Finland
I don’t consider myself a street photographer, but I like to photograph people in their environments, especially when I’m traveling. I saw this young woman waiting for a train at Helsinki railway station from the platform I was standing at and thought that the train cars provided interesting frames for the image. I didn’t see what she was doing on the bench, but I thought she was probably checking her mobile phone.
A couple of weeks ago I mentioned that I was going to see a friend of mine play at a local bar and promised to post some images later. It took me a while, but here’s one of my favorites from that evening. Needless to say, the show was great and entertaining as he was not only playing and singing, but also reading short passages from his first novel. If you want to know more about Heikki, you can find his website here.
A simple click of Lake Tuomiojärvi I made during an evening walk. It’s a shame I didn’t take more than one photo of this beautiful scene, but then again, this one photo is all I need to remember the moment.
Here’s one more autumn image to start the week. One of my goals this autumn was to photograph leaves flying in the wind. There was a strong wind on the morning I took this photo and I knew it was probably one of the last days before all the leaves were gone. I saw these trees next to our office and started working on different angles. I finally settled on the one you see above and began to wait for a gust of wind that would blow some leaves off the trees. It turned out to be more difficult than I thought and I kept missing the shot because of the slow response time of my phone camera (I’d left my DSLR home in the morning). I stood there a good while, trying to anticipate the right moment until I finally got a couple of promising images.
I took the one I liked best and blended in a couple of leaves from another shot to fill some spots in the sky I thought were too empty. I’m not sure if this was really necessary, but it made the image look more balanced to my eye. I then finalized the image by increasing color contrast and adding some vignetting to the corners in Nik Color Efex Pro. Although this might sound like a lot of post-processing work for a mobile phone image and the image was by no means bad out of camera, these final post-processing steps really made the colors pop – and more importantly – they made me happier about the image. Even if you’re not shooting in raw, there’s a lot you can do to improve your images afterwards with software such as Snapseed, Lightroom or Photoshop, and I see no reason to settle for what the camera offers you.
A quick update for Friday afternoon before I have to get going.
Here’s the second image from the autumn series I shot a month ago. When it comes to autumn and mobile phone photos, a hand holding a maple leaf against the sky or sun is probably one of the most common photographic clichés. Still, the weather was so nice and the leaves so colorful that I had to make my version of it. I’m not sure if I was able to bring anything new or personal to this shot, but at least its my hand in the image. I’m also happy about the color contrast between the blue sky and the yellow leaf.
That’s it for today. Have a nice weekend, and if you’re in Jyväskylä, come and see singer-songwriter Heikki Hallanoro, a friend of mine, perform at Vakiopaine tonight. I’ll also be there to take a few photos. Hopefully I’ll have some nice ones to upload next week.
Autumn is almost over and the leaves are already gone, but I haven’t had time to post any autumn images yet. I’m going to fix that by posting a series of images I took on a beautiful morning in early October. This boat is one of many boats on the shore of Lake Palokkajärvi. I walk by it almost everyday during my commute, but this time the golden leaves and the morning light created such a beautiful scene that I had to stop and try to capture it. I took a number of shots from different angles, but this one stood out.
I’m trying to catch up with posting images I’ve post-processed recently. I took this one in May only a few hundred meters from where I live. I liked the original version, but thought it was a bit too light. Because the image already had a painterly quality to it, I decided to emphasize it by adding a texture on most of the image. I think it worked nicely, making the image a bit darker and giving it a more tranquil mood.
This image was pulled from the previous version of this blog. I took it in Rantasalmi, my home town, a few years ago on a sunny spring day. There’s a small river called Pappilanjoki (Parsonage’s river) that connects two lakes, Lake Kosulanlampi and Pieni Raudanvesi.
Both Lake Kosulanlampi and the river have become eutrophic due to the surrounding agriculture and municipal waste waters. On the right behind the trees, there’s an old parsonage built in 1870. Because of quality of water in the river and the lake, there’s a lot of vegetation on the shores and riverbanks, which has made this area an important resting stop for many species of migratory birds.
Sunset reflecting on windows of apartment buildings in Kuokkala and apartment buildings reflecting on Lake Jyväsjärvi. This photo was taken on Kuokkala bridge from where there’s a nice view to both the city and the lake. This in an older image that I’ve previously published on the old incarnation of this website, but I recently reprocessed it and decided to post it again.
This image of a coltsfoot in spring forest is one of the older photos I’ve been post-processing recently. It was taken on the same evening as the series of spring leaves I’ve been uploading on my Tumblr blog. Originally this image had warmer light and it was a bit soft, so I accentuated the details on the flower and the piece of wood next to it and adjusted the white balance to make the ground look desaturated. I also added a lens blur filter on the background to give a “Lensbaby” look.