Turku, Finland.A familiar city, seen from somewhere new.
I was standing on the rooftop terrace of Fuuga, Turku’s new music hall, looking at a familiar city from a position I had never photographed it from before. Buildings and details I knew were forming combinations I hadn’t been able to explore.
The sky was burning orange. Framing further to the right would have let me include the Aura River, but the most intense fire was on the left. I had to choose.
I chose the sky, together with an old factory chimney, the surrounding buildings and the interesting roof structures of the Wäinö Aaltonen Museum in the lower left corner. I love finding compositions where the natural and the urban become part of the same image.
The river version is still a possibility. The original photograph is saved in Huuru, and I can return to it.
The five percent.
My attention often catches on something that occupies perhaps five percent of what I can see. A small arrangement of shapes. Light and shadow on a wall. A person moving through an interesting place at exactly the right moment.
That little part of the view can feel extraordinary to me. Making a photograph is a way of showing someone else what caught my attention.
Huuru rewards that way of looking. I can commit to a composition while photographing, then continue refining it afterwards. The full original frame recorded by the camera stays available, with the RAW original preserved too. I can shift the crop, open it up or find another composition within that captured image.
That freedom matters to me. A frame can feel right today, and there can still be something else worth discovering in the same photograph later.
An eye that keeps developing.
I started photographing in 2003, when my family got its first digital camera, an Epson. I was immediately hooked. Around the same time, the Finnish social platform IRC-Galleria became an important place for my growing interest in photography and graphic design. The equipment was limited, and my eye for detail was still developing, but I had plenty of enthusiasm.
In 2007, I graduated as a graphic designer and got my first DSLR. I photographed people, gigs and the world around me, as well as working for publications including Ruotuväki and later Episodi. For years, I carried a camera almost everywhere.
Eventually, carrying the DSLR became less frequent. Phone cameras were improving, but for a long time my photography became mostly casual snapshots.
The iPhone 11 Pro was a turning point. I’ve continued using Pro models since then, and the growing possibilities of their cameras, particularly the telephoto lenses, have changed my photography. Having more freedom to choose how I frame a subject has made an enormous difference.
Water and autumn colours will almost always make me reach for the camera. Still water reflecting old buildings and the colours around them can hold my attention for a long time.
During the darkest part of autumn, sunlight becomes especially exciting. After so much darkness, there are suddenly shadows with shape and direction again.
Then I work on how it feels.
With the Fuuga sunset, the composition was already close to the final one when I took the photograph. Afterwards, I moved the crop a little further left when I noticed there was even more fire in that part of the sky.
Then I worked on how the image felt.
Grain is an important part of that for me. Its texture can make a digital photograph feel more alive, almost as if something within the surface is moving. I adjust halation, the glow around bright areas, and look at what is happening in the shadows and highlights. I want interesting dark details to remain visible and important bright areas to retain their character.
I also look for a balance in sharpness. I want enough definition for the image to hold together, with a softness that feels cinematic and a little dreamlike. In this photograph, I pushed the warmth further because that warmth was already such a powerful part of the sky.
These choices belong to the particular image and the feeling I’m trying to find in it.
A pause in a moving moment.
When I describe a still photograph as cinematic, I’m thinking about the sense that it could almost move. It could be a pause in an interesting moving moment: the tiny fraction of a second that I found most beautiful or compelling, the part I wanted everyone else to know about.
Over the past couple of years, people have often asked how I make my photographs look the way they do. It means a great deal that an image can make someone stop while scrolling and want to know more.
Recently, someone who had started following my photography on Instagram sent me a message. One part of it, translated from Finnish, stayed with me.
They also described the photographs connecting with their own moods. That is a wonderful thing to hear: something I noticed in a particular place has become an experience for someone who wasn’t there.
Take the familiar route. Look again.
You can practise finding those photographs on a route you already know.
On your next walk to work, the shops or a hobby, let your eyes travel above the places you normally look. Notice how upper floors, rooflines and treetops frame the street. There may be a narrow opening of sky between buildings, branches crossing a façade or sunlight reaching a wall far above the pavement.
Stop with something that catches your attention. Move a few steps sideways. Raise or lower the camera. Watch how one shape disappears behind another, or how two separate elements suddenly fit together.
If you have an opportunity to see the route from higher up, explore that too. Fuuga gave me new ways to photograph Turku, and that experience has made me interested in looking again at places I already know.
Find a small composition within the familiar view that you would like another person to see.
A camera for the way I see.
Huuru grew out of this way of photographing. I’ve used excellent iPhone camera apps, especially Halide and Mood. Years of photographing with them and with different iPhones helped me understand what I wanted from my own camera.
I wanted the things that matter to my photography to work together in one app: finding the composition, shaping its character and keeping the freedom to return to the original. I wanted a camera that supported how I notice, frame and finish an image.
When does it feel finished?
Knowing when an image is finished is harder to explain.
I think it comes from an eye that has developed over the years, and a taste for how a photograph feels. At some point, I look at it and something happens in me too.
I feel the thing I hope someone else might feel when they see it.
That may be the closest I can get to explaining why, in that moment, the photograph feels finished.