The Star of 1818

I had a plan that I take photos of b-boys while they are all together and
doing their thing. When I called Joonas to make some arrangements, it came
out that they are organizing a break battle TOMORROW and there will be dudes
from Estonia, Finland and Lithuania. Well – as usually all these things
you’ll know only at the very last minute. But not to let the chance roll by
I agreed on the shoot for the next day. The guys promised to be ready after
the battle around 7 PM and it gave me time to prepare about 24 hours.

The biggest problem was to find an suitable old-school Boombox. I called to
all the known rappers in town, but the outcome was still NONE. Everybody has
seen something like that somewhere, but where or who had it, nobody knows…

Then I got a good tip from Roman, who by the way is a gentleman well known
for his great tips and help. Thank you Pez for kindly lending your ghetto
blaster! But I have to remind you, that it’s still at my place!

I wanted to take the photos somewhere outside, under some bridge or
something similar. I picked the location already earlier, but on the day of
the shoot the weather decided to bail on me. In our climate you really cant
count on weather anyhow and the only possibility was to move the shoot to
the garage under my home. Otherwise we would all be Gone with the Wind
because of the heavy lightning and storm.
Thank you Roman for coming to help me on the shoot and spending your
precious time.
Thank you to Joonas, Maik, Jaen, Edvinas, Gabrielis and Viktoras – you were great!

Drake McElroy
Nick de Wit
Jimmy Verburgh
Alexey Kolesnikov
and
Vladimir Lenin

winter. spring. summer. autumn

see the photos

the changes in the nature can stay easily unnoticed visiting the same
place day after day . nothing changes much in one day… but if you
compare summer to spring… there is a huge difference.

early in the spring when I was on the road with my bike I rediscovered
an old stone wall – eroded over the time. In the summer it’s
surrounded with dense green jungle.

the same wall and burgeoning green made me act quickly. in a matter of
days there was already a photoshoot.

many thanks to Simona, who was right away fascinated by my idea and
agreed to begin already at 7 AM in a relatively uncomfortable outfit
wearing a summerdress in this chilly weather; with only +1C degrees!

thanks to Mihkel who went so quickly through time machine and is
present on the photos.

many thanks also to Leela and Janek for helping me a lot behind the scene.

Ken. thank You.
Kaupo – thank you for the costumes!

Jaak on jälle kõige pikem?!

Maa tuleb täita lastega
ja täita lastelastega,
ja laste-laste-lastega,
maa tuleb täita lastega,
ja laulude ja lastega
ja kõige vastu võidelda,
mis võõrastav või vaenulik,
mis vaenulik või valelik,
ja võidelda, kus võimalik,
kus võimalik ning vajalik,
sest elu kõik on ajalik
ja lastele jääb tulevik.
Maa tuleb täita lastega
ja täita lastelastega,
kui olev tahab olemist ja
tulevikku tulemist,
maa tuleb täita lastega,
maa oma enda lastega,
ja laulude ja lastega,
maa tuleb täita lastega.

music: Justament – Maa tuleb täita lastega (1987)

Eric thanks for the Polaroids!

often it’s like that, that I’m inspired by some frames or shots from some movies. after seeing this magnificent motion picture called “The Limits of Control” I got an urge to get some flamenco dancers in front of my camera.
I got a chance to organize a photoshoot in Kanuti Gildi Saal. There’s definitely the best atmosphere you could ever want for a shoot… dark hall, black background and dancers in the middle of the stage in a light circle! superb!
of course this photoshoot couldn’t have been made without professional dancers. Maria Rääk, the absolute leader in Estonian flamenco scene, and Eduard Korotin, one of the all time best male ballroom dancers in Estonia.

Many thanks to Annika, who helped organizing the shoot in Kanuti Gild and also helped to stage this photoshoot!

Maido, thank you very much!

And I can’t finish without mentioning the guitar player in the right corner. thanks to Erki who was really patient!

Thanks also to IS MUSIC TEAM shop for the classical guitar.

and “SELG SIRGU!”

i had a wonderful chance to use my connections and take photos from a very talented young gymnast. to see such grace and flexibility live is unbelievable! many thanks to Inga, who was assisting this photoshoot and helped to coordinate the whole set.

for me it was beyond belief to hear Inga say to, what looked to me like a completely stretched out gymnast, that: “ok, everything looks great, but now you have to stretch a little bit more, mooooorreee and mooooooooorree!”

thank you very much to Liis and Inga

from famous Swan Lake.

from series “V for Victory”

This year will be different. We will discover Russia.

Finally the difficult days at Meresuu Spa & Hotel are over. In these few days our biggest friends were three elevators which lifted us and our entire photogear between all eleven floors.
Now the photos are ready and are waiting a little bit of retouching. I’ll add some of them in my blog pretty soon.

thaks to Joonas and Mike

This post here is inspired by one blogpost in digital-photography school.

The questions they expected an answer to were following:
What was the camera?
What were you photographing?
Was it film or digital?
What lessons were you taught in the early days?

I live in a tiny independent country named Estonia. But the first time I ever held a camera in my hand was when Estonia was still occupied by the big and mighty Soviet Union.
It might have been in 1988, when I actually made my first „real“ photos. By a real photo I mean pictures that are photographed and developed in a darkroom like it was made in the „good old times“.

My mother was a photographer and thereof I got acquaintanced to photography in a really smooth effortless way, since I practically lived in a photolab.
She worked in Soviet time photostudio, which produced various document and studiopictures.

Thats why I got really curious with images. I remember that one of the first cameras I ever experimented with was a classical Smena8. Unfortunately I can’t really remember whether some picture came out of this testing or not.

But I do remember very clearly the first images that actually went right. These were made with my mothers work camera at the time. It was Zenit E.

And what did I take a picture of back then? At that time it was really difficult and complicated to get a hold of foreign literature and journals. But next to our house was a newsstand with assortment of some foreign newspapers and journals that strict Soviet regime censorship had actually allowed on market.
Prevailingly were sold journals from Soviet Union friendly socialist countrys like DDR, Czechoslovakia etc.
But the funniest thing was, that even those soviet regime friendly journals were really rare – one newsstand got maybe, when lucky, only one exemplar. It would have been especially hard to get a hold of these journals if I wouldn’t have been friends with an older lady that worked in our little kiosk.
She stored the cooler journals for me, whenever something new arrived 🙂 So I had a great chance to always take a first look, pick what I liked and buy the journals! Back then it was a real big treat and advantage! But that’s how things actually functioned back in the old soviet times. And that not only with literature, but basically with everything.

Even buying bananas was quite challenging back then. You had to know the person in charge in the food store to even have a chance in buying a banana. Because it was only five small boxes of bananas for the 20 000 people living in our small town and the queue for buying bananas was thereof more than 200 meters long. The first ones got a banana or two, but the rest of the people only got to catch a glimpse at a banana! Well at least then we got to know what a banana looked like – right?

But now getting back to the story… I photographed the pictures from the journals with my mothers camera, because there was no such thing as copying machine. And these, especially cool pictures from foreign motorcycles and cars, were really popular in my school. Not everybody could afford a journal. So they got a repro version from the posters from me. I did it for free – it was just cool to share the pictures!

I saw one of those images in some photoalbum last time I visited my mother. I think it might be the last one that’s left. The picture itself was circa 4x5cm and it had a fancy foreign bike on it – I think it was Kawasaki. Next time I visit my mother, I’ll definitely take the photo with me and add to this post right here.

Sometimes, when I was especially lucky, I got a hold of some journals from Finland. And back then Finland and all the products from capitalistic western countrys like Finland were something really rare, special and awsome for us estonians! And pictures from superstars like BonJovi were extremely popular, you could tell that by the extremely high demand!

And whether that’s good or bad, all my early experiments and experience in photography stayed in that analog time. Maybe it was all too much for me and I grew tired of it, because, as I already told before, I practically lived in a darkroom.

I got befriended again with a camera only in the beginning of 2009. First shots were made with Holga and it was merely for fun. And at the same time I was again charmed! I was rapt from the format „square“ – it’s simply beautiful!
Practically one year long I took pictures only with analog cameras. During this year I had again the good old Zenit-E, additionally Kiev-4M and the fantastic Pentacon Six.

And I’m back in shape! Today my photos are again in demand.
My pictures are now available in Istock online photo library.

At this point I’d like to thank my dear friends and colleagues, who showed me the way back to photography. Many thanks to taiko and kaaderdaja and ken and peeterv.

Let’s make the time stop with our pictures!