This is Janne Kaijärvi, a journalist who paints a dark future for media and journalists if they aren’t ready to change their ways of doing news.

This is for a worldwide ad campaign I took for a hotel company. Idea of the campaign was that there were one photo of selected people working and one photo of them doing something they did really well.

The man jumping was outstanding. If I would have understood it before hand, I might even tried this photo with one shot. Now it’s taken mid day and combined using three elements: The jumping man with the stadium, the other player and last, the ball in the sky.

This is Irene Mikaela, a Finnish fashion designer. I photographer her and two other designers on the roof of Cable factory in Helsinki.

As usual, anything didn’t went as planned. This time it was a quite windy day. One could even say a blustery day. Anyway way too windy for shooting something on the top of a building, as it was really difficult to even stand still. For some reason I decided to go for it anyway, so I roped two studio flashes to concrete bollards, which weighted so much I couldn’t move even one by myself.

After about two hours of hard work I got every flash to  stand still, people came to shooting and I was ready. In the next second, just when I take the first official photo my power generator stops. It was out of power, because someone at my studio had taken it’s plug out of wall probably thinking of saving energy. Nice.

This is the photo I took after I had pulled a lot of power cords from inside and we could continue. A little bit after this my second flash stand twitches in the wind looking more like a tree than a respectable stand.

This is president candidate Paavo Väyrynen. He has been in Finland’s parliament over 30 years, from year 1970. This year he didn’t make it, so now he runs for the president of Finland.

This is Markku Koli, a former lieutenant general of the army of Finland. For some reason he resigned and took a job in the military of United Arab Emirates.

The paper I took this had asked me to take a photo with an empty field or something special to Finland he would not see for a very long time. That’s why I had planned an early morning photo shoot with a misty field, but because the rain was extremely heavy we had to take cover in a forest near by to get out anything but broken electronics.

Long time no posting.

This is musician Tuure Kilpeläinen in Suomenlinna fortress island. I like the photo because it looks more like a landscape than a portrait. If we forget about some utterly minor things like vanishing points and moonlight, I can see common ground with old romantic painters.

Yep, it’s a sleeping nurse. I took this a while ago for a story about uniforms.

1) There are also fish in lakes.

2) The fish in the lakes like to swim also at nights.
The time lapse has been taken between 2 am and 5 am. I was surprised to see the red color midnight sun turned the water.

3) Go Pro Hero just isn’t good enough quality for me.
Too bad. I just have to get a DSLR in the water – again. The negative fact about it is that one time lapse takes from 5000 to 50 000 photos and one DSLR takes about 100 000 photos before it’s shutter dies. So it gets a little expensive if I want to play it smoothly.

Music by Stefano Mocini.

I am building my own time lapse dolly and with the video fewer I just had to test what could I do from below. Like every first time, this one wasn’t any better – next time I have to think something to get rid of waves and fishes. Then it will be perfect.

I took this photo few weeks ago while shooting a portrait of the lady riding the bike. I don’t know if they ever published this one, but I do like it a lot.

This photo I took yesterday. Marie was interviewing a lady I photographed and we had an extra hour. You know how things go in those situations, don’t you?

This is my debut in the world of clothes. I photographed a collection for Tauko, who design and manufacture clothing from recycled materials. Check them out from http://taukovaatteet.com/.

This is Finnish metal star Jouni Hynynen from the band called Kotiteollisuus.

The magazine had asked something “rock”, but the restaurant they interviewed looked like every restaurant at day time – clean and white. I got the colors from color gels I used with my speedlites. The half eaten pizza is what I found in front of Hynynen when I arrived.

Finally when I got everything good they couldn’t use it because mr. Hynynen got rid of his beard just few days after the shoot. Which means I have the opportunity to do it even better next time.

This is graphic designer Lotta Nieminen for a magazine for graphic designers.

This is my five cents to the Wikileaks case. The photo was taken for a local magazine for journalists. The guy in the photo is Heikki Aittokoski, the Finnish journalist who first published Wikileaks information concerning Finland.

Music by: Kevin MacLeod

I took this with my old iPhone. It’s unbelievable what those camera apps can do, no post processing at all! Anssi Vanjoki from Nokia claimed about a year ago that their phone is just as good as a SLR. We can all laugh about that, though he wasn’t all wrong. It’s physically impossible to make a cell phone camera lens which could compete against a full SLR, but the thing is, a good photo does have a very little if nothing to do with picture quality. And as long as SLRs can’t also do great looking post processing automatically, I can say that Canon, iPhone just beat up your eight thousand euro flagship to ground!

This is a Finnish actor and singer Vuokko Hovatta. The photo was taken for a magazine, but as the focus group is little bit older women, they decide to use my other photo. However, this is my favorite one of the set. It’s made with tungsten color balance and yellow gel over flash. So no Photoshop this time.

Check out our very own iPhone app for lighting people from http://www.lightstudioapp.com.

Yesterday I was photographing Lady Kishwar Desai. She is an Indian writer who tells about hospitals where never borns a girl, a town where only boys are born and a woman, who said that every time she sees her mother she sees an assassin who tried to kill her with opium.

Check out the whole story from Kumppani-magazine and read her book Witness The Night.

And remember to check out our very own iphone app for lighting people from http://www.lightstudioapp.com.

This is the next cover for the Shaker magazine.

I wanted to take a cover, which would be more like a scenery than a cover with persons in it. I had planned to put the people on a picnic blanket in the middle so it wouldn’t even be possible to recognize them. Unfortunately we live in Finland, so weather can and usually have something to say about these things. This time I understood by my own that we probably shouldn’t have a beautiful autumn scenery for a late november issue.

The next thing I thought was to put them on a cliff in the middle of a sea. That way it wouldn’t matter what time of the year it would be, because the sea looks 10 months a year just the same. That didn’t work because I understood that it would take a lot of time to get the people to the place and out of the place.

The next thing I thought was to put people on a cliff on another place and photoshop there clouds all around them. That plan I prepared to shoot. I even checked out the exact place where I would stand and where they would stay. I prepared them to get umbrellas and wear good clothes as this day would be cold and rainy, like the weather man had said for a week. And we were all ready, but… Why there always have to be the but?

The morning came and it was beautiful and sunny. I mean really sunny the way there is almost never in Finland. And I was devastated. Not just because it would make the shoot more difficult, but because I was going to do my thing at 1 pm and the place I was going to stand was facing south! Usually I like to shoot against the sun, but never when the people are staying on a highest cliff and there is a large gorge between us so I couldn’t put up any lights. And if I couldn’t use lights, I couldn’t have fill for them and they would be totally black or the sky would be totally white! So…

I ended up photographing at the same place (well I had to), but to another direction. I used sun as main light and only one studio flash as a fill light from down left. Then I went to my workroom and did everything in photoshop to make the scenery look unreal and weird. So here it is, I present you a not-so-much-scenery-but-a-strange-looking-cover.

And I like it.

Remember to check out our own lighting app http://www.lightstudioapp.com!

This is the inside photo of Veli-Pekka Leppänen. I posted the cover shot two days ago. Story remains the same, check it out from the last post.

Remember to also check out our own iPhone app for photographers from www.lightstudioapp.com!

This is critic Veli-Pekka Leppänen. He wrote a critic of a book for the local newspaper in Helsinki and got ripped by the most trendy magazine in Finland, for a story of seven pages blaming he as a person. Of course the publisher of the book know the editor-in-chief of the magazine and asked for the favor. The local paper of union of journalists made a story about the whole thing and asked me to take two photos of the poor guy. This is the cover shot. I will post the inside photo tomorrow.

The shoot itself went ok, though I lost my keys, my car got towed away, a flash stand split into two and a Pocket Wizard got broke. I’m sure mr. Leppänen got a really professional impression of me.

Remember to check out our own iPhone app for photographers from www.lightstudioapp.com!

Today our own iPhone application is finally ready! It’s made for all of you who would like to improve your lighting skills and take even better looking photos. We used almost a year to create it and now it’s better than five years of photography school in Finland.

This is one of the lighting patterns explained in the tutorial. It’s lighted with two medium sized soft boxes from above and below Jonna.

Go check out more about our app from www.lightstudioapp.com.

This time my cover shoot for the Shaker-magazine included some hard partying and beautiful people.

After trying to illuminate the Jenny Woo-bar with my studio lights I noticed I would lose the intensity of the black in the place, so I decided to make my photo from few different shots. I put my camera to a tripod and went photographing the room and the people with one portable speedlite-type flash. This photo is a combination of 76 different photos, where every photo lights up about one square meter of the room. And while I do like this, I can say now I know how to do it perfectly for the next time.

I had a perfect assignment this summer: I got to shoot some Urban Exploration in an abandoned factory for a local newspaper. Before this I had always been underground, but this time our location was above  and in a direct sun light, which made the place hot like hell. Or at least that was what I thought from inside of my layer of clothes, which I very unwisely eased to a t-shirt and got some nasty wounds. Lesson number one: Always cover your hands from fingers to elbows while shooting in an old factory full of toxic shit.

Though the photos in the sun are nice I think this is the best one of them all. The yellow light from the door is from sunset, lights inside are from my flash, which I used to paint the room with light.

Last night was perfect for some moon madness.

I visited a modern mad house.

The first thought after I got this assignment was about my friend and colleague Taavetti Alin, who had taken a great shot of two swordsmen in his studio. I liked his photo so much that I decided to try to make a tribute to his work by imitating his set on the field. Too bad the idea turned out impossible because the concrete cave I was to shoot was so low and unclear that I couldn’t position my lights where I wanted to.

However, I do like the shot and I changed my curves to Taavetti Alin -mode in post.

Today was my first day at work after summer holiday. I had planned sitting in the office and filling up some papers or something, just getting used to the feeling of actually doing something, but for some kind of warped worm hole I ended up photographing the whole day.

This is the most basic portraiture job one could have. I had to take a close head shot for a magazine for graphic designers. So here we go.

We are having our vacation in Ostrobotnia and got little lost in a potato field. This photo is taken with iphone from the viewfinder of an old Soviet camera I took with me. I laid it down to the ground and it just happened to point to the bike and she just happened to walk into the frame.

This is Christopher Wangel from Football Association of Finland.

The paper asked me to take a different kind of football related photo than the one which they had planned to use on the following page. This is the vertical photo I ended up with. They printed the horizontal, where you can see every light I used on the shoot. I would have used it here as well, but it really needs to be in large scale to work. That’s why you can have this version, which only shows the background lights.

This is a promo of dancer Jorma Uotinen’s dance performance Black Water for the local newspaper Helsingin Sanomat. I had really fun time shooting this as Jorma is a really nice guy and the paper had asked me for something dark, which is something I really enjoy to do.

I had planned to take the portrait as a reflection from the sea, but there was too much waves so I couldn’t get any reflection at all. Then I got to use my wader to insert a flash into the sea and boy was that fun! You do all have long rubber boots up to your chest for just this kind of situations in the back of your car, right? Well, I have.

The photo is a couple of months old because I don’t have the first publishing rights with the newspaper this is taken for. I’m not sure if they would mind as these kind of posts can be seen as an advertisement for them, but I don’t think it’s worth asking. Though, Markku, if you do happen to read this, what do you think?

I couldn’t sleep so I decided to make a series of a night time activity in my head. This isn’t from it yet, just a cookie test for the real thing.

Last wednesday I was in a high security prison taking photos of Juha Heinonen and Jere Nieminen who wrote plays.

I have a lot of different takes, but I think I like this one best. It’s rough and unlighted and there is a tension between camera and them. The only thing I doubt about this photo is an old tradition of photography where people are divided to them and we. We photograph our own kind of people with dignity and as subjects, but we photograph others like people from third world countries like animals, like objects of our interest. The most famous photo of the genre is a photo of an Afghan girl watching straight to camera. You all have seen it. The girl with really, really big green eyes and a red cape. The most famous cover of the National Geographic. Well, anyway, I hope that these guys this time can be counted as subjects themselves.

This is Jukka Pääkkönen, who works for Solidary Center in Finland. The story is about child labour, that’s why he has a football. About the forest… Well, at the point I was taking this it sounded like a great idea compared to the office. At least it’s freakish, which is always good.

This was the first time I shot parkour. I had already visioned the photo in my head (about five years ago) and when I saw that there was no urban structure like tall buildings or concrete I was again totally out of plans. Good for me I got some nice sunset at background, which I brought to foreground with a flash and a yellow gel.

Oh, and the shot was for Matkaan -magazine. Check out the whole story from it.

This is poet Kai Nieminen. He lives with his wife in a middle of a forest in an old school building making tea and poems. Not bad.

These are Riku and Tunna from Madventures, the only travelling show worth to watch if you don’t plan a family holiday.

The reason this photo is here isn’t because I consider it as good. Actually, I don’t know if I do. It’s not here either because it was really difficult to take – which it definitely was: The room was white, quite boring common office room and I had to use about everything in their kitchen to modify my lights from garbage bin to utensil cleaner. So why is the photo here? It’s here because I can’t judge it, which probably makes it some kind of breaking point for me. It has something inside what I want to learn and something I don’t want so see ever again. And when I learn what those things are I hopefully get better.

Even though I’m not ready to bet all my money for this photo, I’m sure the story is outstanding. Check it out from the new Shaker.

Sami promised to go to swimming from Sauna in the evening, so I put up some lights for about three hours to get ready for the moment.

First I positioned my camera in the water and put my second flash to the tree at left of this photo, but after an hour of work I desided to move the camera because there wasn’t really any scenery from low perspective. I also tried to use remote control to shoot, but for some unknown reason I couldn’t get two pocket wizards working on one camera body, even with cords. So I had to say goodbye for my plan to exposure while sitting in sauna and actually come out to take the photo. Hmhph.

Finally I put my camera on tripod with long exposure to get the sky right. My main flash is in the tree right to Sami. My second flash is also in a tree, few meters behind the first one and third flash is at the other side of the bay, just powerful enough to light the left side of the photo, which would be black without it. And last, the head lamp Sami is using makes the water greenish. I have to say I’m little proud of my self this time.

We came to start the spring at Marie’s summer cottage. Sea is still covered with ice and here are no viper snakes yet. Little cold and little rain. That’s Suvi holding my head lamp. Tomorrow more friends and more action, this night only spring slowly crawling this way.

This is a portrait for Amnesty International of a human rights activist Juanda Djamal from Aceh. He came to Finland to talk about things like ice cream, kittens, harbor waves and such.

It’s not uncommon to have so little time that you just can’t move your subject anywhere from the place he/she has been interviewed. This time though we had plenty of time, but the morning was so depressing gray that I decided to take the portrait inside no matter what. Lucky for me there was this little decoration wall with fake vine separating two dinner tables from each others in the restaurant of the hotel mr. Djamal stayed. After that I only needed to place one speedlite.

This morning was beautiful so we desided to have a little adventure.

We went road tripping to Hämeenlinna to have some fun and to take some light painting photos over old castle ruins over there. I didn’t expect to see any snow anymore and I had counted I wouldn’t, so after seeing that awful cold white light reflecting thing everywhere I was so shocked I couldn’t do anything right. After changing every lens I had (I always change lens when I don’t know what to do) and setting up 30 m electricity wire and studio flashes I gave up.

This photo I took on another place after that, so our trip was success after all.

Today I was playing hookey with Mika instead of doing my obligations with Photoshop. Snow is starting to melt so there is misty everywhere. Add some rain and you get a perfect weather for hobbies which require good visibility, fast interactions and working electronics.

This is an assignment for a magazine to photograph Matti Väisänen, the most conservative bishop in Finland.

I was at Laura’s cabin for a week playing croquette in the snow and making circles to the sky with my illuminated RC-plane. And by the way that’s me standing in front of the cabin. Isn’t technique swell.

Laura is ready to be dragged in a sled behind the car. And boy was that fun!

This was an assignment for a Finnish magazine to take a portrait of Elisabeth Rehn, who was elected to the Board of Directors of the ICC Trust Fund for Victims.

I really liked it when she said to me that she’s not sorry for her house to be dirty because she has a lot more important things to do than to clean it. And no, it wasn’t dirty, it was normal.

This is the first post for this blog. From now on I will fill up this place with random photos when ever I get a good one. That’s probably about one post in a week or so.