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.
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.
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.
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.
I went out to photograph the sunset on a cold January afternoon because it looked like there might some nice colors in the sky. As I was looking for a good position, this man skied past me and I knew I had to get him in the frame with the sun. I had my camera hanging on my neck, but I wasn’t really prepared to take any photos. Luckily he wasn’t too fast and I was able to adjust my camera settings and take this photo. Looking back, I think this was the best photo I took that day.
For those of you who are interested in tech stuff, the image is a blend of two differently exposed versions of the same file. Blending allowed me to adjust the exposure of the snow and the sky more easily to my liking.
I took this photo of a great tit last December on one of the last days of the year. We spent a day away from the city near Pieksämäki. It was a fairly cold day, but very productive in terms of bird photography. I haven’t had the time to go through all the images yet, but I know there are at least a couple of photos I like.
There’s a small hill with a relatively nice view near our apartment where we sometimes go. I originally shot this photo bracketed to make an HDR image, but ended up using only one exposure. Apart from the sun there wasn’t much need for the extra dynamic range. I think I’ll try to make the HDR version later when I have more time.
This image is also from 2007. It was taken just a little after the one I posted earlier. Well, actually it’s a composite of a few photos, but the base image was taken in 2007. This year I plan to do more processing than before, so some of these experiments might go a bit over the top. I try to keep them tasteful though.
Here’s another image from 2007. Google was kind enough to give me a free copy of Nik’s plugin bundle and this was the first image tested it on. I used a very randomly selected set of filters from Color Efex to get this look and the image instantly became one of my favorites.
As a side note, I’ve created a Facebook page for my images. If you don’t like RSS feeds, you can now keep keep up to date with this blog by liking the page. If you like the images there (or here), feel free to share them to your friends.
I’ve still got loads of exciting news to share, but I’ll try to keep my posts short, so more on those next time.
Lately I’ve been going through old photos again and trying new processing techniques on them. I haven’t used textures before, but I think after this experiment I’m going to try to use them more often. The original photo was taken in 2007 on a frozen lake in Eastern Finland.
By the way, I have a mobile phone / scrapbook blog in Tumblr. In addition to phoneography, I also use the blog to post alternative takes on images and unique Creative Commons content. Tumblr updates don’t show on the front page so if you want to keep up with my mobile photography, be sure to follow me on Tumblr or subscribe to the feed on the Mobile page.