Guest - Jari Peltomäki

Snow Bunting - (C) Jari Peltomäki

In my opinion Jari Peltomäki is one of the greatest bird photographers of today. Therefore I asked him to write some words about himself, to give us some insight to what makes a good bird photographer. Here it is in Jari's own words:

I lived my childhood in industrial town called Pori on the west coast of Finland. My parents didn’t have almost any contact to nature at all and all my friends were more like urbanized kids. However, my uncle was a keen hunter and he took me with him to hunt pigeons, ducks and hares. So that was my first real contact to nature. I remember that I was amazed how my uncle knew birds by their calls and that his knowledge of wildlife was pretty extensive. I very much enjoyed being in nature and seeing the wildlife, but it was the killing part which I didn’t like! I guess that was the reason why I became as wildlife photographer instead of hunter?

I was lucky that during the same time I had biology teacher at school who told us to write to notebook the arrival dates of migrant birds in spring. Then at school we compared who had seen the first Lapwing or Skylark, so there was a little competition between pupils. That was the year 1977 and a starting point for my life with birds!

Already 1978 my parents bought me my first camera, manual functioning and very sturdy Russian camera Zenit TTL. I also got some very poor 400 mm lens with it. That time I already had some birdwatcher friends and together with them I was practising bird photography mainly with black and white film. We also processed films ourselves and made prints. Results were not very impressive! I hope I had saved some of my very first bird pictures, but I think I didn’t?

Then some of my friends turned out to be wildlife photographers, but like many others, I started bird watching as a serious hobby. During the years I was drawing, studying, counting, ringing and twitching birds all over the planet. I always had a camera with me but that was mainly just for recording the odd rarity, if I happened to find one. Actually I have been lucky with rare birds, since during my active birding years I found three new bird species for Finland and also one new one for Romania. Then I have found some second and third time observed birds in various countries as well. I also worked 7 years in Finnish Rarities Committee, which is the place for all birdwatchers who are really keen on bird identification.

It was around year 1989 when I started to work for WWF as a warden in the best wetland in Finland -Liminganlahti. During that time I worked many years as a chairman at the local nature conservation association. At Liminganlahti I started my own birdwatching tour company in 1992 and afterwards the company got a name Finnature Ltd. Because of my work as a guide, I met plenty of foreign birdwatchers and wildlife photographers. That was the inspiration to restart my wildlife photography in a serious way. I was using a lot of slide film and I was travelling for photography to many of the same countries where I had been birdwatching before. I still have many processed slide films which I haven’t put in frames and I doubt that I ever will?

Digital photography

The biggest boost to my wildlife photography has been the change to digital camera body in 2003. At the beginning I made expensive error, since I thought that if I bought the best digital body to start with, I can use it at least 10 years. Hah, can you imagine? I kept my first digital camera only for 6 months and it was losing value 500 euros every month! Now I have just received my 6^th digital camera and I have learned that camera is not an investment, but a tool to get the best possible images.

First I was using digital camera as it was a film camera, taking just a few images of each subject. Soon I realised, that one of the main advantages of digital photography is that you are able to take more frames of fast moving subjects! This is great for action photography; birds in flight or birds fighting etc. Also with new camera bodies you can use higher ISO figures and that gives you so much more speed!

The fact that I am shooting nearly 200 000 frames in a year (which would have been 5555 rolls of film!) causes also problems. I have many hard drives full of data and it takes so much time to go through it all! If I only kept 10 % of images that would mean that I would still need to process 20 000 images in a year! Completely impossible for one photographer! Therefore in future I would need to be more critical with my images and only keep and process “the best of the best ones”. You really don´t need duplicates of the good frames anymore, do you? However, I´ll love digital photography!

Barn Swallow - (c) Jari Peltomäki

Owls of Finland

Nowadays I live in Finland in the Oulu area, which is famous of owls. Althought there is not really extensive forests around Oulu, it seems to be one of the best places in Finland for example for Great Grey Owls. I have worked with owls quite a lot, earlier as a ringer and nowadays as a photographer. I have also put up a lot of nestboxes for some of the species and built many artificial sticknests for others.

During the years many professional photographers, including Andy Rouse, David Tipling, Peter Cairns and Brutus Östling, have captured some of their best images of owls with me. Also I have helped many filming companies to film owls in Finland. I quess that is the reason why I hear following question fairly often:”When is the best time to see or photograph the owls in Finland?” The best answer what I can give is: ”Then, when they are ”available”! Depending on the year the best time could be January, February, March, April, May, June or even July. Occasionally good photo-opportunities for owls appears in autumn as well. Therefore the best way to avoid possible disappointments is to book late, when I know for sure that the owls are here. Naturally nothing is 100 % sure with wildlife, but when the good owl situation is on, it can continue for many weeks and sometimes for many months!

Some of the Finnish Owls are resident species and they stay in their territory throughout the year, but some of them are moving fairly long distances during the autumn. Then they are looking for good areas for voles. When they find suitable area, they will settle their winter territory there. If the food supply is still good in spring, they might breed in the same area.

The vole situation is the major factor when we are talking about seeing or photographing the owls. When vole situation is good owls are breeding in good numbers, but when vole population is low owls might be more easily observed and photographed especially during the winter! Vole populations vary in cycles and also geographically. So one year there could be good vole situation in Southern Finland and next year in Middle Finland and following year in Northern Finland! It is possible to predict the vole situations in different parts of country roughly one year beforehand.

I have the hides e.g. for Golden Eagle photography and for many other bird species. I could take you to the best places to photograph Brown Bears, Wolverines or Wolves in Finland! If you are interested in to photograph Finnish owls, I would recommend you to subscribe newsletter at www.finnature.com website, since I will let the newsletter out immediately when the owls are available.

Great Grey Owl - (c) Jari Peltomäki