This is the very first non-work-related-post of the summer from me. This might have also been one of the only actual and proper summer nights I’ve been able to spend during these months. You know, such a night you spent with people dear to you, stay up late no matter if you had work tomorrow and do something less-than reasonable with say a boat, a motor, six-pack and a camera. Proper irresponsible and free summer night.
The problem really wasn’t that I hadn’t taken photos during my spare time. I did, really, thousands of them. The problem is that after 8 to 12 hours of work one doesn’t just feel like processing some shots he or she took last weekend. Or some might feel like that, I rarely do. And I feel quilty for that. Am I really that unmotivated that I don’t have energy to take photography as both work and area of interest and dear hobby? This leads us to another very good question I’ve been struggling with this summer: Where does one end and the other start? If one enjoys his work, is it still work? Should work and play be separated? Should I start worrying when I find myself staying far too late at the office working photos for the fifth time that week? I don’t know, you tell me. It’s not like there has been much else waiting for me in Kemi.
This was interesting. Miika Viljakainen from Aamulehti asked me if I was interested in spending a day at the army boot camp. Of course I was. The story was about growing to be a soldier and it was published in Aamulehti’s sunday supplement and I was lucky to get quite a lot of space for the photos as well. As always, Miika’s story was amazing :) If you know Finnish, be sure to read it. After 10 hours I had too many photos to choose from and it took ages to come up with some sort of selection for the paper. Here’s some more in a form of a slideshow. Sounds by Miika.
The City theater of Kemi got it’s auditorium renewed. Fancy, new and shiny seats for everyone and even couple of extra seats for couple of extra people.
I was nervous: if I have one mantra I keep telling myself while on assignments, it’s “Konsta, do something different”. Sometimes it works out fine or near-fine or at least OK, but almost every time it leads me to one very essential question about photojournalism that was first planted in my head by an Alma-photographer Joel Maisalmi who’s talent and attitude I highly admire. It goes “Do I take this photo for my portfolio, to show other photographers, or do I take it for the readers who want to learn something about the subject?” In my case something different often means technical stuff, like strange angles or unpredictable framing etc. Too seldom in my photos the difference derives from the subject and the contents of the photo.
We’ve all seen millions of similar shots, where the subject (in this case the director of city theater Juha Vuorinen) is set somewhere in the auditorium, photographer climbs few rows back and shoots. Even I’ve done it before. I was tempted to start my monkey business again, but came to my senses and for once took the shot I was expected to.
However, maybe the karma gave me a present for my sacrifice: as we were leaving, we walked past the old chairs piled on one wall… with that walker for elderly people parked right in front of them. What the heck was it doing there? Did the old chairs come there with it?
Few weeks ago I had change to do my first reportage this summer about Kilke scout camp. We did a three-page story for the Asiat Sunday supplement. In the beginning I was bit lost because we arrived the first day and everything was still in state of construction. That wasn’t the way I wanted to cover this subject. Also besides the reportage we had to do a big news article for next day’s paper so we really had to be efficient and organized. Visually my aim was to create an impression that we we’re there for a day, even more, really getting the feeling right, when the fact was that we had only few hours to do the job. I wanted to capture some of that excitement, magic and friendship which the campers seemed to share. Everybody we met seemed to have a good story for us. And on top of that the light was beyond this world as the setting sun burned pillars of gold light through the trees.
During the weekend I was taking photos at finnish sport event Kalevan Kisat. On saturday night there broke out a hellish storm and I was witnessing it from my hotel room window. And as did Tatu, I also grabbed the camera. The storm was pretty intense at Kajaani and I got extremely lucky with this photo.
A tropic thunder over Tampere. Or actually a bit to the west. Unfortunately I was at work when the storm was at its strongest. This one was the best I captured near my apartment at the Näsijärvi lake shore. The buildings are the ones at Naistenlahti, and you can see the power plant as well. It’s been crazy in Finland lately. The weather is like in India or Mexico: hot (more than +30 celsius), very humid and strong thunderstorms hitting almost every day. Today some 40 people were injured in Pori when the storm hit a rock festival. Yesterday I was photographing a house that was set on fire by a lightning. That image is in the previous post.
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Technical stuff: This one was taken with a tripod. At the lakeshore it was dark, no ambient light except a faint glow coming from the nearby road. The lens I had here was a 17-40mm wide angle zoom, the camera was set to f5, ISO 200 and exposure time of 30 seconds. I’m not experienced in photographing lightnings, so if you have a better idea, PLEASE share it with me by commenting!! :-) I bet there’s another storm coming already!
This summer was my second one in Aamulehti. For some reason I’ve been working as a press photographer AND as a layout artist (or whatever they are called). Anyways, like always, I didn’t use flash at all, took most of the photos with either 50mm prime or 70-200mm zoom and post processed the images so they would have a lot of contrast. It’s easy nowadays, as the raw image files give you so much control over the exposure and colors. Here’s some of the shots I’ve taken between may and today. All photos are property of Aamulehti.
1st image: Firefighters at the scene of a building fire in Lempäälä. There was a storm (again) and lightnings started quite a lot of fires. 2nd image: Matti Järvelä, a long-time driver for the city of Tampere. 3rd one: A calf enjoying a hot summer day.
I’m really confused. I’ve been practicing the profession of a photojournalist for less than years now, but it has already given me more wonderful, sad, frightening and unreal experiences I can remember (I have a bad memory though). For me, it all comes to two little questions with huge answers behind them: “why” and “how”. I didn’t have time to do many assignments before I noticed I’m spending a LOT of time thinking my own feelings towards what I do, how I do it and especially why. Why do I photograph people? What am I trying to find? Of course, many of the portrait photos are taken because the people in them want to have physical proof that they were there at the time, or to have something to support their memories. And I get paid. That’s it. But on the other hand, I find myself more and more often looking at photographs of people I don’t know, people who will probably never see the images (I’ll come to that later) and knowing I won’t get paid for them because they are not for sale. I’m not even trying to explain their connection to some story or reportage just to have them included in the set. No. I don’t know why, but I just had to take them to look back, to see how the people are looking back at me. The stares are stories of their own.
The headline for this post is “guilt”. It’s there because I’m sometimes feeling a bit guilty as I know some of these people will never see the photos I took of them. I was in their home, in their life and they gave me something that can’t be measured in money. They gave me their story. In the end that is the real reason I want to do this and why I think photojournalism is really the best job in the world. To hear and see stories, and to be able to tell them to others. I just want to be able to give something back, even if it was just the photo I took. It’s nothing compared to the story they shared with me, but it’s something.
Tomorrow I’ll stop being a lazy, ungrateful idiot and use my day by sending photographs to all those people that have been kind enough to share their lives with me :)
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The photo: Of all the photos I took during my last foreign assignment, this one of an old Maharashtran woman, Jana Bai Dada Berde, in her one-room house is the most important to me. She was a little scared of me and my camera, but wanted me to take some photos of her cookings. Bhokar, Maharashtra, India.
Kemi is famous for it’s “red-roots”, a lot of socialism-sympathetic precarity has lived in this industrial city throughout history. And it still shows in somewhat comic ways as can be seen in the first photo. I’ve really enjoyed working here at Pohjolan Sanomat this summer. The paper is very photo-oriented and conductive. They tolerate even radical photo-ideas and are not too uptight, when blundering takes place. And blundering is bound to happen from time to time, isn’t it?
Besides Konsta, also the time does fly. Last weeks I’ve been running around and shooting various subjects. The diversity of this profession never ceases to amaze me. One day you’re taking photos of restaurant menu for food review, on the next witnessing a surreal scene of a man being tossed into water on “Unikeon päivä”. What is there not to love?
For the latter image I got lucky. I had planned that I would slip my swimming pants on and take the shot from the water. But we were running late and I didn’t have time for serious stripping, so I just tiptoed and tried to get the camera as high as possible for the right angle. And I can assure you I was pretty relieved that the falling man wasn’t out of the frame.
