It's getting warmer in Helsinki and the days are getting longer. We went to do some landscape shooting with other amateur photographers this past weekend and here's a couple of photos I took. The location was the Suomenlinna Sea Fortress, situated on a group of islands off Helsinki. Established Finnish landscape photographer Mikael Rantalainen, who is specialized in winter landscapes, was instructing us so we got to see how an experienced photographer goes on with his outdoor shootings.

I got further in going through my Svalbard photos from last summer. I finally got going with my intentions of post processing and turning some of the photos into black & white, grayscale tone.
More of these photos in my Behance projects Svalbard in Greyscale pt.1, pt.2 and pt.3. There's some samples on my Facebook page here.

It's been a winter full of snow and, recently, damn cold in Helsinki. Here's some photos from the freezing days of February. Currently, it's -20 degrees celcius outside, so you can's spend too much time shooting without gloves.

Here's four pieces below and you can find more recent winter shots from my Behance Network project, Winter in Helsinki.

Shot taken in the remote Russian mining settlement called Barentsburg, Svalbard.

Gotta love social media. Boy, somebody had started a snowball of sharing of my photos the other day - in twitter, photo directories and whatnot. Then I see people pouring into my site from different blogs and photography/art community sites such as Shockblast.net. Feeling pretty humbled.

I already linked one of the articles on my facebook site, but since this blog is MY photoblog I think it's not too bad if I post some of the sites I found my photos shared from and people writing very nice things about my work. Even though you could say; "this is how social media works", it's also encouraging to get some nice feedback, nevertheless. I also got some new fans on my facebook page from numerous new countries and got about 70 twitter users sharing my work to their followers. So, thanks everyone! Here's some of the links that I found my photos from:

Shockblast.net
Trendhunter.com
iso200.com
Pichaus.com
Photodonuts.com
Xaxor.com
designyoutrust.com
Moderskeppet.se
spin-sparklers.tumblr.com
Ynput.com
opiniondeimagen.tumblr.com
blog.zekarlos.com
elyann.tumblr.com
Designspiration.net
emi-ruka.tumblr.com
seelekarte.tumblr.com
ape-x.net
triesurlevolet.tumblr.com
waru-rakko.clipp.in
liquidreams.tumblr.com
bbbarze.com

I haven't been doing too much macro photography and this is something I intend to do more in the future. My dear friend gave me a Nikon Extension Bellows and then I bought a 55mm Micro-Nikkor lens (which is old, yes, but sharp as hell) to get to try the bellows. These particular photos below are not shot using the bellows, but only with the manual 55mm lens. The stones I used as model were pretty small, about the size of a thumb, I'd say.

Many of you may be familiar with Gregory Colbert's (a film-maker and photographer) Ashes and Snow installation, but I wanted to share his inspiring work with you, nevertheless. It was a long time since I had watched this last time and it never fails to give you the shivers.
His photography portfolio and the Ashes and Snow project can be found from here.

This is a short film from the bigger project, but the one part I like the most. The song is by amazing Lisa Gerrard and the narrative voices feature Laurence Fishburne (English version), Enrique Rocha (Spanish version), Ken Watanabe (Japanese version), and Jeanne Moreau (French version).
If you're in a hurry, save it for later...

So, I had a chance to go to Switzerland for the first time in my life and see The Alps. To be more precise, we stayed for four days in the lovely mountain village called Engelberg. I did skiing every day we stayed there and the highest slope started from the top of the Mountain Titlis (3,238m). I had my camera and some lenses in my bag all the time so did some shooting as well, naturally. I posted two projects, colour and black&white, to my Behance portfolio and to Facebook as well, if you're up to getting a closer look. Here's some views from The Alps.

First of all, Happy New Year of 2011! It's been a really snowy winter all over the world and it's been even snowing in places you rarely get a chance to see this white beauty.

This post includes shots taken in Finland during winter time. At this time of the year you don't get to see sunlight that much, but when the light is up and the ground is white, it just gets beautiful. I just created a new project to Behance Network with the same name as this post so you can go and see more winter photos in here.

I've had my portfolio site up for about a year now and now I've decided to start running a photoblog as well. I've generally gotten a bit more active online in terms of photography since I recently set up my Facebook photography page.

I've been thinking what would be the best way to start a photoblog and I'm going with this: My favourite photos from this year, 2010. You could tell there's been some highlight trips for me this year, such as visiting Svalbard and Venice as well as getting a change to photoshoot wild bears from a hide in Northern Finland. I might be putting out some older shots later in the following posts or even doing a similar favourite collection for the year 2009. We'll see what will follow.

Anyway, here’s a collection of my favorite images from this year in no particular order.