Last month, me and Marko Rantanen went shoot­ing around the Hel­sinki met­ro­pol­itan area for Helsingin San­o­mat omakaupunki.fi ad cam­paign. “Oma kaupunki”, which trans­lates as “My city”, is a site where people can exchange tips, events, news and ser­vices. The cam­paign theme is “Greet­ings from the neigh­bor­hood. This is what Oma Kaupunki is made of.” All the ads show how people can col­lab­or­at­ively par­ti­cip­ate in doc­u­ment­ing their home town.

I shot with my Pentax ME and Marko used his Has­sel­blad XPan. I wanted to use film cam­eras to get a cas­ual feel to the pho­tos, like they were shot by ordin­ary people, but still remain styl­ish enough to be used in advert­ising. The look is largely based on my per­sonal snap­shots and the hand­writ­ten, care-free typo­graphy by Jenni Jun­tunen plays an import­ant part.

The print ads are com­prised of short col­lab­or­at­ive stor­ies about Hel­sinki with them­at­ic­ally related pictures.

The cam­paign also con­tains two fridge mag­net out­door ads where people can arrange words that describe Hel­sinki. The mag­nets are free to take home with you. And if that wasn’t enough, we have a multi-user ban­ner where five per­sons per ban­ner can arrange vir­tual fridge magnets.

Fridge mag­net out­door ad

Fridge mag­net multi-user banner

“For free” ad in stores around Helsinki

Post-it sticker ad

Marko hanging from the ground

Some of my pho­tos alloc­ated for this campaign

Com­poser and orches­trator Thomas Goss has a great video series on You­tube called Online Guide to Orches­tra­tion. He goes through the dif­fer­ent ele­ments and tech­niques of the craft in an inter­est­ing man­ner. He also has great score-reading videos in which he breaks down clas­sical pieces, one of which I’ve embed­ded as an example below.

Yes­ter­day, someone on Red­dit pos­ted a chip track they had made on MilkyTracker, a multi-platform Fast Tracker 2 clone for mod­ern com­puters. Nat­ur­ally, I had to try it out imme­di­ately. I still remembered most of the com­mands, but the inter­face was a bit hard to use after almost 15 years. For example, copy and paste are done with alt-F4 and alt-F5, respectively.

Chip music has a spe­cial place in my heart. They are small and eleg­ant, and their lim­it­a­tions are the source of inspir­a­tion. Even Tim­ba­l­and infam­ously agreed.

Here’s my 15 minute chip tune test:

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I present you with a new song called Stars, which turned out pretty nice. It pon­ders the dis­tant future of human race. If humans travel to the stars someday, will the col­on­ists sep­ar­ated by huge dis­tances and liv­ing in dif­fer­ing envir­on­ments evolve into dis­tinct spe­cies, unable to repro­duce with oth­ers colon­ies? Or will they mingle enough to remain a single human spe­cies. Provided there will be no faster-than-light travel, dis­tant colon­ies might be extremely isol­ated. Send­ing mes­sages back to Earth would take dec­ades. After a few gen­er­a­tions, Earth might lose all mean­ing to the colonists.

Also spent a week­end in Ger­many at Melt! festival.