About me

“And I’m on my knees looking for the answer,
Are we human or are we dancer?”

Human – The Killers

Nature photographer from Lapland, Finland

Hello! I am Olli Junes and through this website you can get to know my photography and my lifestyle in the North.

Welcome to the site!

In photography, I have always…

I started photography at the age of 15. With the money I earned from my summer job, I bought my first camera, a Canon Powershot S2IS. Before that, my contact with cameras was occasional experimentation with my brother’s system camera, which left an indelible impression on me. I was able to capture my inner world in photographs. When I started my photography hobby, I could never have imagined where it would eventually take me.

In the first year of high school, at the age of 16, I started my own business Foto-Junes. Yle Lapland did a story about me for the web and TV. The point of the company was to finance my photography hobby and gain experience in wedding photography.

I learned a lot from top photographers around the world, such as
Zack Arias
,
Jasmine Star
,
Chase Jarvis
,
Marianne Taylor
and
Vincent Laforet
. I admired them because they were able to take advantage of the scalability of information sharing that the internet and blogs brought.

… to the border – and eventually across it.

When I graduated from high school, I immediately moved to Jyväskylä to do school photography. I spent three autumns at Seppälä’s School Photos and Kuvamuisto, the rest of the time I was shooting weddings. I worked hard and was in the worst shape of my life because of the shocking workload.

Photography soon became a full-time job, shooting almost 40 wedding photos a year, going to trade fairs, travelling a lot and processing all the free time photos. I remember many times falling asleep on the keyboard while editing images. I learned a lot about working, guerrilla marketing and maintaining my own wellbeing.

I was actively photographing for seven years: hundreds of weddings all over Finland, tens of thousands of people and countless events. Photography sucked all the juice out of me. I began to wish for individual days when I could not take photos.

I had learned to hate photography.

Photography was a hobby I loved and I lost this hobby to work. I forgot to take care of myself and wanted a change, so I went into sales. I left photography for years and the cameras were left gathering dust on the shelf.

Burn-out – a blessing or a curse?

I had professional equipment on the shelf for a total of five years and I didn’t had no intention of touching it. The idea of photography tempted me for years but I didn’t have the energy to revive an old hobby. People who have gone overboard with something, you know what I’m talking about.

Things eventually led to a progression in my sales job to the point of burn-out. I burned out for a variety of reasons.

For some, burn-out is a curse, for me it was a blessing. Although I lost some of my ability to challenge myself congnitively to the limit, burn-out gave me eyes to see the most important thing in life – life. Values became clearer and I made the decision to turn values into words into action. We moved from Sweden first to Helsinki and in spring 2021 to Rovaniemi.

“You must live, and realise that you are living” – A. Hellaakoski.

I come from Rovaniemi and I couldn’t be happier.

… pushed myself to the limit – and over it.

I’ve made the decision that I’m no longer going to lose the hobby I love to work. As a professional photographer, if you are becoming cynical about your work, alarm bells should be ringing in your head.

When your passion for photography disappears, so does your income. This is a huge risk that is part of the daily life of freelancers and sole traders all the time.

While living in Helsinki, I sold all my equipment and in the spring of 2022 I bought my cameras again.

In my current job I need studio equipment for streaming and educational video production and I thought I could use the same camera for nature photography.

Thank you if you read this far. Photography is a way for me to open my inner world to you.

What do I do now?

I am an entrepreneur in a digital marketing and sales development company called Resaco. The head office is in Rovaniemi but we work completely remotely. At Resaco we work completely remotely and my own values have had a big influence on the kind of management model and day-to-day life I want to build and maintain in my company.

To balance my work, in my free time I go hiking with my family in nature as much as possible.

My aim is to carry my camera with me as much as possible.