Behance portfolio

I'm now on Behance! My gallery can be found here http://be.net/Elina_Manninen, you can have a look at my work there :).

Summer dress

Spring is coming! The cutest dress, made by my mum. Our Sunday fun with Enja (who I had to bribe to be my model for 5 minutes :) ).

ilona & puutarha

One of my favourite images that I have in my stock collection is this :). This time it was published in ilona & puutarha (Iltalehti). Hmm I think I miss summer...please come soon. It's still been snowing in Helsinki can you believe...

Jyri my husband is still in the Sahara desert running the Marathon des Sables. They had the longest leg yesterday (about 81km) and in those conditions it took Jyri about 17 hours to complete (if I calculated correctly :) ). I woke up at about 3.30am to watch him come to the finish line - there's a webcam on so it's pretty cool to see them come - and this time time appear from complete darkness with their headlights on. He looked ok and happy so good! I think today he can rest (since some competitors are only arriving today...) and then the final day is only 15km to finish off the whole thing.

On Friday there's another Silo Brainstorm, this time in Tampere - this time without Jyri and without me. But here's a few photos of the boys doing hard thinking :) https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.280356302045478.67541.173515059396270&type=1

Pixta.jp

Happy Easter to everyone! I will have a massive 4 day break and will be back after then :). During that time I will be following Jyri's Sahara run here http://www.darbaroud.com/index.php?lang=en and eat lots of Easter food.

Starting from today my whole stock photo library will also be available in Japan! A long process this as well, first me organising my files and sending them to Pixta, and then they had a huge job keywording every photo again in Japanese! But now they are there and looking good :).

Spring sessions - families and children

Spring is coming (at least it should be, doesn't really look like it when I look outside though...). I've been working with my portfolio, new site and everything else all winter and now it feels like I've almost done the hard work :). Currently I have been doing also commercial shoots but I love to do child and family sessions and always want to offer them to my clients. My new price list is coming out in the beginning of June so during April and May you can still book all the child and family sessions with my current prices!

Send me an email or give me a ring :)

Portfolio

Portfolio...a physical portfolio... I never knew how big of a task it would be to put one together. It's so much more than just quickly selecting a number of your photos that you sort of like. It's also defining yourself as a photographer - what you are, how you see yourself. If you had 30 chances by individual photos to show what you are like as a photographer so that the other side would also get the same idea, which ones would you choose? People who know me also know how much I've worked with this. Also because I choose something and after a few days I feel like I should have picked something else. And photos that I like aren't necessarily the ones I should have in my portfolio.

I have had so much valuable help from Pedro Reis, my friend, designer and a kind of mentor who's trying to get things through my sometimes thick head. So thank you for everything! I'm also thanking Merja Yeung who helped me with this a lot. And all my clients and projects that I've been involved doing my work have been amazing.

Now that I have made my final picks and put everything together I still need to print it :). So it is coming...

Spring baby - newborn shoot

Newborns - so special little ones! I usually arrive to a newborn shoot with nothing else than myself and the camera. I do have my flash but I only take it out if it really is too dark. I don't carry around lots of props for the little ones - I think that I will get to know them when I arrive and will use the special items that parents have already prepared for them.

On this day I had no hurry anywhere so lots of time to chat with mum and dad and settle the baby to sleep. A bright day so all done with natural light with my 50mm f1.4 and (my new favourite with newborns) 100mm f2.8 macro.

Gorgeous baby girl. My love to her and her beautiful parents :).

Fun with my Enja :)

Sometimes we spend Fridays like this. Usually not because my little missy rather does something else than models for me :). We found these cute lollipops in the cutest sweet shop, Karkkikauppa Sweetheart in Helsinki.

White world

One of our morning walks to the office :). It's so beautiful outside, we even got more snow last night :).

Today I finally got all my stock images onto dvd's and tomorrow they will be off to Japan :). Also my broken hard drive will be off to Germany. And I will have the rest of the week for editing -- had the cutest little boy to photograph on Sunday so I will get something out soon :).

My new website will be out soon and all feedback welcome (since we are testing that everything works)! There is a teaser page now at www.elinamanninen.com and that's where the full site will appear a little later. And I appreciate all the comments we have received so far! And thanking my designer Pedro Reis for everything he's done for me :).