I lived my childhood in industrial town called Pori on the west coast of Finland. My parents didn’t have almost any contact to nature at all and all my friends were more like urbanized kids. However, my uncle was a keen hunter and he took me with him to hunt pigeons, ducks and hares. So that was my first real contact to nature. I remember that I was amazed how my uncle knew birds by their calls and that his knowledge of wildlife was pretty extensive. I very much enjoyed being in nature and seeing the wildlife, but it was the killing part which I didn’t like! I guess that was the reason why I became as wildlife photographer instead of hunter?

I was lucky that during the same time I had biology teacher at school who told us to write to notebook the arrival dates of migrant birds in spring. Then at school we compared who had seen the first Lapwing or Skylark, so there was a little competition between pupils. That was the year 1977 and a starting point for my life with birds!

Already 1978 my parents bought me my first camera, manual functioning and very sturdy Russian camera Zenit TTL. I also got some very poor 400 mm lens with it. That time I already had some birdwatcher friends and together with them I was practising bird photography mainly with black and white film. We also processed films ourselves and made prints. Results were not very impressive! I hope I had saved some of my very first bird pictures, but I think I didn’t?

Then some of my friends turned out to be wildlife photographers, but like many others, I started bird watching as a serious hobby. During the years I was drawing, studying, counting, ringing and twitching birds all over the planet. I always had a camera with me but that was mainly just for recording the odd rarity, if I happened to find one. Actually I have been lucky with rare birds, since during my active birding years I found three new bird species for Finland and also one new one for Romania. Then I have found some second and third time observed birds in various countries as well. I also worked 7 years in Finnish Rarities Committee, which is the place for all birdwatchers who are really keen on bird identification.

It was around year 1989 when I started to work for WWF as a warden in the best wetland in Finland -Liminganlahti. During that time I worked many years as a chairman at the local nature conservation association. At Liminganlahti I started my own birdwatching tour company in 1992 and afterwards the company got a name Finnature Ltd. Because of my work as a guide, I met plenty of foreign birdwatchers and wildlife photographers. That was the inspiration to restart my wildlife photography in a serious way. I was using a lot of slide film and I was travelling for photography to many of the same countries where I had been birdwatching before. I still have many processed slide films which I haven’t put in frames and I doubt that I ever will?

Digital photography

The biggest boost to my wildlife photography has been the change to digital camera body in 2003. At the beginning I made expensive error, since I thought that if I bought the best digital body to start with, I can use it at least 10 years. Hah, can you imagine? I kept my first digital camera only for 6 months and it was losing value 500 euros every month! Now I have just received my 6th digital camera and I have learned that camera is not an investment, but a tool to get the best possible images.

First I was using digital camera as it was a film camera, taking just a few images of each subject. Soon I realised, that one of the main advantages of digital photography is that you are able to take more frames of fast moving subjects! This is great for action photography; birds in flight or birds fighting etc. Also with new camera bodies you can use higher ISO figures and that gives you so much more speed!

The fact that I am shooting nearly 200 000 frames in a year (which would have been 5555 rolls of film!) causes also problems. I have many hard drives full of data and it takes so much time to go through it all! If I only kept 10 % of images that would mean that I would still need to process 20 000 images in a year! Completely impossible for one photographer! Therefore in future I would need to be more critical with my images and only keep and process “the best of the best ones”. You really don´t need duplicates of the good frames anymore, do you? However, I´ll love digital photography!