chasing the focus

Long days with a lot of light – and short nights with almost non-existent darkness. And even that short darkness isn’t pitch black but dusky. Finland at its best. Beautiful.

I’ve been making a website for a friend and this image happened as a side product. The evening when this photography session took place in Helsinki-Vantaa airport was very gloomy and dark but I managed to get a couple of decent snaps anyway – and postprocessing helps, too.

This aeroplane was just about to leave from the VIP terminal, carrying Finnish figure skaters :)

Just a comfy sofa and this set – and isn’t life good?!

May I present to you – this is Rööm. She’s an Estonian horse, a beautiful small mare, 5 days old in these pictures. Her name is Estonian and means Joy (Riemu in Finnish).

The proud mom is a bit protective and with all the little people in the riding school there was no other option than trying to catch a couple of frames in bad conditions – but they came out allright anyway, considering. I’m hoping to get more pictures, better ones, some other day!

Clicking any picture takes you into my horse picture gallery.

I took this one about week ago when everything still was very white. Now the wind has brushed some of the frost off the trees. However, my problem was that most of the walkway was lit with orange streetlights (yuck…) and at the end of the path there suddenly was a very cold blue light. So straight out of the camera this picture looked pretty awful – all orange, with a bright blue spot in the middle! However, after a colour correction act and some tweaking with saturation in PSE, this is what I ended up with… Reminds me of the scenery in the Narnia movie The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe!

Today I’m giving you just a documentary-type of photo about how this winter has been so far. Lots and lots of snow and whiteness. So much so that even photographers are getting fed up with all that white – especially since it comes with fog that flattens all the light and removes all the shadows so that it’s difficult to even focus. So, this photo too, is pretty heavily post-processed to bring out at least some detail out of the never-ending whiteness!

This road is actually where I used to live. About 200 m further and there’s what used to be my mother-in-law’s house and next to it the one my husband built for us. Yes, I know, we lived in the sticks… but it’s beautiful there. Especially if you don’t have to live there… And see the cables? They really are hanging so low I could almost jump to them! No wonder we constantly had power breaks, with either snow or wind raging out there.

This is a photo-op I missed yesterday morning because I was in a hurry and didn’t stop to take the photo. Yeah, right. It woudn’t have made any difference, I was half an hour late already! Anyway, today afternoon I got another chance – but the light was far from what it was yesterday. Of course, it takes a lot to beat a good morning light and for this pic it came from a perfect direction yesterday: From behind the trees, through the fog. Today there really was no light at all and it came from another direction because it was late afternoon. However, I think the picture turned out pretty good anyway. Just that again I can’t make up my mind which version is better! The first one is more authentic (although pretty heavily post-processed) but there’s just something in the second one, too…