General thoughts

The old stuff

I've had a web-server since 2003 or something like that and I haven't really touched it in a while. So randomly today I logged in again via FTP and found that I still had tons of my old photos on there that I believe used to be on a previous (previous, previous?) version of this website. And when I say old photos I mean OLD photos. My concert photography photos. Feels like a really long time ago now. You could roughly split them up into the pre-2009 era (the very first ones I took where in 2003) and then everything post-2009. I bought my first DSLR in 2008, but I think I mostly used it in 2009. That year with all those summer festivals in Finland.

Anyway, I thought I should upload some more of those OLD photos here. They don't look great. I know that. And I'm sure I have the originals on an old hard-drive somewhere, but I wouldn't have the time to look for them and perhaps edit everything again, so why not look at all the really old photos?

Here's a random one I picked.

Adamantra @ Tavastia, Helsinki, Finland (September 26th, 2009)

There are more photos in the gallery.

Mobile travel photography?

This is just going to be a quick update. Not quite something I would call a blog post. Call it a lifesign anyway.

The more I travel - still not enough - the more I have noticed that I rather tend to take more quick snapshots with my smartphone than with my DSLR, if I even carry it with me. On longer trips, especially abroad, I definitely bring it along, but I think it's a combination of both my own laziness (a smartphone is just so much more convenient) and the fact that my camera is slowly, but surely reaching its retirement age (a new one is overdue!) that I sometimes don't even take it out of my bag and simply take more (quick) photos with my phone. More recently I've only used the DSLR for event photography (private events as well as work events). It still serves that purpose.

It's the time of social media; be it Facebook, Instagram or Snapchat. People use their phones all the time and to be honest most smartphone cameras have a fairly decent quality nowadays - so is mine. So why not take photos with them? I decided that - if I have any nice shots taken with my phone - I will add those to my gallery here. I actually started with some photos of my trip to Canada and to the US last winter.

May I introduce? The one and only Stanley Cup from the Hockey Hall of Fame in Toronto. Great trip, just really, really cold (-25°C). #nofilter #justsomephotoshop

Some updates

I figured it's been a while.

There are still a lot of old photos on my harddrive that need to find their place onto this site, so I've started digging a little bit and updated some concert and festival photos. Looking back now I kind of miss the 'old times' (roughly pre-2010) when I was a lot more active taking photos at concerts and festivals. I hope at some point I might get back there, even though everything has changed a lot, especially social media and nowadays everyone is a photographer. It's difficult to keep up, especially as an amateur.

Anyway, here are a few old shots. The main thing that bothers me is the bad noise of my old 40D, but if you can ignore that part... :)


I'm back

Things went exactly as I thought.

Every time I find a cool new tool, CMS or similar, I get excited for a few days and start playing around it with and then - real life drags me away from it and things like this happen. I've seen this rather often in the last 10+ years. Been around long enough.

Anyways. I still totally like Koken, but my problem right now is:

I simply do not get around to doing concert photography :( That's what this website originally was supposed to be about. Lots of factors play into it, but right now concerts photography is a little bit dead for me. So I either need to start something completely new (new domain, new ideas) or just expand this site to other types of photography.

Most recently that's been travel photography. I just came back from a trip to the USA last week and could show a few photos from there. Those have nothing whatsoever to do with concerts. Let's just post one here, just for fun. Everybody likes cool photos of Manhattan.

New York City - Top of the RockView from Top of the Rock (Rockefeller Center) at night

I might as well do a major overhaul of this website and post whatever I want. At least I get to fill it with content that's somewhat recent.

Uh...welcome!

Hello visitor!

It looks like I've given it yet another try. I set up a new blog/photo gallery website, this time using a CMS called Koken that I discovered a while ago and thought "Why not? Looks cool!". It does indeed look cool, it is slightly different and setting it up was fairly easy. I was surprised!

On top of it all it's free and I can use it on my own webspace instead of hosting it somewhere else with limited access.

It's always a struggle to build a new site, fill it with content, get people to look at it (while we're at it, I have a Facebook page too and sometimes I use Twitter :))... AND keep up with it. I can't remember how often I've tried, but given up eventually. Sometimes it was lack of time, often lack of interest, but mostly I just didn't like the system. Blog, Flickr, some strange flash galleries - tried it all. My latest solution to put at least some of my (concert) photos out there was Tumblr. I might still continue to use it, depending on how this new site will turn out. I mean, I've been building websites for ... 15 years, give or take. These days a good CMS can help a lot.

Right now I have no idea what you're going to find on this site in the future. The original idea was to display my photos, but I might also add a blog. Yet another random blog, yay... possibly even in different languages, because I like languages. Let's just say: If I feel like I have something interesting to write about, I'll do it. Otherwise it's mainly photos. Mostly (but not limited to) concert photos, because I have a lot of them from the last couple of years.

Anyway, Koken looks nice. It might just be the CMS I was looking for. We'll see. If you don't hear back from me within half a year...