A client turned friend. The sweetest of girls. With an unbelievable voice. Meet Keisha. A talented musician who was given the butterfly wings to change people’s lives with just a beat.
Posts Tagged ‘friends’
One for Thursday … – Niki Strbian Valokuvaus
February 25, 2010Valentine’s day in the botanic garden – Niki Strbian Valokuvaus
February 16, 2010All shades of green. Sunshine. Glasshouse. Kaisaniemi botanic garden on Valentine’s Sunday … PART 1.
Finns don’t regard love affairs stable enough to dedicate them a day in their calendar. As my father says: “Women come and go but basketball stays.” 
Surely Finns do not have a dedicated day in the calendar to basketball either, despite the important fact that it’s my Dad’s lifetime hobby. If there was a holiday dedicated to sports in Finland, it would most likely be, you guessed it, to ice-hockey. Perhaps even skating. And maybe sailing. And maybemaybe to sauna (which counts as both sports and a cultural event here, didn’t you know??).
But we are talking about Valentine’s day. On February the 14th Finns choose to show their affection to friends. Because friendship truly lasts a lifetime. And because it’s quite enough to show affection once a year when government permits.
I decided to celebrate the day by spending the entire day with my best friend/assistent/colleague/muse in the botanic garden, shooting a marathon of minisessions for my friends. Here the first sneak peek from Sunday. These two are quite fresh among my friends, yet I feel I have known them for a decade. At least. You two clowns, who are so in love: Come over soon to eat some halusky with us, we run out of the special cheese usually really quickly 
Enjoy, hope you will like it!
When editing the photos, I had the “Isn’t she lovely, daa, daa, da…” tune stuck in my head. I wonder why…
Let me introduce you, in case you don’t know why the heck the next photo features a lamp. This, ladies and gentlemen, is the famous Double Bubble lamp designed by Eero Aarnio. I challenged everyone to bring something special to the minisession and A+A came up with this. This is HERS not HIS. I am happy they didn’t go with HIS. The BMX bicycle could have been a bit difficult in the glasshouse…
The secret meaning is of course that the big bubble represents the boss of the family. Hmm…?
Looking into the future. Is it bright? Enough?
xoxo
Snow, snow, snow queen – Niki Strbian Valokuvaus
February 4, 2010Having fun with friends. In -16. Wind. Both of my kids. Cranky. Imagine the shoot:
click click click click
back to the car – unfreezing hands
click click click
back to the car – hot tea
click click
back to the car – cannot start the engine, cannot turn the key
click
back to the car – kids crying, me fainting from the cold, leaving and driving home
and … we almost kissed a truck who skid when the driver went too fast through a curve. But we got home safe.
You were awesome as always! thank you
How is your handwriting? – Niki Strbian Valokuvaus
January 28, 2010Pour me a drop of truth. It doesn’t have to be a whole glass. How is your handwriting? Getting worse with every email and Word document you write? With every letter you don’t write? I just finished reading a thick, thick book of correspondence between two Czech actors and humanists, Jan Werich and Jiri Voskovec, also known as V+W. And the great amount of letters that crossed Atlantic (since one of them lived in communistic Czechoslovakia and the other in the US) made me wonder… Would it be different for them if Internet was existing? Would they use the actual paper and pen so much? How many letters to my friends have I written lately… gosh, none, I don’t even have time to write emails. I don’t fancy that my friends store and back up my emails, but I think, I hope, they do keep the occasional letter I write – while my hand is in a great pain from such weird thing I want it to do. My handwriting got really bad over the years and it was not good to start with either…. I had a flash of geniality yesterday and found this www.fontgarden.com. Lifesaver! Before your handwriting gets real illegible, get it recorded in 010010111000. Or just download any of the cool free fonts they already have and pretend it’s yours. You can choose among big names’ handwriting – fancy a Franz Kafka? Marilyn Monroe? And while you are at it, enjoy the quotes. Some of them are real gems. Here my choice for the day:
And that’s why we don’t have any TV 
Oh and while my lil ones cannot write yet, they can do this. Show me that with your mouse, ha!
I define Finnish weather forecast with one word – reliable. In summer, you can rely on it being almost always right. In winter, you can rely on the fact that whatever it says it is never sunny and nice. Mostly during winter the forecast promises clouds today and tomorrow and sunshine in about 3 days time. Every day. So you always have a little hope that in three days it won’t be so depressing
Ok, enough raving about the sophisticated science of weather forecasting. When my father visited Finland during summer I asked Kati to swap family sessions. And though I really wanted to photograph Kati with her whole family, we ended up just the four of us – Kati, her daughter, me and my whining and completely unhappy son. Of course they promised sunny weather. Of course it was cloudy and gloomy. But we photographed anyway.
Meet Kati, a fellow photographer, beautiful, independent and successful woman, great mother and a good friend. And with her daughter they also make gorgeous models. (more photos coming!) When I grow up, I want to be you, Kati.
Me so sad. I am loosing a friend. She’s moving away, getting a cool job (the sports newsreader on a national Czech TV channel), taking her oh so sweet (and oh so hyperactive) boy with her. He’s my daughter’s friend. I wanted to gift her and her family with a few photos while they are still here and while there is still summer here too. Kate is a former athlete and her hubby is among other roles an athletic coach, no wonder their boy is a physically gifted child who outrun his peers by about 10 meters on a 40 meter sprint No wonder we chose their base sport stadium as a location for our session. I hope you will enjoy your photos, my dears.
Oh and by the way, if you wonder where the nick is coming from … a diminutive of the Czech version Katerina is Kacenka, which incidently also means a duckling. Before my daughter learned how to speak properly, she always used to call Kate “quack-quack”.
We’ll miss you. That’s all.
My local family – Niki Strbian Perhekuvaus
July 21, 2009It was many years ago, just another party of our Czech community where I met just another Finnish girl. But about her I was thinking: Finally a Finnish friend! As I found out later, she was thinking: Finally a Czech friend!
What was so striking about her? Her eyes? Yes. Her sense of humour? Yes. Her honesty? Yes. Her husband? Her Czech husband, yes And so we met the couple, who was to have a great son – our godson, and a little beautiful lady – my daughter’s best friend to date. We are lucky to have you!
This looks like a home fire accident, but in fact it’s a traditional Finnish savusauna – smoke sauna. Dearies, this is to remind you that you are so hot you could burn a house down
