Starting new blog

Start

This is a new blog hosted by me, Markku Heikkilä. I'm a Semi-Pro photographer from middle of Finland. In this first blog I want to tell you some things about myself and my relationship with photos and photography. I started taking photos more seriously a couple of years ago when I was travelling to many eastern European countries for my work. That time I was shoting with my Canon Ixus. That time my photographies were more or less point-and-shoot-photographies. Actually you can find my early photos at my Finnish blog called matkamiehen.blogspot.com. In posts that are from year 2006 you can find pictures from Albania, Lebanon, Hungary etc. That was a fun time travelling around working days at clients' office and just taking some pictures for fun at free time. In the blog there are some newer pictures also at front page.


My DSLR

I bought my first DSLR early 2008 and after that my life has not been the same. I mean that it has little by little changed the way I see the world around me. First half a year I was just shooting what ever and when ever. I was just enjoying the great images I could get out of my Nikon D80. Then I found Alamy.com plus some other stock image sites. Because I believed that time that my pictures were the best in the world, I started to send my photos first to Alamy and later to other sites also. I don't remember how many times I needed to send new photos to them but one day I found out that I'm now selling my pictures online with Alamy.com, a big international picture agency. I went nuts and thought that "This is easy, and anyone who has a camera should be selling his pictures".

However, anyone who has anything to do with photo business knows that eventually I found myself with sale number zero. My photos were quire a good when considering that I had just picked a camera to my hands for the first time, but they were far away from industrial standards. Technical quality was okay because I had a good camera and I had learned how to use it technically correctly. But actually I didn’t know anything about taking photos from a self expression point-of-view. Plus I had no idea how hard business I had found. So I did set my camera aside for a couple of week or even months and said to myself "That's it - you can now start to find something new to your life. You are not going to be very good at taking pictures".

Some wedding photography

Fortunately, before I found out that photography is a hard work, I did take a couple of assignments as a photographer at my friends’ big days like wedding and graduation parties. And at that point when I was thinking that there was no way I was going to be good photographer ever, some of these events came whent I had promised to photograph. So here I am, ready to quit photographing, but still some of my good friends wanted me to take some pictures of them. If you know me, you will know that in most of the things that I get involved in I’m one of those persons who are always calling for quality. So I thought that if I just could find a way to learn things about wedding photographing maybe I could learn some tricks and tips how to get better. And I did found a couple of them, but the site that I was most impressed was http://digitalprotalk.blogspot.com/ where David Ziser was telling how he sees things at his work. I started to read his blog daily. And yes, I think that I learned a bit from here and there. At the same time I also found  http://www.kelbytraining.com/ that was a major way for me to learn how to use Photoshop and Lightroom for my favor at my photographing.

And little by little I could gain confidence that things that I have been doing were going to lead me to better results and I’m still on that road. My goal is that any time I pick up my camera to my hands I try to take better photos than ever before. And any time I sit down to post-process my photos I want to learn new ways to do it faster and more creativity way.

You are very welcome to follow my journey to better photography by Markku Heikkilä

This is all from now.