Portrait photography has remained popular mostly on our west coast, Ostrobothnia and Central Ostrobothnia. The previous generation of Kokkola portraitphotographers (working with film) used to be really unique personalities who are still remembered and talked about.
Digital era changed the world
The digital era started around the year 2000. I changed into digital 2001/2002. It was a dramatic change. It took several years until the quality of digital files reach our creations with film. Of course it was also about money. If you could afford to spend more, you’d develop faster. But learning to think digital took so’oo long, you cannot imagine.
We (I and my colleague Anu Sundell) fought and, for example, got our best results in competitions in the year 2008. We grabbed five out of nine prizes in the annual Wedding photo of the year -competition.
But we had to make bigger changes to find other kind of goals where we could specialize in.
Specializing is interesting
I started to concentrate on working for companies and industry in headshots and more demanding projects. We are fortunate to have a spacious studio and a comprehensive amount of equipment to plan different kind of solutions for different customers.
A secret agent running marathon
I bet many people wonder why I get so excited about faces and photographing faces (elections. social media portraits and so on). It is extremely interesting. I feel like a secret agent when I look at my customer and see what kind of differences and magic I can do having such a long experience (and fascination for fashion and looks).
Like I have said, it is like running a marathon in the Olympic games and the distance from the start to the goal is only one centimetre. It is all about separating capability, seeing and recognizing purposeful differences and create portraits using these as tools.
Photographing headshots is fascinating, tiny differences can actually make huge differences. This is the more formal version
Why not be glamorous?
Here I’ii give you one example from my recent personnel shoot. I was making ID card -photos and decided to stay within the normal way of doing it but also go overboard and let the customer’s personality show more glamorous features. I got loads of endorphin from this tiny marathon. Hanna-Maria as a member of personnel and Hanna-Maria as a glamorous woman one Friday in April.
Tilting the head a little bit, made a huge difference. This is more feminine and eyes and lips are sending very similar message, relaxed and beautiful
you might be interested in: https://anneyrjana.fi/yrityskuvaushinnasto/