Who’s behind the camera?

Hi there! Thanks for stopping by :) So you want to know something about me? Well, let’s see…

I’m a Finnish mom of two lovely girls, with one husband and two small pooches. I was born in Helsinki but these days I live in a small town on the southern coastline of Finland. My salary comes from IT-related things (= fiddling with computers).

My very first hobby was music – I started playing the piano already before going to school. Well, that didn’t last long, but then around the age of 8 I took on a flute – and have been stuck with it ever since. During my teen years I learned some basics of guitar and played the clarinet, too, for a couple of years. These days it’s just the flute – and its “big sister”, an alto flute.

Photographing was never something I thought I’d do. Well, I did snap the “must” photos of family events and kids with a pocket camera, but never managed to arrange them into albums. Then, at some point, I was working for a local newspaper. Writing the stories required me to take photos to go with them, so they handed me a digital camera – an Olympus. It was way better than my own first digital camera which was an ancient Casio, with a 8 MB memory card!

So I upgraded my own camera – I bought a Fujifilm S5500 (or was it S5000?) with a 10x zoom – and loved it! Soon I found myself photographing all sorts of things I never thought would be worth taking photos of: A dripping icicle, ants crawling on the apple tree, small buds making their way through the dirt in the spring… So I needed an even better camera. That was another “bridge” camera, Sony DSC-H5 with an image stabilizer and a 12x zoom. I loved that one – except that it was slow. Soooooooo slow. So less than a year later I bought a second hand DSLR, Canon EOS 400D and started my rocky road into the world of camera bodies, lenses and learning how different they are from a compact camera!

About a year later – in March 2008 – I upgraded my 400D into Canon EOS 40D. It’s too big, too heavy – and I love it. So no small purses for me: I’m going everywhere carrying a big backpack with the camera and at least one extra lense inside – and a couple of filters and extra batteries and… Well, you know. Go to the grocery shop without your camera and for sure on the way you’ll meet a duck reading a newspaper or a fox riding a bike!

I think I still don’t know how to take decent photographs. Yes, I’ve learned a lot along the way, but the really good photos are oh so rare - and mostly “accidental” instead of carefully planned masterpieces. I think what makes me a photographer is the love for the hobby. And why do I love it so much? Because it’s shown me an entirely new way to look at this world, the wonderful, beautiful creation of the Almighty God.

-e-