All you need is a dinner table, a willing family member, an Ikea light and a camera. Et voilà.

D700, ISO3200, 1/125 sec @ f/4.8, Nikkor 50mm

Well… I guess the images speak for themselves, so…
Sit back, relax and enjoy

Sorry, but you're not my type

Hmm, handsome... why don't you come a bit closer?

I think that's more my type

*giggles* Let's play hard to get for a bit

Ok, that's enough. I'm a man of few words...

Ow yeah... ow YEAH!!! Give it to me baby, ahah, ahah!

Sometimes you have those days on which you just don’t feel too good.

Today was one of those days for me. Can’t really put my finger on it, but it wasn’t your regular Sunday.
I did have a couple of things to do, though, so I set to work.
Only… When you’re not feeling all too good, and you have to do something that looks a bit dubious, it doesn’t really help.
According to studies (if you Google blue color not appetizing) the color blue is prone to make people lose appetite and is not recommended to be used in food.
So one would start to wonder why on earth people would still make blue food and drinks. It actually does look disgusting.

D200, ISO100, 1/60 sec @ f/16, off-camera flash with Photoflex softbox

And this is a sports drink, for crying out loud.
I had a faint feeling of nausea, and it didn’t really get much better.
I did, however, try a sip, and must admit that it’s not by far the worst drink I’ve ever had. But owwell… Tricky business…

When I was in Missoula last summer one of my friends gave me a DVD to watch. A movie called Once.
It was a bit funny. It’s an Irish movie, but not the blockbuster type of movie. It was made in 2006 and it was released in Finland in July 2008, hence I hadn’t really heard of the movie until my friend pointed it out.
And it was a great movie. Well… Movie… More musical-ish.
Great music, great play.
And guess what…? This week, The Swell Season, the band with the guy and girl from the movie, played a couple of gigs in Helsinki and we were there. And it was great all over again.

We were a bit late with booking our tickets, the whole thing was sold out within 2 hours, so we ended up high up on the balcony on the back row. But but…. lo and behold… A couple of people didn’t show up and a guy came up to the balcony and offered us and some other people on the back row the seats from the people who hadn’t showed up. So we ended up all the way in the front, right up near the stage.
Oh, and did I mention it was great?
Wish I brought my big camera, but that would’ve probably been a bit obvious, so I had to make do with my cellphone.
But it was still great
Totally recommended!

Swell Season in concert in Helsinki

Photography can lead you into several directions. All creative, all unique (supposedly). And they all come with a certain set of rules.
Take for example product photography. Open any style magazine and you’re buried under adverts displaying -among others- watches. It’s such a big thing these days to have a massive, expensive watch.
In photography school we were taught how to properly photograph watches.
You know, photographers were way ahead of their time. Already well before the first official mentioning of a smiley face photographers were taught to put the pointers of a watch on 10 past 10 to create a smile and make the picture look positive. And that’s what we’re still taught.

Image courtesy Hamilton (ripped out of Men's Health November issue)

And when you keep an eye on it, it’s everywhere… EVERYWHERE! To the point that it’s annoying. 10 past 10. The magical time.

But that’s where most of the photographers stop thinking. Watch – photograph – 10 past 10.
But wait! What about…
If it’s not only a watch, but someone’s wearing it?
No matter… Watch – photograph – 10 past 10. It’s the golden rule.
Or is it?

What about…
Hehehe… The funny thing is, when people are wearing a watch, it’s not positioned the same as when it’s just a watch set up for a shot in a studio. It’s upside down.
But apparently this hasn’t occurred to most photographers. And they stubbornly set the watch to 10 past 10 on their models and shoot the shot, because that’s how they were taught.

Image courtesy Hugo Boss (ripped out of Men's Health November issue)

Image courtesy Chanel (ripped out of Men's Health November issue)

But wait!
What happened to the smiley face? Of course… When people wear a watch, the watch is upside down, thus the smiley face turns upside down with it. And turns into a very unhappy face.
Little improvisation for photographers: if you shoot a watch while it’s worn by a model, set the pointers to 20 to 4 or 20 past 8, if that makes you more happy. The ad will end up a lot happier, at least. That I can assure you

Giorgio Armani is treating me well (and he should for the money I invested in him ).
Got some feedback on my previous pics and was advised to put in some complementary colors.
So… following the good advise:

D200, ISO100, 1/250 sec @ f/16, Tamron 28-75mm, off-camera SB-800 with Photoflex softbox

And the beauty?
The picture is unedited save for a bit tighter crop. No saturation, no alteration. Right out of the camera
Good that the flowers don’t have GIORGIO ARMANI on them, otherwise it would’ve been one hell of an expensive picture

So yesterday after my life-threatening operation downtown Helsinki I went to a big store where they sell fabrics. There was one piece missing still for my home studio table top: a black backdrop.
I went into the store and enthusiastically asked for black silk, thinking it would be some 30 euros per meter. You can imagine my surprise that the cheapest suitable silk they had in store was closer to 70 euros per meter. That was a good amount more than I had budgeted and seriously more than I was willing to spend on it. So I had to downgrade… I found a very nice piece of Lycra or something and that was really the best piece after the silk I could find. The others were not really black, or too shiny, or dusty, or what not. But this nice piece of cloth still cost me 39 euros per meter. And I needed two meters at least. So… *sighs* about 80 euros lighter (oh, and a 50 euros parking ticket, because I parked three meters from a pedestrian crossing instead of five – that’s TWO tickets in two weeks, for crying out loud!!!), but a nice backdrop richer I went home to test it out.

D200, ISO100, 1/250 sec @ f/2.8, Tamron 28-75mm, off-camera SB-800 with Photoflex softbox

I went out to get a bunch of leaves and I even had a really nice conversation with an old guy who was working in the garden close by. That’s such un-Finnish behavior! And I like it

Oh… And when I was testing out the backdrop, I found out why it was so expensive anyway… It said with big bold white letters “GIORGIO ARMANI” on it
Hahahaha! Now that I come to think of it… How decadent is it really? I’m using a GIORGIO ARMANI cloth for my photography backdrop…
Oh my… where is it going with me?

After I came back from the US I bought a bunch of stuff to set up a small studio at home. Last week I got my first official assignment to shoot some products for a brochure that I’m doing (great fun, now I’m doing everything, from the initial design of the brochure to the photography of the stuff that goes IN the brochure ).
It was a good road of trial and error, but in the end I think the results are very nice. And the client loved what I did, so I guess everyone’s happy.

D200, ISO100, 1/60 sec @ f/16, Tamron 28-75mm, off-camera SB-800 with Photoflex softbox