STEDSANS IN THE WOODS

LUXURIOUS DINNER AND OVERNIGHT STAY IN THE SWEDISH FOREST

It's been a really long time from my last blog post (too many new things going on) I've missed blogging but I wanted to come back with super interesting story and now I have it! (actually two)

First one is about our visit to Stedsans in the Woods in July. Charming project by Mette Helbæk and Flemming Hansen. They came from Denmark and started this huge project in Swedish forest. They sold their house and closed their restaurants in Copenhagen. Who has that kind of courage? And they managed to get the rest of the money with Kickstarter. I can already say it's worth it and love to support it.

We had our ten year anniversary and we decided to celebrate it by coming to Stedsans and have a beautiful dinner in the forest and stay overnight in one of their big cosy tents and I mean they were cosy. A huge soft double bed with beautiful linen.

This course was our starter. A medicinal plant salad with mushrooms and berries from the forest.

When we arrived we were shown our tent and all the important things concerning our stay on a hand drawn printed map. Restaurant, toilets, shower, boat house, floating sauna, garden and pigs with chickens ;)

The dinner was delicious even though I have quite strict diet. There were things I could not eat but I was well taken care of.

My husband can eat anything ( not envy at all) and his favorite was Peas francaise with horsebeans and lemon thyme. I don't drink alcohol so I had to skip wines but they offered lovely non alcohol drinks like Aronia-apple juice. It was very good with main course Brisket with grilled leek and flowers (flowers! love to eat flowers!) and we enjoyed a lot being there. Their charming style, atmosphere with cosyness and good service. 

Mom and daughter Kodak moment. Picking flowers together for us.

This is Peas française with horsebeans and lemon thyme. Mette styled the dish quite gracefully but in very relaxed way. I felt I had to go and shoot it in the forest and lucky me - forest was just few meters away from our dinner table.

During our six course dinner we had a lovely discussions with a couple sitting next to us Maria and Thomas. We all took few pics of the food ;) they were looking so delicious.

I found Mette's and Flemming's Stedsans in the Woods because I've been following Mette in IG. First I wanted to visit her restaurant in Copenhagen but then I read about her interesting plans. So in spring it was quite clear that I wanted to visit their place in Sweden. Do you ever feel that somehow all the things are connected ? Because same time when I was thinking about Stedsans I got an assignment - to make a speech about trends in food photography. Of course I mentioned Stedsans as one example of the trending things in the world of food.

So I gave a speech in Helsinki in April. Event was called What's cooking Helsinki - food carnival. I spoke to food bloggers about trends in food photography and why storytelling is even more important now than before. I have my own opinions about trending things (actually I don't like the word trend at all, haha. For me trend is equal to consumption which is not a good thing but the word is very easy to understand so I use it) but I decided to ask opinions from talented food and lifestyle bloggers. I wanted to hear their ideas about food photography at the moment. I combined their thoughts with mine and I got surprisingly coherent content. We shared pretty same ideas of going more natural and authentic content - less styled - simple and natural and some of us saw building community very important. We are all creative so we all have a bit different style and opinions in the end of the day but I felt a feeling of collective mind if I may say so.

I want to thank you all lovely ladies who helped me with the trend speech task in April: Aran Goyaga from Cannelle & Vannille, Nina Olsson from Nourish Atelier, Holly Becker from Decor8, Beth Kirby from Local Milk, Adelaster Food Textures, Tami Hardeman from Running with Tweezers, Sif Orrellana and Nicoline Olsen.

Here above you can see a pic from our atmospheric tent. Why I told about Stedsans in the Woods to my audience - food bloggers? I think my main point was that trends are less important. Going back to the roots and sustainable way of living with no waste is one of the directions we are heading to. Simple life with healthy and delicious local food. Using plants and flowers from the nature that is surrounding us but still eating delicious food. Luxury in the forest.

This we found from our breakfast table. Who can say no to this?

Mette made an omelette for everyone in the morning. We sat and drank our coffee and ate as much as we could, haha. After breakfast we decided to test a floating sauna. It was different compared to our own sauna. A lot of light and possibility to go swimming. The lake water was clean and very refreshing. I mean cold. But this summer has been quite cold here in Scandinavia so what can you say. Maybe next summer is warmer. I hope.

The floating sauna was made by an architect and carpenter. It was lovely.

Before leaving we went to see pigs and chickens. We walked by the garden and I was feeling happy and calm and ready for the next destination: Göteborg and botanical garden.

I hope you enjoyed my blog post! Next time I will tell you about my 1:1 flower class with amazing The Blue Carrot.

xoxo

Kreetta

HOW TO EDIT A PERFECT PHOTO STORY?

STORYTELLING NEEDS EDITING

What is the story you are telling?

I will write quite loosely my thoughts of editing. I hope you find some good tips to make your editing process more focused and easier. I wanted to tell a story about our late lunch - blinis. It happened in our home on a beautiful sunny winter day. I also styled it to look like a slavic table. Not so seriously though. Blinis have Russian roots. 

Things to consider when you start to build your story. You should already think these things when you are shooting and of course during you are editing photos. Remember also when you are shooting the story to get different kind of pics for sure.

Show scene and build narrative - how you draw the viewer to follow your story? 

Point of view - where are you? 

Purpose - what are you trying to tell?

Lightning -use it for benefit for your point of view - soft light, hard light, dabbled light etc.

Find mood, create atmosphere - develope emotion - that is what the story is about  

Introduce people in story

Follow movement

Show ideas

Find contrast

Find details

Sounds logical?

On editing you should know how many pages you have in magazine or how many pics you want to use in your single blog post or in your IG feed? These days we have digital cameras and it is easy to shoot a lot. Editing is more difficult because you have so many pics to go through. But like the cliches "Kill your darlings" and Less is more" editing is all about making decisions. You have to make decisions which photos tell the story, which ones are the strongest ones. If you think about a magazine layout you can notice there are big and small photos in the same story. Which photos are the main pics - pics you want to show and best for your story. Which ones support the main photos well. There are different combinations for sure how to tell your story and I don't want to say there is right or wrong, just want to give you some tools and tips how to get rid of the too many alike pics in your story.

Some tips:

Pics have to have enough difference from each other:

new angle, different depth of field, direction, close up or the whole subject. There are so many different ways to make a pic. Every story need to build from small pieces.

Pic have to have new or different information from the subject. Go close - step back. Go up, go down. Try to find the best angle for your subject. Thinking out of the box helps here.

Which order you show them? In blog you have to start with very good photo because people is so short tempered in internet. It's obvious that a very good pic draws attention where ever you tell your story.

Surprise the reader, begin with not the obvious pic. Doesn't work always.

There are strong main pics and supporting pics. If you can't think what new or different the pic brings to your story - it might not be the one to use. Even though you have made a huge job for cooking, baking, shooting and styling the photos, you should not show too many alike pics in your final story.

I have few choises from one angle from same subject. I have to pic one of them. I don't want to show all of them only because I can't choose which one is the best one. Luckily - more you edit better you come. I hope you aren't thinking that editing is too difficult for you. No it's not. But if the pics are too alike you should show only one of them. Of course it depends on your story. If  you are telling a story like mine today - choises to make is easier than for example if it would be a food and travel story.

Ok, are you still with me? 

If I haven't already said it enough clearly, I say it again. You have to make decisions - can't avoid that. But it is good to take editing as learning by doing. Nothing bad happens if you feel afterwards that you should have chosen differently. You learn everytime. Make a new story.

You can also ask from your friend or collegue their opinion while you are editing. I bet they see things a bit differently but this is not a matter of who is right - you always have to listen your inner voice but it is good choise to let somebody else go through the pics - of course knowing your story. Like I had first 78 pics I went quite easily to 20 pics and then I edited pics still 10 and finally I chose to tell my story with 7 pics. A good thing to remember is that you can also take a break in editing. Continue after few hours or next day. I usually don't like to make a final editing straight after photoshooting. I make the first selection but I like to leave the final editing for the next day. But sometimes you just have to make them during same day. That's why it is good to learn how to do it more efficiently.

I´m sure I forgot something so please ask if you feel you want to hear my opinion.

Finally here are recipes of blinis and muschroom salad. This time we did not have dairy free so we used lactose free soured cream. But you want to be dairy free you can use for example Oatly's oat creme fraiche. 

Other ingredients with blinis are of course chopped red onion, chopped russian salt cucumber and fish roe.

GLUTEN FREE BLINIS about 25 blinis / by my husband and he doesn't follow so much other people's recipes. He cooks food quite freely.

3 dl water

1 1/2 tsp dry yeast

1 dl teff flour (very healthy choise and gluten free)

1/2 dl rice flour

1 dl oat flour

Combine ingredients let it rest at least 3 hours.

Add:

1 tsp salt

1 dl mineral water  Mix it to the dough.

2 eggs. Separate white and yolk. Mix yolks to the dough.  Whip egg whites to firm. Fold gently into dough.

Fry blinis with canola oil until they get a bit color from both sides.  

We also made mushroom salad with blinis.

MUSHROOM SALAD

1 1/2 dl smetana

dried mushrooms/salted mushrooms to taste

1/4 onion chopped

1 tsbt olive oil

1 tsp white vinegar

salt to taste

white pepper to taste (we didn't use pepper)

Mix all together and let it rest for awhile at least the time you fry blinis.

Bon appetit! 

I hope you get inspired to make blinis, they are so very tasty.

Phew, long blog post full of information. I hope these thoughts helps you on the way to perfect photo story. Well, I guess perfect is a bit strong word but it is always good to have a goal that makes you work even harder. Oh, I almost forgot to tell you that one of those pics is iPhone pic. Which one?

I've blogged couple of times photography tips so you can find them here: 

IG feed food photography with smart phone

Composition

Have a beautiful Sunday and creative week!

xoxo

Kreetta

ps. this is the contact sheet of 20 pics I started to edit to final 7.

NEW CERAMICS + iPHONE PHOTOGRAPHY

TRADITIONAL CHRISTMAS MARKET AT RYTI-HOUSE

Weekend is here. So great. Tomorrow I will be at Ryti-house in Huittinen. It is my sister's family's place. I have all packed and hope we are going to have a great Saturday full of Christmas feeling. There will be traditional Christmas Market. I will be selling ceramics like flower frogs, vases, pendant, small cake stands and bowls and small paintings and small prints of my photos taken by iPhone. They are super cool :)

I wish you a beautiful weekend and maybe we see at Ryti-house tomorrow!

xoxo

Kreetta

ps. Christmas Market is on Saturday 11.12. from 11 am to 17 pm address Raskalantie 218, Huittinen. See the FB event here.

SPRING SOUP

ASPARAGUS+FENNEL+NETTLE

If you have seen my Instagram feed, you know that I've chosen to be a cook for a whole weekend. My husband had a birthday on Friday so one part of his present is to let him just enjoy of eating - not making it. He likes to cook a lot but you know who wouldn't like to just sit at the readymade table?

I found great inspiration from Green Kitchen Stories blog. You can find the original recipe there.  Actually I saw their delicious pic in IG. Surprise! It really looked very tempting. 

So I made it. But I made some changes to the recipe. I changed spinach to nettle, because you can find it almost right next to our door this time of the year (yay!...and it's free ;) and it is also very healthy. Second change was replacing lemon with buckthorn juice. I can't eat citrus fruits so I used very scandinavian choise that is quite similar or at least a bit close ;) and garnishing with goutweed. That you can also find from garden (too) easily.

What can I say. It tasted heavenly. Very good and the toppings! I haven't thought it well before that you really can do amazing things with toppings. You don't have to eat so much bread (expecially if it have to be gluten free) you can eat some really nice things with your soup like here: lentils, asparagus, parsley, green chili, pumkin seeds and cashew cream. So this recipe is also totally vegan too.

One big nod to David and Luise for this beautiful and tasteful recipe. I had to write it down to my vintage (straight from the seventies - it has only plastic artifical food things in it's cover) recipe book and that is a book where we only write the best ones.

Have a tasty Sunday!

xo

Kreetta

ps. I took this photo with my husband's camera because I was too lazy to take my camera home and yesterday when I made the soup I just had to photograph it. He has smaller and older Canon and the lens was Voightländer 90mm and with cropped sensor it's really tele...and only manual focusing...it's always a bit uncomfortable when you don't have your own gear and well, you have to work a bit more with making one pic, I say.

EASTER EDITION

INDIAN CUISINE MEETS FRENCH KITCHEN WITH SCANDINAVIAN TWIST

I love to work with intuition. When talking about food I often have certain taste in my mind what I would like to eat and of course when I'm cooking I try to reach that.

But have to admit I don't always get there, haha. Today I wanted to make some strong flavors with little twist of something that is new to us. 

NEW BLOG'S HEADER DESIGN - BOILING UNDER BLOG

Today I will tell you about photographing a header picture to food and lifestyle blog. I was asked to photograph a blog's header for new cool blog Boiling Under by Pauliina Siniauer. Her blog is about food stories and good recipes. I was very happy about this assignment because I could photograph my favorite things - food and lifestyle. I usually love the word editing but this time I will show you many photos that you see the process.

Because she lives in Berlin at the moment we planned the project only writing each other. We went through her favorite ideas, ingredients and made a Pinterest board together. That is very useful tool. There were things she liked and ideas I wanted to show her. Important was that we speak same language. But still I got quite free hands to photograph what and how I thought things would work. I started to get images in my head. I love that moment. Boiling Under name gave me thoughts quite generously. Finally it took one day to go and get the ingredients - most of them are Pauliinas's favorite ones, style, photograph and send the photos to Pauliina. 

I tried different kind of compositions and changed order and ingredients. I made simple compositions and more complex compositions.

My love for vintage items is quite obvious - I admit :)

It's a great feeling when you feel that there is a flow going in your brain and things makes sense and looks good.

Just changing little things you make the difference.

But at the end of the day I usually have to say that less is more. But if you don't try different kind of things you don't find the right one if you know what I mean... 

I was designing the blog's header to blog about food and good recipes. It gave me a lot of possibilities. But I happen to know the person and the name Boiling Under is - to me - something not so obvious, a bit hidden and trending. This person has an excellent sense of humour and she is greatly skilled in writing and she is very good speaker. But still the less is more is better than too much and way too many thoughts. 

We both agreed the same picture. We like more about a hint of something than obvious things even though they look good and are pretty. Back to square one. The first idea I had in my mind was simple and I got it when I saw this charming little casserole that my workspace friend Meri-Tuuli  have full of salt :) 

That's our beloved Boiling Under.



xoxo Kreetta 

ps. I wonder what should I do with all those photos. They might be quite nice pics on the kitchen wall or what you think?

FLOWER POWER - EASY PHOTOGRAPHING WITH iPHONE

I've noticed that I have started to photograph even more with my iPhone. It's easier and faster and you get your photos in no time to Instagram. I've been in Instagram now for a one year and I have no regrets. I use to think that there are way too many photographs in the world and that is a great excuse to avoid IG. But...well no. It's a place with people. It's a place of community.

I use VSCOcam to photograph my pics. I've just use to it, so I don't use camera's own app to do it. I don't know which one is better but I've my habits and quite happy with them. You know the size of the photograph taken with phone is huge. You can get almost A4 sized pic with 300dpi so nothing stop you making a nice photograph print from your phone photos. I think that is amazing. Technology is here to stay and it is speeding forward and I just don't know where we are after next ten years. 

I surely believe that if you want to have a job and live good life, you can't step back and avoid all the technology. You have to go along but you can choose your way. Appearance in internet and social media can't beat the true value of friendship and family so there are moments that you just have to forget the whole world around you and concentrate to your real life. It's sometimes hard because it is so easy to just push buttons on your phone and make a digital foodprints one after another. 

What do you think?

Here's 3 IG accounts I love to follow: 

Cabinlove

Here you can find your perfect hideaway

Cannellevanille 

You can eat with your eyes and enjoy of beautiful photography

Indigo_mint 

Vintage vintage vintage - I love it!

...and my IG you can find kreettakreetta.

Have a lovely weekend!

xo

Kreetta 

ps. If you haven't seen my very first Steller stories, you can find it here. It's a story of Venice.

Flower LOVE

Good Sunday! Lazy morning. Lazy day. This is a bit "dagen efter" for whole Finland because yesterday we had Finland's Independence Day.  That is the day when everybody is watching the Linnanjuhlat from television. It is the Presidential Independence Day reception. It's THE big party in Presidential Palace, approximately 2000 invited guests. Everybody would like to be there even at once...so have to do something that President of the Republic of Finland Sauli Niinistö will invite us there, haha. But being honest it's fun to watch how people have dressed up for the party and of course there are many opinions about the dresses...

We had also planned to travel to visit our friends and celebrate but sad to say I got weird stomach flu so we missed the party. I had also planned that I will make a blog post about the flowers I bought quite cheap price this week but because I got sick I can only show you these pics taken by iPhone for Instagram by VSCO cam.

I think it's unbelievable what you can do with your phone nowadays. Of course you can see the grain but this time of the year we don't have so much light so it means grain. But I don't care about it. I think it makes pics even more real and grain has always been one part of the photography.

I have promised many things lately to make and show you here in blog but I have had quite a lot work - which is very good for starting businesswoman ;) I had planned that I have my web shop open before X-mas but...we'll see. I think I'm going to take a nap now.

Have a great Sunday and enjoy waiting for X-mas!

xo
Kreetta

Workspace - My Very First One

Have you dreamt of your own workspace? I have. So many times. 

Fresh Tomato Sauce - It's a video!

How are you my dear reader? 

© Kreetta's husband - I love this photo...soon he is better photographer than me!

We had very beautiful warm and sunny weekend and I just had to make a video. I used Final Cut X to edit. As I have told you I had 30 days trial of it. But not any more. So I made a video in a last minute. I'm so happy I made it!

I shooted this video at our pergola and of course it's about tomatoes! There are plenty now and I love them! I asked my husband to help me and because he likes to cook - he really could help me. I promised not to show his face :) So here we go! Fresh tomato sauce for your eyes only.

Sooo...how was it?

It's a very easy recipe - are you going to try it? I think we found it from one food magazine - don't remember exactly. It was few years ago. And by the way we didn't use parmesan but of course you can!

xo

Kreetta

Forest, mushrooms and friends

it's a family

We went to forest with hope we would find blueberries and mushrooms. We did and the day was very beautiful. It was a wonderful day with friends in the forest. It is totally different thing to eat your lunch in a beautiful place. Fresh air and relaxed moments. Who wouldn't enjoy?

we love forest

fungus with birch

anthill

beautiful green

blueberries for you

rye bread

sweet family

huge cep

not with empty hands

catch of the day

How are you? Have you been in forest lately? It's so relaxing place to be.

This week has been my first one at work and I have to admit I'm now a little bit tired. It's so different what I have had. But I'm sure next week will be easier. It is just how it goes. I hope you enjoyed my forest essay and have a lot of energy to make something what you love this weekend.

xo

Kreetta