Arctic Wedding

A couple of weeks ago Katie and Marc from England had their wedding at the Kakslauttanen holiday village in the Finnish Lapland and I had the honour to photograph the wonderful day. Everything was pretty much perfect, including the weather, food, and how everything was organized. There was even a newspaper reporter from Helsingin Sanomat present. You can find the article online here.

I posted a couple of photographs from the day, and there are a lot more happy faces on my hard drive. If you are intersted about hiring me for your wedding check my website for more details here.

Wedding at Kakslauttanen

Wedding at Kakslauttanen

Wedding at Kakslauttanen

Wedding at Kakslauttanen

Wedding at Kakslauttanen

Wedding at Kakslauttanen

Wedding at Kakslauttanen

Wedding at Kakslauttanen

Wedding at Kakslauttanen

Wedding at Kakslauttanen

Wedding at Kakslauttanen

Wedding at Kakslauttanen

Wedding at Kakslauttanen

Are your news free?

Not so long ago I was photographing an event that had a lot of national interest as a news item. I think that I did a pretty good job with my photographs as I was able to cover the variety of the people that were attending. I had emotions in my photograph, it was clear that these people believed in their cause, also my photographs formed a nice storylinefor the event and covered the general atmosphere.

After the event I contacted many news outlets and sent them a small gallery of my photographs. A little while later I was contacted by a press agency and three leading Finnish news sites. They all told me pretty much the same thing: “Your photographs are wonderful and we would really like to use them.”

“Can we use them for free?” To a couple of these emails I answered that of course not, I did a great deal of work and put a lot of effort into my photographs and a name in the newspaper will not pay my bills. I have had my (paid) photographs published in almost all of the leading Finnish newspapers and I had no reason to agree to that, nor does any photographer for that matter. To one email I answered with a reply that if I can use their news for free on my website. Needless to say I didn’t get a second reply to that nor did I get to any of my other messages.

Looking at the sites and the print editions the next day I found that many of the publications did not run a photograph with this story and one site had a horrible still-capture from a video with no context at all. All in all this is a pretty sad story, not for my part, but for the news industry because it is coming clearer that they are not willing to put effort into their journalism anymore and are cutting costs in every turn and this in turn is hurting their businesses as much as anything else.