Finland-based commercial photographer Antti Karppinen is a visual storyteller, and he loves to put a movie-like twist on his images. This is evident through his recent personal project featuring beautiful costumes, an elaborate set, and two models who might as well have been plucked right out of a painting.
Antti sets the stage for us:
Before I moved to Wales, I decided that I wanted to do a couple of my own projects once I got here since I’ve noticed that these “pro bono” projects bring inspiration and sometimes good things you didn’t even expect. With this in mind, I was browsing through different photographers’ websites and stumbled on a website of a really amazing photographer Aga Tomaszek. On her site, I saw these Steampunk wedding images and I was hooked. The images were taken in a really awesome mansion, but my eyes were caught in the wedding couple wearing really detailed steampunk costumes. I looked through all the images many times and thought that it would be awesome to shoot that couple in those steampunk costumes, but with my own style.
After deciding on this project, Antti got in touch with the bride and groom in the images, and they eventually agreed to do a kind of “anniversary edition” of the original wedding images in the same mansion (Maunsel House) in Somerset, England. The shoot would fall right around the first anniversary of the wedding. Antti collaborated with the couple on ideas and they contacted the mansion to confirm logistics. After this point, it was all fun and games.
Antti was thrilled with the setting, saying that the mansion was so beautiful he almost found it tough to focus on his work.
As always, this project was a learning experience for Antti, as well as an opportunity to stretch his creative muscles:
You have to trust your instinct and your vision of things. You have to be bold enough to contact a stranger and just ask them for help. Meeting new people opens up new paths to get your work shown to the bigger audience. Do your own projects and make them count!
Below are some BTS images: