The lightbulb moment for FHaB

The idea for From HEL & Back (FHaB) came to me when I was working on the award-winning Transitions1020 project for Nokia, a two week shoot travelling around New Zealand’s south island. The shot above was one of many taken with the Nokia Lumia 1020, one of the last mobile devices made by Finland’s Nokia before Microsoft took over. Two days earlier, I’d been shooting fashion for a client in a studio back in Helsinki (HEL, which helps explain the choice of name for FHaB) and now here I was standing in the wind and the rain on a deserted beach outside Christchurch, waiting for the sun to rise. It was so completely different from my normal working environment and so inspiring. It reminded me of my early days as a photographer travelling the world. And the rest of the trip continued in the same vein, one fantastic experience after another, no matter that we were working at a crazy pace.

Don’t get me wrong, I love my studio work – crafting the light, working with a creative team, all the elements you need right at your fingertips to be able to deliver a polished result back to the client. It takes a lot of expertise, time and money. But I also believe it is a good idea to take time out, go on creative sabbaticals and challenge yourself. It’s a way to shake up the status quo, to find new ways to use your knowledge and see if you can create something out of the ordinary, or even just different. Photography has been my career for over twenty years and I need to set myself new challenges to make sure the passion continues burning. I am hoping that FHaB will allow this to happen in an organic way, a place where I can showcase my personal work, totally separate from my commissioned work, and see if I can create something special.

That is why I am setting off by myself to Argentina in November, 2015, and I will spend several weeks travelling around South America. I was actually born in Buenos Aires and spent much of my childhood in Lima, Peru. I still speak rusty but fluent Spanish but have not been back since I was 17. As I pinball my way around the continent, I will be filming and taking photos of a wide range of subjects, using equipment specially selected for the task. There will be personal moments, hopefully some universal moments, all ready to be blogged about, made into galleries, edited into a series of moving images… people, music, earth, wind and fire! If you’re interested in following the quixotic wanderings of a professional image-maker, a mongrel that is an Argentine Irish Brit living in Helsinki (HEL), you can subscribe or follow on one of FHaB’s social media channels. Wish me luck!

And just because, here are some images from the Transitions1020 epic that started all this off, all shot on a mobile device! And, yes, I did stop off in Sydney on the way back, so I added some of those pics too.