Life as a Photography Student and Other Stuff. All Images Copyright by Ida Taavitsainen.
I know they are not in season right now, but we had a bunch of tulips a couple of weeks ago. They are so beautiful, especialy when they wither.
This has nothing to do with this picture below, but there is now a website for all the second year exhibitions. Check it out here.
I’ve posted so many black-and-white images lately I decided it’s time for some colour. I shot this image of Lidia last spring, but printed it last week when we had a colour printing workshop with Steffi Klenz. The workshop was very good and the real C-print looks so much better than this lousy scan.
Last week and this week I’ve been working on my pictures for the group exhibition Other Faces that I am participating in. I’ll write more about my work later (I know, I’ve promised this before…). The private view is on December 2nd from 6-9 pm. You’re all very welcome.
The poster was made by Eeva Rinne.
This cute little chap sitting in his parents lap is called Vincent. I’ve only had the honour to meet him once, but I must say he did a very good first impression.
Here’s a image from my first fashion shoot with the Russian supermodel Natalia Vodianova that I did last week. She was very nice and easy to work with.
Haha, enough with that. Yes, this is a photo of Natalia Vodianova taken by me, but it’s was taken during a Nick Knight shoot for Vogue that took place at the Fashion Revolution exhibition at the Somerset House last week. At the exhibition you sometimes have the opportunity to follow a live photo shoot by the best fashion photographers and I happened to be in the right place in the right time! I highly recommend this exhibition for anyone with the slightest interest in fashion.
I also took some snap shots of Lady Gaga, but they didn’t come out well…
This is a test shot and test print (and a rather bad scan) of my exhibition work (yes, we are having an exhibition in Rochester on December 2nd and 3rd, if I haven’t mentioned it yet) that I did during a salt and albumen print workshop on Monday. I’m really excited about alternative printing methods and salt and albumen is great, because you don’t need a darkroom!
My initial plan was to do some self-portraits for the exhibition but realized I can’t do them here, because I have absolutely no relationship to this place (well, except the fact that I study here). Instead I turned the concept over and now I’m taking pictures of objects that make me feel at home in this strange place called England. I’d really like to do salt and albumen prints for the exhibition, but so far I haven’t shot anything else than my sewing kit.
I’ll write more about the exhibition later.
I was watching A Room With a View today, and all the men in the movie wore white straw hats. That reminded me of my father’s panama hat that my sister and I wore during the sunny summer days.
We hade a lith print workshop on monday, and I absolutely loved it. You just can’t achieve the same texture with digital. These images are from a place called Dungeness that our tutor took us to a few weeks ago. It was one of the most fascinating and eerie places I’ve visited. The artist and film director Derek Jarman used to live there. I loved his last movie (if you can call a blue screen a movie), Blue.
The prints don’t look as good on screen as on paper, but here they are anyway. I’ll probably post more images of Dungeness later.
My dad’s old Canon thought it would be really fun to shoot 33 out of 36 images in the same frame. I wasn’t so happy about it because I lost almost all my images from my trip to Stockholm, but at the same time I think this multiexposed image is very pretty. So I guess this goes under the category of lucky accidents.
Yesterday when I came home from London, there was a pink envelope waiting for me. Pink envelopes always remind me of the movie Broken Flowers (if you haven’t seen it, do it now), but also of my cousin Pinja. She sent me many pink letters last year, so I immediatley knew this was from her.
The letter reminded me that this picture of Pinja (and me!) that I took for Auvo’s web pages last summer was still unposted. I really like it. Pinja studies art history and is specialised in architecture, hence the text in the background (that we accidentaly stumbled on!).
I love my friends for making the effort and writing me letters. Thank you.
