Kuvailin alkukeväästä ihanaa kollegaani Paulaa. Paula on ihana ja positiivinen ihminen, ja se tuli mielestäni onneksi kuvissakin esille hyvin 🙂 Valo tuona iltana oli taianomainen.

-Annamari

This week I was reminded how intolerant and petty the Finnish photography community can be. It all begun when the winners of the annual Finnish Nature Photography Contest were announced. The main prize went to Matti Pukki, who had shot a beautiful and creative long exposure image of three gulls. You can see the image here.

As soon as I saw the shot, I immediately knew that the Finnish photography community was going to go ape-shit. And it didn’t take long before there were headlines in the newspapers how the winning image had gathered critique and hatred from Finnish photographers. “The focus is all wrong.” “Too artsy.” “This has nothing to do with nature photography.” etc. And this is not an uncommon phenomenon over here. Go to an international photography forum on the internet and you will find helpful, supportive and open-minded people who love photography. Go to a Finnish photography forum and you will find a bunch of petty people bitching and moaning about every damn thing. Whether the topic is about gear, technique, composition or whatever, the threads and conversations usually turn into childish bickering in no time.

Now, there is such a thing as constructive criticism, but we are not talking about criticism here. We are talking about open hostility, rampant elitism and pure idiocy. Some commentary I’ve encountered on Finnish photography forums include such jewels as: “macro photography is not proper photography”, “you’ve never taken a photograph, if you only have a digital camera”, “HDR should be made illegal”, “if you have to process your shots, you’re not a real photographer”, “only pros should have full-frame cameras” etc.

I’ve always found this phenomenon completely baffling. Seriously, what the hell is wrong with these people? We all have the same hobby/job here – we all should love photography here. So why is everything new and different like a red flag to a bull to us? Why is any sort of creativity or technical advancement immediately shunned and frowned upon?

In my opinion photography has always been about pushing the limits, about doing something new: photography has always been about technical advancement and artistic freedom. After all, we remember great photographers like Stieglitz, Nadar and Eggleston because they pushed the boundaries of photography, while no one remembers the people who thought that color film would mean “the end of photography”.

On a personal level, I’ve found that every time I’ve stepped out of my comfort zone and tried a new genre of photography, I’ve grown a lot as a photographer. I guess that is why I love most genres of photography – and even with genres that don’t tickle my fancy I can still appreciate the craftsmanship, skill and patience that goes into it. And I pity the people who consider photography as a “my way or the highway” -type art form.

I’d like to close this rant with the words of Bill Brandt, that have always rung true to me: “Photography has no rules, it is not a sport. It is the result which counts, no matter how it is achieved.”

-Samuli

When autumn arrives and the vacations are over, many Finnish people feel their minds slowing down and get a feeling of depression. The phenomenon of autumn depression may have been exaggerated, but it’s not completely fiction. When the fall goes forward people with autumn depression may experience unhappiness, pain, weight gain, lack of energy and feel antisocial.

This may be or may not depend of the life situation of the person. Even people who have had recent happy life events might feel that the season is affecting their mood.

This picture series represents that emotion. Even when the autumn may be full of beautiful events and the person is beautiful, healthy and otherwise happy, he or she might be a prison of their mind and may want to isolate themselves.

Huge thanks to Laura for volunteering in this project! I’d like to emphasise that Laura is not depressed. In fact it was quite hard for her to make a sad face when her mouth really just wants to smile all the time, she’s one of the most joyful people I’ve ever met 🙂 Huge thanks to Samuli also for helping with the lighting!

-Annamari

Model: Laura Jalkanen

There’s a scene in a movie ‘Yes Man” where a group of artistic hipsters are preparing for a jogging/photography -class. Just before Jim Carrey and hilarity ensues, there’s this bit of dialogue between a student and the teacher of the class:

“Alison? Do we need to use a flash?”

“Not when the sun’s up, Reggie.”

When me and Annamari watched the movie, we both went: “That’s not true!” Sometimes it’s even more important to use flash when the sun is up! While it’s true that flashes often become essential in low light when you’re shooting portraits, flash can actually be as useful (if not more) in the hours of daylight. Bright daylight often creates harsh light with a strong contrast that rarely is extremely flattering: you get strong, burned highlights paired with dark parts and black eye sockets – not the look you’re often going for. Sunlight is especially difficult to deal with when you are shooting against a strong backlight. That is when you need flashes.

Most of us don’t like using flashes. I originally didn’t either. I hated them, and thought that using flash = ruined atmosphere. But as I started experimenting with flashguns and studio flashes and bought a cheap-ass pair of remote triggers (cost me about 40€), I realized that they really weren’t the boogie man that I thought they were. On the contrary these days I love using flashes, as they help me to capture the scene as I want it, instead of letting the ambient light dictate the way my shoot looks.  Here’s an example from last weekend. We were out shooting with Annamari. I really wanted to take a shot of her with that lovely, bokehy backlight. This was the first attempt:

So, while the background looks pretty good, Annamari is way underexposed. And I want her to be the main attraction of the shot, not the pretty bokeh. So, why not use photoshop? That shadows-slider is really handy, you know? While I could go the Photoshop way and process the shot until the cows came home, I would still be facing two problems: the loss of image quality and the lack of directional light. Even with a lot of processing the result would not be that great. So, enter a flashgun with a shoot-through umbrella on the right. And the results:

Much better, don’t you think? Just that catchlight in Annamari’s eyes was worth the effort of spending 2 minutes putting up the flash on a light stand. The background is still nicely exposed and the strong backlight is still drawing that lovely rimlight on Annamari’s hair, but the overall lighting of the foreground is much better.

Here’s another example of using a flash during the day. Flashes aren’t useful only with strong sunlight. On a dull, overcast day, flashes can work in a opposite way: adding contrast and direction to a flat light, making the subjects seem more three-dimensional and colourful. Few months ago I shot a wedding couple on this lovely location in Jyväskylä. The weather was really unstable: first we got rain, then it was cloudy and then we would get short blasts of full sunlight. This was the first shot that I took:

It’s not utterly horrible – you see these sort of shots everyday in newspapers. But it’s lacking punch: the couple is annoyingly blending with the dark background and the bride’s dress looks kind of gray. So after a few tries I asked the maid of honor to help me – I was shooting in manual mode and the settings are pretty much the same, but I handed the maid of honor a flashgun (1/8 power) with a remote trigger and asked her to hold the flash towards the couple from the right:

Again, much better! The wedding couple pops out from the background, there’s a nice directional light that still looks natural and the colors are much nicer!

Here’s one more example. Few months ago we were out shooting with our model, Laura (see Annamari’s blog entry). As the sun started coming up, we stopped using a tripod and went hand-held. The sky was looking wondeful with soft, warm colors. But the contrast between the sky and everything else was hard to deal with. So we decided to use a flashgun to light Laura. Here was the tricky part: we wanted the light to match the warm tones of the sunrise, but… flashes produce light that has a color temperature close to daylight (about 5500°K); so the light that the flash was producing was way colder than the ambient light. To get that warm tone we had to use a warming flash gel. So, I was shooting, Annamari was holding the flashgun with a warming flash gel and a diffuser. And here we go:

The difference really is quite dramatic. But enough of this blabbering: I totally encourage you to dust off your flashguns, buy a cheap remote trigger (or an expensive one, if you got the cash) and try them out! I guarantee that they will take your portraiture to another level.

-Samuli