A recent “nordic warrior”-themed shooting with model Nienke from the Netherlands. In Nordic mythology, a valkyrie is a female figure who decides who falls and dies in a battle. Selecting among half of those who die in battle, the valkyries bring their chosen to the afterlife hall of the slain, Valhalla. Luckily, I was not chosen… 
. I really enjoyed that shooting, thank you Nienke!
Last week I had a shooting session with the C-juniors of ÄU (Äänekosken Urheilijat) Volleyball girls. Portraits shootings with sport juniors are always a very rewarding experience. The youngsters are very excited and are having a lot of fun in front of the camera and in the midst of mobile studio flashes; the shooting and the photography itself are an empowering experience for the models (and for the photographer too ). Unlike classic school photography, which basically is a money making mass industry, I prefer to take more time and aim to create a dramatic light setup. In addition to conventional portraits, the real fun starts when doing the action portraits. This is where portrait photography meets sports photography! The girls and boys give everything to look good, and they always do! As another example, have a look at the soccerboys of Jyväskylä Cometes.
After the shooting, I take the time to create a unique style in post processing and individually process every selected image. All in all this takes, of course, a lot of time, but it’s worth every brush and dodge! The result is something very different from the classic school photography style. It emphasizes the individual, the environment and the circumstances, giving every image a unique ambiance.
Coach Teemu shows how to do it
Either conventional or action portraits can be used to create individual player cards. Here I decided to use the half body portraits for that purpose.
Thank you Teemu & Girls!
Organized annually since 2003 in Jyväskylä, the snow rugby is a unique tournament and a must for hard core rugby players and fans. The tournament also adds up nicely to the growing selection of exotic sport tournaments and disciplines Finland is famous for, such as swamp football, wife carrying or rubber boot throwing, just to name a few… This years edition was held under perfect conditions, sunshine and only -5 degrees celsius. Compared to normal 15-a side rugby, teams have less players, the pitch is smaller and the rules are modified to some extent.
I’ve never shot rugby before. It was certainly trickier than soccer, movement is much less predictable. But it was fun, hopefully I’ll be able to shoot some real rugby on grass this year (JRC, hint hint).
As in any physically demanding sports, scientific re-hydration during and in-between matches is of critical importance…
Girls are having fun, too
Some 25 men and ladies teams participated. Among them are the Blizzard Boks, a team consisting of South Africans living in Finland. A Blizzard’s player is making final prepaprations before kick-off against Helsinki Rugby.
It’s all about determination…
Another interesting team, the R.I.P.’s (Rauma Ice Pack, blue/white stripes). The team consists mostly of french guys living in Finland.
For more pictures please visit my archives.
A recent studio shoot with Swiss Photographer Felix Peter and models D&J. Two simple setups, one low key, one high key.
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The other day I and fellow photographer and friend Felix (www.felixpeter.com) visited Finnish artist and “father” of the citybird”, Samuli Alonen, at his wonderful workshop at Pykälistö in order to shoot some portraits of Samuli at work. Pykälistö is a former guard house of VR (Finnish Train Association) that has been refurbished and transformed into an oasis of Finnish artwork by Samuli and his father Kari. For more information about Pykälistö and Samuli’s and Karis’s work visit www.designalonen.fi.
I met Samuli for the first time a few months ago, because I was shooting a photo series of one of his art crafts, the citybird. The citybird is a sculpture made of a piece of naturally shaped ancient rock with feet and head made of bronze, and it looks like, well, a bird. Samuli started crafting citybirds some ten years ago, and the first one was sold to a Swiss family that visited the workshop in 2003. During the past ten years the citybird has become Samuli’s most popular piece of art and at times demand exceed Samuli’s production capacity. Samuli offered me coffee and introduced me to the craft. The birds are characterized by beautiful craftsmanship, lines and shapes, and each of them has something very special and personal. Samuli had two birds ready and I took them with me to the studio. I had no experience of how to shoot this kind subject. The shapes of the craft were interesting and called for a simple lighting setup with one or a maximum of two lights. I felt I wanted to do a low key setup and put the bird on black acrylic plate. The lighting was very simple, one striplight and a reflector, and a background light for some shots. Since I had two birds I thought of making a sequence of pictures that would make up little story. I wrapped the pics into a quick slideshow:
But let’s get back to the other day. Arriving at the workshop, we were offered some coffee and had a chat, and after two cups we started to setup the light. For a first setup we’d use flash without ambient, with one softbox to the left, a speedlight in the room behind Samuli and one speedlight on the floor to illuminate the brick arch on the right.
Photo courtesy of Felix Peter (www.felixpeter.com)
I like the text on the blackboard that says “Tervetuloa”, because that is what you feel like when visiting the workshop, “welcome”.
Next we decided to use ambient light and add some light with a simple low budget light torch (Felix’s specialty). This introduces some white balance problems but overall allowed us to better retain the ambiance of hot iron and sparks.
A recent milieu shoot with photographer and friend Felix Peter (www.felixpeter.com) and models Dani, Joel, Juliaana & Iina at a local graffiti. We used a 4 flash setup with 2 QR heads and 2 speedlights. It was freezing cold and a stiff wind made it a challenge for both models and photographers. Thank you Dani, Joel, Juliaana and Iina!
Trying out a new light setup for headshots. Very simple, two silver umbrella aligned vertically (one slightly upwards, the other downwards) slightly right of camera, and two main lights left and right behind the model (deep octa on the left, grid on the right). Thank you Models Juliaana, Laura, Iina, Noora & Ella.
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In conjunction with a recent shoot (see blog entry) I shot a few portraits of kickboxers at Jigotai Kickboxing Jyväskylä. After shooting the training session itself, I did a quick setup with 3 lights within the boxing ring. Shooting portraits after training session makes for more authentic portraits, the kickboxers are sweaty, and after 75 minutes of heavy physical work the mind is calm and open. And that’s exactly what you want from a portrait. After all a portrait is not so much about depth of field, but about the depth of mind…
At the end a few staged sparring shots:
So you are shooting an event in fluorescent light conditions and think you got the camera’s white balance right. Right? Still, you end up wit lots of shots that have an ugly, mostly yellowish color cast? I have recently shot a kickboxing training session, and that’s exactly what happened.
Here’s an example of two subsequent shots (unprocessed originals):
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The background in the first picture is yellowish, while in the second it is more neutral. The kickboxers in the foreground, however, have the same color both. Here’s another example:
Here both the background (the door and reflection in the mirror, which is behind me) have a cast in the first pic, the second again is more neutral.
So what is it? The camera WB was set to fluorescent, but within a fraction of a second it gives me two different results. While chimping (looking the result on the LCD) I noticed it and was confused at first. I did not bother about it too much, as fixing WB is not such a problem. But then I noticed that in some pics the color cast applies only to a part of the pic, and that’s more tricky. After some more confusion I remembered. Those darn neon lights…
Neon (fluorescent) lights flicker at about twice the frequency of the current feeding them, meaning that an entire flicker cycle will be between 1/100 and 1/120 second. During such a cycle the light’s intensity and color temperature changes. Using a shutter speed faster than that, as I did, then that’s exactly what happens. I was using shutter speeds between 1/400 and 1/800, and in almost every sequence of frames shot in a row (at 9 fps), I have at least one with a color cast.
A possibility to overcome that problem is to shoot with flash at shutter speed slower than 1/100. Here an example shot at 1/20 with bounced flash bounced:
The other option is that you don’t bother, hoping the good shots have no cast, and if they have, fix them. Black & white conversion does the job too:
