I had pleasure to shoot bariton Masato Inoue some years back. This photo is one of my favorites from that session.
Song of Yesterday, Flood of Today
I love Michael Moore’s “Capitalism, Love Story”.
I realized how HUGE impact the movie made within these four years. We just don’t live in same world than we did in 2009. Capitalism is yesterday’s song. It’s gone. Communities are formed everywhere, people are waking up to realize the value of each other’s help and spiritual thinking. People grow healthy food by themselves and share it with their friends. Money just isn’t as valuable as it was before. True innovation and originality is suddenly more valuable than gold.
It’s pretty remarkable to live in this era and see this change happening. It’s huge flood; something impossible to stop.
Session with Beautiful Kayo
I had great chance to have a little photo session with my friend and fellow cameraman Kayo. She turned out to be such a cute model with great intuition. Perhaps her intuition for being model came from her own experience as a photographer.
This image turned out to be the winner of yesterday’s shoot; there’s something that just turned right about this photo.
I used off-camera speedlite to add a bit of illumination to the subject with TTL turned off and manually dialing down the power of the flash so that it doesn’t overpower the ambient light which was already good to start. I removed flash spots from her eyes in Photoshop as they were a bit distracting from that angle.
I learned that in this situation, a bit off-camera flash can actually help to raise the overall exposure a bit, and remove some of the darker shades of the face which often result when shooting in outdoor shade. I always bring either flash or reflector as it can really help to add bit of necessary light to the subject.
Updated WordPress
I finally got around to updating my WordPress to the current version 3.5.1. The automatic update didn’t work so I had to do some fiddling with terminal. I realize how quickly I forget about that stuff..
Anyway I notice some really nice improvements about new WP, especially the new media manager.
Oceanic
This might be the best image I took in 2012. Maybe this image is kind of the reason why I am taking photos.
Ceasefire
“..And little by little I will start to understand more of myself too. Just slowly is ok, I don’t think I have to hurry anywhere anymore. In my head tonight I say it’s ceasefire, and tomorrow another ceasefire and the soldiers can have their long lasting cigarette break and another, until they forget any war ever existed. ”
Jaakko, rest your head now.
From 2012, Island Mother
Two photos from my Island Mother photo series in 2012 were added to the gallery.
Visit in Finland
Visiting Finland was in many ways a kind of emotional trip for me. I met my grandma who is approaching her 90’s. Her condition has been up and down lately, and she is now living in a care house in Kiuruvesi. I also visited my birth place, the old house where I was born some 34 years ago, before I was adopted.
I took a lot of photos during my travel and as I get the negatives properly scanned, I will share the photos here and in my Flickr. One of the photos however was above others, it is the only photo that’s in the front page now, the photo of Sanni, my grandma.
I realized, once again how taking photos of something really important is actually kind of self-measuring your level of maturity.
During my visit in Finland I caught this terrible fever which then turned into a nasty tonsil infection that totally knocked me off my feet for the last weeks. I’m however getting better now and getting ready to return back to this world. I will be uploading more photos now that I’m in better health.
My little Final Cut Pro X Review
Recently I have been editing the material I caught in Jeju in my new favorite tool, FCPX.
I really love the workflow in Apple’s new version of Final Cut Pro. The simple workflow makes a lot of sense to me. It’s so easy to learn and use that there’s almost no need for a manual.
I have no intention of going back to Premiere.
And FCPX really flies. By default settings, FCP does effects rendering in background, which is really cool; take a cup of coffee and when you return, you see the video is ready for smooth playback. Exporting is GPU accelerated which is wonderful, wonderful thing.
As a nice touch you can now just quickly drop in cross-dissolves in both audio and video; the same thing works for audio as a crossfade. There are many nice little touches like that all over in the application which gives the impression that the people who created it have actually thought about the needs of the video editors.
And VST & AU audio effects work fully with this application which is excellent thing; with most used video scopes and audio metering this really is fully featured video editing application.
It’s really easy to make a watchable DVD straight from FCPX although the process doesn’t give you much options regarding letter-boxing or fine tuning of menus. It would be nice to see some kind of mini-DVD Studio Pro bundled with this application. So It’s still necessary to have Toast installed if you intend to do any serious DVD authoring.
And it’s real cheap. Costing less than 300 dollars it’s a bargain, and with App Store you can now legally install it in multiple machines. Makes a lot of sense for small editing studios with multiple workstations.
There are however couple of things that I’d like to see fixed. One is that often the UI doesn’t refresh always properly when working in timeline. And sharing to Vimeo or Youtube works unreliably despite my fast optical (internet) connection. And if you unlink audio it seems impossible to relink it (I might be wrong, if I am please teach me).
And broadcast monitoring doesn’t work unless you have Lion installed.
Overall, I find FCPX joy to use. I can recommend this to anyone who has upgrade plans in mind.
Here Sometimes, Tomorrow
My photo exhibition Here Sometimes will start from tomorrow. It has been quite a journey to get here. I really want to say thanks for everyone who was involved in making the photos.
Especially I want to say thanks to Saeko Nakahara, the beautiful model in the photo “Adoption” which is now in the front page, Maya Sinji Jung, my sister and big teacher in Jeju, and Turo Halinen who took the top photo in this post.
I also want to say thanks for my wife for allowing me to do what I want.
We have opening party at 6.00PM in the gallery tomorrow. I hope you can make it before the wine disappears.