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Interview with Jari Peltomäki (11.01.2014)
How long have you been a photographer and what is your proudest Award/Achievement to date?
Jari Peltomäki has been photographing from 1978 – he started with black and white film and moved from there to use slide film for two decades and now he has been using digital camera for over 10 years.
He appreciate most of his three highly commended images at BBC`s Wildlife Photographer of the Year competition (WPY) - where he was also in final judging panel in 2012 competition.
WPY highly commended with a Brown Bear image 2003
WPY highly commended with Great Grey Owl photo 2005
WPY highly commended with Dalmatian Pelican photo 2010
What keeps Jari passion for photography alive?
He like all the beautiful things in nature and my passion is to photograph birds! In my opinion birds are beautiful! With his images he want to show the beauty of the birds to the wide public and he try to make people understand that it does make sense to protect the nature and birds!
Apart from photography, what other passions do you have in life?
Nature conservation is close to his heart and he has been working for the conservation of the best wetland in Finland – Liminganlahti for over 20 years. Also his work for the owls by feeding them when they need help and by putting up the nest sites can be considered as conservation work. He also love’s his dogs Luna and Lyyli (Red Setters) and it is great to have walks with them in forest.
If there is one tip you could give a student of photography in order for them to improve their craft, what would it be?
Get passionate about what you are doing – then everything is possible!
Name three photographers or artists who have most influenced your work.
Hannu Hautala – grand old man of Finnish wildlife photography! Good friend and always ready to help! David Tipling – very successful British photographer! Good friend and good companion on photography trips!
Markus Varesvuo – very successful Finnish bird photographer! Good friend and great guy to work with!
Bence Máté – very successful Hungarian bird photographer! Good friend and really inspirational guy to work with!
Give your prediction of where you see photography going in the next 10 years.
Cameras are getting smaller and video is coming more popular! Maybe we don´t need to take separate still images any more, but we can select the best still frames from the video footage? Software need to develop a lot that it would be possible to handle all that data and hopefully the software will be able to help to pick up the best still image amongst the large amount of the data!
If you were an animal, who would you be?
I would love to be a Peregrine Falcon – very fast flyer and powerful bird which always causes a huge panic amongst other birds!
