At the airport

25.5 saturday
Day. 32  Time to go

So, the time has come. I´m at the airport almost laying down on some kind of fake beach chair. Feeling very tired even though the travel is only in the beginning. Next ten hours will include a plane change in Lisbon and arriving at 6:something am. in Helsinki. Good thing that the security check and luggage drop had hardly any queue´s in them.

I´ve spent the past week mostly buying gifts and couple of things for myself too from Porto. It surely is a beautiful and unique city. I´m kinda sad that the place I was staying wasn´t there, but on the other hand it was great to see the real life in Portugal, Barcelos. That to me is more important than staying in the middle of other tourists who came just to take pictures, heh (pun intended).

Whoever is thinking about visiting Portugal, do it. Due to a quite massive inflation about ten years ago which tored the country´s economy to the ground, cities physical condition went downhill and that can be seen clearly even today. That makes the country interesting to visit right now, atleast for a photographer in my experience haha.

I`m going to keep it short because I bought a QUITE MANY books that are waiting for me in my backpack. This was a good trip. It opened new ways seeing my self from personal and professional angles. The believe that I am able to travel alone and even make it back home got stronger, now I can trust myself more which is important for self development. Trust yourself, you can do it too.

Thanks for tuning in guys! Travel and see the world, it´ll make you understand things. Also remember, life´s not infinite so why not make the most of it.

love,

Pyry

Fireworks seen from my bedroom window.

Slowly putting everything together

19.5 sunday
Day. 26  Final tasks

Man.. Time flies. Last time I wrote was ten day ago.. There´s this apartment building just next to my building and one side of it is aligned with my balcony. The neighbour building´s wall has thick stripes pained on in it, and the sunset can be measured with these stripes as the shadow rises higher at evening. Days go by faster and faster, the stripes fill in again.

The day before yesterday, the Peltosaariproject finally came to an end. That took a lot of hours because there were over hundred gigs of material which had to be edited together. The final piece of work, which was 1h 40mins long was premiered in Peltosaarifest at Riihimäki. On the past week there has been a regular photography job too. Fernando invited be to take photos of the school that he teaches in. On monday i documented the outside of the school and tomorrow, next monday I´m going to do the same from inside, also after that going to take photos of one elementary school. Photographing the highschool from outside was lot of fun, and super interesting. The weather combined to the strong and complex concrete structures was ideal conditions for high contrast black and white photos. Couple of B&W photos came out pretty alright and ended up to the final portfolio. My favourite thing about this shoot was that I didn´t have to hurry and really had the time to think about the compositions and lightning. Doing street photography there really is no time to think about those things that much, atleast for me. Things just happen and you have to be quick enough to capture them.

Place under the school where kids can spend their recess.

Between all the work, for me it has been very important to refresh the brain every now and then so the concentration is easier. To do this I´ve gone for runs every now and then. This also includes challenging those own limits and noticing the improvements that comes along the way. it´s been 29.84km this month. Running or just going for walks is something that I definitely recommend, because it has been a perfect way get to know the city better too.

The job learning period here in Portugal has almost come to an end, and due to very few days left here (6 days) this will be my second last blog post here! Not yet saying goodbye though...

My room at ten o'clock at night.

Working in solitude

9.5 thursday
Day. 16  Solitude

"Snap!" A kettle has finished in the kitchen.

I quess there´s still work to do with planning the days, because it is 2 pm and only now I have opened my laptop. Well, the main point is to still get things done so...

"The scenes" here in Barcelos for most of the days.

On monday, I had altogether gone trough all of the 4245 pictures and edited exactly 386 of them, which makes it everything up to this point of the job learning. With Arin, we had a plan that we would place our both football tournament pics to cloud, drive. This way it was easy to just send a link to the drive folder to whoever wanted to download or view the pictures. Both of the picture folders from Porto days, with footballers and students I sent to Fernando trough WeTransfer on my own. After editing the 386 pics fairly carefully in about 5 day period, I feel like the layout and workflow on Lightroom are under control little bit better.

Book about how to survive
in the present time of
digitalisation and
threath of climate
change.

It was tuesday and I was little exhausted from previous days, decided to have a day off which I spent with my book and making food. The next day brought me a new task, it was not from Fernando, instead Arja from Peltosaari contacted me and asked me to send a promotional video for Riihimäki´s LähiöFest tapahtuma. This was part of a job learning project in which me and Tomppa had worked on before I left to Portugal. For the video that I had already previously edited on premiere pro , I had to add a new logo to the beginning and graphics in the end. Before sending it to go public, I added captions.

Jarmo Myllynen, one of our interviewees and a teacher in Peltosaari
elementary school promoting LähiöFest.

When I arrived in Barcelos, the apartment felt more like a working place than a place where I would actually LIVE the next month. Now when over two weeks have passed, the place has gotten more and more comfortable by time. This is of course a really good thing, but on the other side it makes concentrating harder, because it feels less like a workplace. That´s why I´m writing this blog in a cafe just across road from apartment.

Tenth..? Already?

3.5 Friday
Day. 10  Tenth..? Already?

Time has passed here suprisingly fast, even with the fact that most of the time I have worked alone. In fact, from yesterday (2.5) I´ve completely been only editing the photos and writing the blog. At the same time it is very relaxing to work alone. You are able to completely make your own schedule, I feel like that fits me. Also this Job learning period is quite important to me because I get to discover different working methods here. In school that´s not so possible. From 28.4 to 2.5 there was no necessary places to be so I started to work on the pictures and planning the thesis, portfolio.

"And on the right you can see the sea, Porto is a seaside city." Says the english teacher who is also our guide for today. Sun flows trough the bus windows every time the driver steers our group closer to the destination. Students have gathered themselves in the back seats as usual and excitement wells all around more and more every moment.

Coast of Foz Do Duoro.

Yesterday (2.5) Fernando offered me to go visit Porto with his class. Even though I was in a little hurry with the previous photos, i said yes. The bus was leaving at 8:15 from the high school where he teaches, it finally departed at 8:35 which was kinda expected due to all the schedules in here. Fernando was nowhere to be seen and before I asked him if he was coming, I went to ask that from couple of teachers who where coming to Porto too. After an introductions as Fernando´s Erasmus student and small chat, they knew i was coming and happily invited me to hop on.

One of the students, Fanni (not really calling the phone).

Generic birds flying around the "Offley" winery.

The places in Porto where pretty much the same as with the football players on friday last week, but now the group was totally different though. Actually totally different even from what i was told about. It wasn´t Fernando´s own class, instead the students where mostly eight graders from Hungary, Greece, Poland and Italy. My objective for the day was bit in the shades, because there really was no clear instructions or directions what I was supposed to do. I found that everyone would benefit the most if I documented the trip same way as friday´s, so that´s what i did. Despite all the little inadequacys of information, I didn´t mean to sound bragging about stuff in this post, the trip was wonderful!

Last moments of the trip.

Tournament day

27.4 Saturday
Day. 4 The game day

Fernando said the day earlier that he will pick us up at 8 o´clock, well he was an hour late. I quess that here in southern Europe the schedules are not so strict. Also, even it´s only day 4, the culture differences are strongly visible here. Locals hardly manage to speak any english, so from time to time the language barrier really makes communication though. Although, you get pretty far by smiling and being polite.

Quite a few matches has passed and on the lunch brake one team asks me to give some of yesterdays photos to a usb stick, which i gratefully do. At the time sun was shining straight down to where I was sitting, so if I wanted to see anything from the laptop screen there was no other way to it than making a "tent" of my hoodie. Sports photography is something that I´ve never quite done before, so this was actually very cool and eye opening experience. Personally and career wise. Also got some quite good shots for my personal portfolio. On the more technical side, moving fast with the camera and trying to capture the best, most intensive moments. You really have to keep an eye to the game at all times. Also a modern auto focus tracking mechanism is a big help. For this days shoot I used my Nikkor 70-300mm 4.5-5.6/f lens.

Referee, Mayors wife and grandchildren. If I´m not mistaking..

First days

25.4 Thursday
Day. 2 Work work work

From the apartment that I´m living in, the first thing that stands out is the size. I´ts really big. It is not all for me though, there´s one room that is in my use, and because there will be no one else living in the same apartment, I basically have the living room and kitchen just for myself. And it´s all only 80€ per week. First full day goes by fast. Going to the nearest store, making some food and taking care of some backlog, that´s a wrap. Oh.. wait.. Fernando is messaging me and he is saying that for couple of days I would be having a roommate from Slovenia, Arin. He had came to photograph the same event´s that would take place tomorrow and the day after. I didn´t bother! When they finally came about 3 hours late, it was 2:00 am. Despite that, I was happy to share the flat.

Kids playing outside seen from kitchen window.

26.4 Friday

Day. 3 The heat arrives

After a good deserved morning coffee Fernando came pick us up from the cafe next to our apartment. We had absolutely no idea what was the plan of the day, but shortly we found ourselves climbing in to a bus full of football players from 5 different European countries. Me and Arin´s job was to document the footballers away day before a big tournament the day after. We weren´t given that many instructions, but it seemed that we where kind of their personal photographers for the day, commemorating good memories. 

Football players cheering with wine.

The first stop was these wine fields just outside of Barcelos. Mesmerizing grape fields and old European style buildings, they use lots of rock as a building material, it can be seen especially from the 1700-1800 buildings. Trough this beautiful vineyard we had a quided tour and at the end there was representation of a new product. From here we continued our way to the next checkpoint in a steaming hot bus. The sweat was real because every time we hopped on the bus I had to dig my laptop out and and empty the memory card, thanks to the 32 gigs (not enough).

After this, the noisy bus full of footballers drove us back to the central, where we got the privilege to photograph the meeting of the town Mayor. After the session, you guessed it, back to the bus and pictures to the laptop. 

Town mayor & Football team manager.

Porto! Our day ended on the beautiful 25 Celsius west coast of Portugal. The golden hour arrives and at this point our work for the day was done, so we decided to relax with some street photography. I used my Nikon d5200 and a Sigma 24-70mm 2.8/f lens the whole day. Arin had his Canon 5d mk3 and a Sigma 85mm 1,4/f, at the end of the day we shared pics, gave feedback and started to work on them.

Shot taken from the Ponte Luís I bridge.