Evening flight

Summer evening flight

I’m slowly working through my back catalogue of images and although I’m not finding as many gems as I wanted, there is an occasional image that I like. This was a pretty simple image to finish. I cropped the image to square format to get rid of the needless space on the edges and removed some of the trees at the bottom of the image in Lightroom. Then I moved to Photoshop where I cloned out the logos of the balloon company in Photoshop and finally accentuated the colors of the sunset in Nik Color Efex Pro 4 by adding a violet/pink bi-color filter to the image. I could have done a more careful job on removing the logos, but it’s not too bad.

I was out shooting with a friend one evening because I wanted to test a Sigma 150-500mm lens he had for sale (and which I later bought). It was already quite late in the evening and the sun was setting when we saw this hot air balloon taking off a couple of hundred meters from us. I shot a few frames as it floated by just above the trees. After flying a few hundred meters, it suddenly shrank and fell down to the woods on the other side of the park. I don’t know what happened and we never found out whether the people in the balloon were ok, but I don’t think they were in any danger. It looked like a relatively soft landing.

Finally, if you’re one of the people who started following this website back in 2009 when it was still a travel blog about Japan, you might be happy to hear that I still have quite a few photos from that period that I haven’t uploaded here yet. I’ll start working on those images next and I’m really excited to visit them again! I’ll be posting the travel images in the Travel section under “Japan 2009” and return to this blog after I’ve dealt with those images. If you’ve subscribed to the RSS feed from the front page of the blog, you should receive see those posts as usual in your reader.

See this photo on Flickr

Photographing traditional Japanese martial arts

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.

See this image on Flickr

Skiing into the sunset

Skiing into the sunset

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.

See this image on Flickr

License this photo on Getty Images