the appearance of them on this website. At Robert Meyer’s school I did a lot of Street photography focusing on architecture, Ines and mirroring.

For digital adjustments of photos I have previously used Photoshop 7.0 for Mac and earlier versions for Windows as mentioned above. Now as an independent artist with a tight budget I use Affinity Photo. I bought the V1 license in 2016 via App Store and upgraded to V2 as part of Serifs universal license in 2024. Both licenses were then one payment subscription only. I used V1 on my old MacBook Pro (13 inch) from mid 2012 and are currently using V2 on my MacBook Pro (M1 14 inch) from late 2021. I haw found this photo editing software app to fit perfectly with my work flow.

As a photographer I haw also done some documentation photography of my on art works and for other artists with my analog SLR and DSLR camera. For this kind of photography I haw found my original 50mm f/1.8 fixed portret type lens on my old SLR to be the best. The analog film I used for documentation photo’s was mainly Fujichrome 200 iso slide film. Because of that I haw now set my Nikon D3400 DSLR, a ASP-C format camera, to 200 iso on landscape mode for documentation photo’s. My DSLR camera is mainly used for documentation photo’s now. I bought it in 2017 with AF-S Nikkor 18-105mm f/3.5-5.6G ED zoom lens as a kit. Before that I had used my mother’s Nikon D80 (also a ASP-C format camera) with AF-S Nikkor 18-17mm f/3.5-4.5G ED zoom lens, to document her artwork. That camera was bought by her as a kit in 2007. I bought a Nikkor AF-S 50mm f/1.8G fixed portret type lens for my Nikon D3400 in 2024, to make it more like my old SLR in relation to my documenting art works.

Other cameras that I own and haw worked with form time to time is my Yashica Zoomate 105se, with a non detachable 38-105mm zoom lens, that I got as a Christmas present in 2000 when I was a student at Robert Meyers School. It is an all-automatic compact camera for analog (35mm) film. The idea I had for using this camera then was that it would be a lighter camera then my SLR witch I could have in my pocket all the time and use for Street photography. But because this camera, with its lens has too much camera shaking, I stop using this camera for Street photography. I have used it for some of the photos shown on this Website that shows this camera shaking in an interesting photographic way but I do not always won’t that in my Street photography. Now the camera on my mobile phone often works like this. It is not the most expensive smart phone with the best camera but god enough for my use. When I went out on instagram in 2024 my idea was to challenge my perception of the photos that I take with my mobile phone’s camera.

In 2024 I worked with my mother’s Zorki-10 with a non detachable 45mm f/2.8 fixed lens from the late 1960s as an experiment of using that kind of camera. It is an all-manual fully automatic camera for 35mm film that my parents bought used in the mid-1970s. Because it had not had any matinees for a long time it was not so easy to work with. I had a some problems with loading film in and out of it and getting the film to mow along in the camera. This problem resolute in one interesting photographic fusion which would not haw ben possible in a digital camera. However I am not planing on working with this camera any more for my art because of this problems. It was mainly black and white film I used with it, and it was interesting for me to work with that medium for photographic art again in 2024. I will probably be working with black and white photo in some form also in the future.

The art present one this website is mainly photographed with my old SLR (full format) and DSLR (ASP-C format) camera. They span form the early years in the 1990’s up an to now. All the photos shown on this website are copyrighted (©idamariabergh.com) to me. Visually I am drawn towards shadow and light, abstraction, surfaces and reflected images in my art. Sometimes this aesthetic category’s can overlap in my photos.

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