I am Valtteri Hirvonen and this is my Red Line Challenge.
I'm a outdoor and landscape photographer based in Finland.
When I started practicing photography
I realised that it's dark in Finland
for almost six months every year.
So I really needed to embrace the dark
and just come up with techniques to make the photos work.
With landscape photography you are usually limited
by the light nature gives you.
But at night you are in charge of what you can,
and cannot, see.
The best thing about this kind of photography is that
there's no rules.
It can be blurry, grainy,
but just go with the feeling, that's the important part.
With a few simple techniques
you can transform these familiar worlds
into something surreal, something magical.
For this shoot I'm taking a trip
up to the northern part of Finland.
It is a beautiful, but unforgiving place to take pictures.
I will show you how to use a variety of types of light
and photography techniques to reshape the landscape.
I'm going to be out in a snowy forest
but these techniques will work anywhere it's dark.
Here in Finland we can travel freely around the country,
just make sure you are complying with the guidelines
wherever you are, to keep yourself and other safe.
"Oh yes!"
"Yeah, this is a perfect place for the tent."
"With beautiful trees all over."
"We'll use the tent as a huge kind of light globe
and it will light all these trees."
What I'm doing here is putting my light panel into my tent
and using the tent as a
natural soft box,
which is actually in my shot.
"Can I have that one?"
"Oh, for sure, for sure."
Try to compose your shot before it gets really dark.
You can make better decisions.
"Actually put the self timer on
so when I...
push the shutter button I won't shake the camera."
"It will take some time for the light to drop even more."
If you are shooting outside there is no such thing as
too dark.
The darker it is,
the more impact you can have with your lights.
And for this image I need it pitch black.
"It really started snowing quite a bit."
"But let's see how it goes."
I like the soft light that the tent creates for the photo
but it feels a bit empty still.
Usually a lens with frost or dust can be seen as a problem
but for this
I wanted to use it as a positive thing
and add something for my photo.
I used the headlamp to reveal the frost from the lens
and this I think adds
another layer for the image
and you can now clearly feel the cold around you.
I'm using a drone to light up my scene
because I want to try something totally unnatural.
I want to create this mysterious, kind of,
unseen, alternative realities.
I'm shooting long exposures here
so that I get some light trails from the drone
as well as capturing the red glow on the trees.
A drone is great because you can start getting lights
in places and with colours that
you would never see in nature.
But you could do it just as easily
with a red bike light on a long stick.
In fact, that might have worked better here,
the drone is struggling with the cold and snow.
Even so, we've got some really interesting results.
"But I kind of like this."
I really like how the red plays with the blue
from the frozen and icy trees.
"Let's do something else."
When you are shooting landscapes
and particularly at night,
it's great to have a rough plan
for the photos you want to take.
But if you see a great opportunity while you are out there
it's usually worth a few minutes of experimenting.
My friend Jesse was actually skiing in the distance,
and I could see his headlamp
and it looked awesome,
so I told him to put the torch
behind the tree
which created this nice ring light around the tree.
"This is sick, honestly I can take like,
one second exposures, handheld, and
it is razor sharp."
There is something special about the photo.
I wanted a bit of variety for the final photo
so we are heading up to the top of the hill
where I hope the trees thin out a bit.
"It's beautiful, it's super dark.
So I'm trying to find some kind of rhythm
from the landscape."
"I think that one speaks to me.
I will get my camera and see."
A small tip when using your autofocus in low light is to
use your headlamp to light the scene.
And I usually use the back button focus on my camera
so I can leave the autofocus on all the time.
"Even in this lighting the autofocus works quite well
so the camera does all the work for me."
And then I turn off the light and take my shot.
I found this really simple composition of this one tree
and I wanted to ski behind it with my headlamp on.
I need a 30" exposure to give me time to ski all the way
across the frame.
And that works out at
F5.6 and ISO 100.
Don't be afraid if it's not right the first time,
just embrace the experiment
and you can get some amazing results.
"That's not there yet but I kind of,
like how the foreground
is lit by that."
I'm trying to find the perfect angle for the light
to find the balance between how I'm lighting the ground
or if I'm lighting the sky.
"That's nice."
"I think that's cool!"
I'm really happy with this one.
It's a bit unusual
but I like the glow and the light ray.
"It's almost like you are doing magic tricks
and you don't know what you are actually doing."
"For a second you forget how cold it is."
I would like to see people experiment
and be playful with their photography
in this challenge.
Just have fun.
Try the weirdest things with light that you can imagine
and usually it turns out well.
We can't wait to see what you come up with.