Category: Finland

Finland

A bohemian waxwing eating a rowan berry

Posted on by Sami

A bohemian waxwing eating a rowan berry

To continue the bird theme of the previous image I posted, here’s an older one from last winter. Unlike the last one, this image hasn’t been modified if you don’t count slight cropping. A flock of waxwings were feeding right next to the road one morning last October and provided a good opportunity to get some close-ups. I haven’t seen any this year, but perhaps it’s still too early. This autumn, there haven’t been as many rowan berries as last year either, but hopefully there’s enough to attract a few waxwings to our neighborhood.

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Great tit on a red fence

Posted on by Sami

Great tit on a red fence

Birds are one of my favorite subjects. I’m not particularly picky about what birds I photograph as long as I’m happy with the final image. Because I’m not taking these photos for a competition or National Geographic, I don’t mind adding things to the images or removing stuff in post-processing if I think it will make the image better. In this image there was a dark pipe that splitting the red background, which I found really distracting, so I removed the pipe in Photoshop. It’s still not an award-winning photo, but it is a lot better with a clean background. At least I like it better this way.

For those of you who care about the technical side, this was shot with Sigma 150-500mm f5-6.3 DG OS HSM, which has turned out to be a nice lens for the price, as long as you stay between 150-400mm and f/8-f/11. It you shoot it beyond 400 mm or wide open, it gets a little soft.

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Rhinoceros ratsnake

Posted on by Sami

Rhinoceros ratsnake

Rhinoceros ratsnake seems to have quite a few names, such as as Vietnamese longnose snake, and it must be the funniest looking snake in the world. Unfortunately I couldn’t go to Vietnam to photograph this one, but had to settle for Helsinki Zoo.

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Meet Myyrä the Cat

Posted on by Sami

Myyrä looking attentive

This is Myyrä the cat, the newest member of our household. The photo was taken when she was a bit over 11 weeks old, a week before she moved in with us. She’s now 16 weeks old and growing up to be a fine cat.

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A train at Pieksämäki Station

Posted on by Sami

Pieksämäki Station

I visited my home town recently to meet some friends. On the way back to Jyväskylä I had to wait for the train at Pieksämäki station, and having nothing better to do, I snapped a few photos with my phone. I’ve actually posted a couple of those photos on Tumblr, including another version of this image, but I like this one better.

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Reeds and falling snow

Posted on by Sami

Reeds and falling snow

I took this photo very shortly after I purchased my first DSLR, but it’s still one of my favorites. It is one of the few of my early images that came out the way I wanted despite my very limited skillset and now after post-processing it again, it looks even better. The photo was taken at Pitkäruoho nature reserve in Jyväskylä on a relatively cold day in February.

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Black-headed gull diving into water

Posted on by Sami

Black-headed gull diving into water

I see these gulls circling over the lake almost every day and had planned on spending some time with them. Last May I finally took a moment to photograph them at a bay near our house. Not a perfect shot, but probably the best out of the bunch. Next time I have to reserve more memory cards and time, though.

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Misty sunset at Lake Palokkajärvi

Posted on by Sami

Sunset at Lake Palokkajärvi

I think misty nights like this are one of the nicest things about Finnish summer. In this case, I don’t even regret that I didn’t have a DSLR with me because the mobile phone did a fairly good job in capturing the scene.

I created the image by merging three exposures in Photoshop and removing some unwanted elements, after which I applied some noise reduction to it in Lightroom.

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Fishing by the lake

Posted on by Sami

Fishing by the lake

In July, I visited my home town in Eastern Finland. These visits usually include swimming in the lake and going to sauna. After we’d done swimming, I took a few sunset shots on the shore and my father spent a while casting his fishing rod. For some reason, I haven’t got that many photographs of my parents, so I took the opportunity to snap a few shots of him in the beautiful evening light.

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Photographing traditional Japanese martial arts

Posted on by Sami

Jidai Matsuri

A few weeks ago a friend of mine asked me to photograph a Suiō-ryū Iai Kenpō seminar here in Jyväskylä. Suiō-ryū Iai Kenpō is a style of classical Japanese swordsmanship, and what made this seminar special was that the sōke, or grand master, of Suio-ryu participated in it with a number of other teachers from Japan. Needless to say, I was a bit nervous when I went there because I’ve never photographed events like this before and also because asked to take a portrait of the current sōke Katsuse Yoshimitsu Kagehiro during the day.

It was an interesting day in many ways and a great opportunity to spend a day with inspiring teachers and enthusiastic students. In case you’re wondering, the above photo is not related to Suio-ryu in any way. It’s a shot from the Jidai Matsuri festival in Kyoto, taken in 2010. If you want to see photos from the actual seminar, there’s a few at the website of the Finnish branch of Suio Suiō-ryū.

The portrait of Katsuse Yoshimitsu Kagehiro that I made is also on the website.

By the way, if you want to stay up to date on my posts in various social networks, follow me on Twitter or Facebook. I use them as outlets for additional and exclusive stuff that doesn’t make it to this blog.

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