Oh dear how long has it been since the last time I wrote to my blog. My website has been dead-quiet for such a long time you might even think I’ve stopped taking pictures. Well that is not the case – it’s quite the opposite actually!
I have been handling so many irons in fire for the last few months that even updating my portfolio has had to wait – and it still does. Working on magazine covers, editorial assignments, on field…Preliminary assignments for (hopefully) my further photography education in college, school exams (I’m graduating from high school this spring), travelling (New York!!!)… Even my future military service has recently been a lot in my thoughts – and for a reason.
Last year I decided to apply for Finnish airborne (paratrooper) forces. After sending my medical papers and other certifications in I got an invitation to tryouts in Utti consisting of various physical and psychological tests. There they made us run, jump, crawl, swim, ski, fill in answer sheets containing hundreds and hundreds of questions etc.
It seems that the months of intensive training were definitely worth it though as I actually received an approval to the paratrooper school just a few days ago! There were 265 applicants in total and only 51 of us got through and managed to claim an invitation to ourselves. My one-year-long training in Utti Jaeger Regiment begins in July 13th.
But enough of this babbling. Here are a couple of teasers on coming updates on my portfolio (I’ll try and actually write about some of my recent photo shoots in my blog so stay tuned.):
Yup. It’s that time of the year again.
I’m actually just stopping by to brag about some of the christmas presents I got and post few images so I’ll keep it short. The list goes something like this:
- Movie tickets (Yay!)
- Playing cards with photos of rock and pop legends printed on them (Ooh, original!)
- Chocolate (Yummy! I taste rum.)
- A cereal bowl (Now I can invite one more guest to my cereal party!)
- A candle (Invaluable in case of zombies!)
- An apple (Tasty!)
- Joe McNally’s book The Moment it Clicks (At last!)
Before even reading the book I want to point out some interesting things about it by the way. First of all the Finnish version is hard covered and the size of the pages is much smaller compared to the pages of the soft covered English version of the book. Correct me if I’m wrong of course. The title is translated from English into Finnish in quite a silly way too. The Moment it Clicks became The Secrets of Photography (Yawn!).
(Kukaan englannin kieltä vieroksuva haluaisi vaihtaa tämän suomenkielisen Valokuvauksen salaisuudet -kirjan englantilaiseen vastaavaan?)
For my whole life I’ve been a PC user so you may just guess how frustrated I have been at times while at it. Change-over to any other platform has not been an option to me though as formerly I’ve been very into computer games and still am doing minor programming and stuff like that which in my opinion just aren’t very well supported for example on Mac.
In the near future I’ll be travelling a lot so I thought a laptop would be a neat thingie to have. Just imagine how much time would it spare if one had the opportunity of browsing through his or her photos while being on the run. Also when I’m on a serious(ish) assignment after that one striking picture it’s important to me to actually see how the work is coming out. Especially after I’ve experienced some catastrophical photo shoots because the photo looked sharp on the camera’s teeny weeny LCD screen.
I was actually becoming very keen to the David Tejada’s idea of using an external DVD player as a bigger screen as seen in his blog entry here but eventually was turned down by the lack of all right DVD players’ availability. They were always too good or too bad. Having just a portable screen with me would be a bit restricting too I thought but that’s another story.
So this year my christmas present came very early to me and oh boy how excited I was. It was the Apple MacBook 13″ 2.4GHz with 2 GB memory and 160 GB hard drive and the reason I was in such a hurry with it was its irresistible price. Less than 900€ – what a bargain! So obviously they were sold out in just a couple of days.
My first impression on MacBook was totally positive. It’s light, powerful and has a bright, clear screen which is just perfect for my needs. Portability is a must for me and I have a bigger screen at home if needed so the 13″ (33 cm) screen size is just fine. The computer starts up and is ready to use in a blink of an eye compared to anything else in the price range and it stays alive quite a while too as the battery should last at least for 4 hours.
Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard succeeded to impress me with its simpliness and lightweight which leaves more resources to the programs I’m using and less confusion to me. Using Lightroom is absolutely painless as what goes to the performance. Pointing the cursor using the trackpad only is of course clumsy and takes patience if you’re in the need of accuracy but I’m ok with that as far as I don’t have to carry a mouse with me.
Have been trying out shooting in tethered mode too, straight into Lightroom by having folder watching function enabled. I had some serious problems using Canon’s CameraWindow with Mac software as it just gave me an error: “Cannot detect camera.” So if you confront this same issue make sure you upgrade into EOS Utilities which is downloadable from Canon’s website. That worked for me and now I’m able to burst away with my camera and watch how my work of art simply pops up onto the vivid screen of this beauty. It can’t get much more simple than this!
So yeah… So far I’m loving it!
The photo above is one of many images from my today’s trip to the central Helsinki. (Read: A photo gallery containing these shots is under construction.) I restrained myself to use my EOS 350D DSLR and one lens, the new one, only… And oh boy what a combination it was!
Still not sure what lens it might be?
May I present you, Canon EF 135mm f/2L USM!
See the setup here – 3 strobes @ 1/8 power. CTO and CTB gels used on the flashes behind lenses.
In other news
I attended to Finnish version of the global Nike+ Human Race event which was a really fun experience even though the number of participants was nothing compared to other countries’.
I ran the distance of 10 kilometers in 54 minutes and could have easily continued further. I’m confident of myself being ready for the next year’s half maraton. 
Have you ever wondered why some photography are lacking of the “wow”-factor and look flat while other shots may look so great that you drop? Maybe some photos look so amazing that you can’t even believe they’re real. Well that may be just the case…
(click the image for additional info about it)
I’d like to share a series of images where you can see the development of one of my photos (above) from the original file to the image which hopefully does indeed have some of that “woahness”. My post processing starts off with Lightroom’s basic brightness, color and contrast adjustments and after that I do dodging, burning, cloning etc. using Photoshop. It may sound pretty simple – and it is – but I think it really makes the difference!
What do you think?
Jahuu! Abien häipyessä koulun kekkerit ovat meidän. Tanssin itse jo ensimmäisenä vuonna, joten päätin sen sijaan olla valokuvaamassa tapahtumaa kollegoideni päästessä laittamaan jalalla koreaksi. Kuvia on todella paljon, 134 kappaletta. Kannattaa siis varata aikaa niiden katseluun. 
Vaatimus kuvien minkäänlaiselle käytölle on vähintään nimeni esittäminen kuvan ohella. Pelkkää signeeraamaani kuvaa voi käyttää sellaisenaan nimen tullessa esille signeerauksesta. (Eli joo, saa laittaa IRC-Galleriaan, kunhan nimi näkyy.)
Canon EOS 350D, EF 17-40mm f/4L, 430EX ja ST-E2
Tässä kuitenkin päivän parhaita paloja (itse kuvat näiden jälkeen):
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