Ok ok something about me. Although it is not the most comfortable thing to talk about, for me at least. But since this is a blog of some sorts, I guess it is kinda proper to say something.

First of all, let me just say that I am not a professional photographer by no means. Not at all. But you may have already guessed that by looking at my pictures… Actually I’m a rookie in this business. I have always loved photography though and done some courses but professionally I am a designer, web designer and graphic designer. And that is why this site probably looks better than the content itself… 🙂

Seriously though, I happen to love everything analog. That mostly has something to do with the fact that I am a late GEN X, which is known to have analog childhood and digital adulthood. That is totally a reality for me, born 1979 and got my first mobile phone for my 18th birthday in 1997. An Ericsson NMT that had 8 ringtones. Sweeet.

The love for analog also shows in this blog. Nevermind that mostly the images are digital. The grain effect is real. There will be some film blogs but mostly I will be covering stuff with the Fuji X film simulations and recipes. If you don’t know what they are, you can read more about them for example in the fujixweekly.com website. But briefly said, they are presets you can save to your Fuji X camera system to have a certain film look in your JPG’s. Kodak, Fujicolor, Agfa etc. They produce the most film-a-like digital images available and I just love them. It is like you have a bunch of different film available for different scenarios all the time in your pocket.

For me photography will always be film photography in its purest and original form. That is afterall the way I have been introduced to it back in the golden 80’s. Then during the 90’s I actually shot tens of film rolls with my compact camera when practising the noble art of graffiti painting and documenting that shit. But the shots were mostly crap. Like just the painting on the wall and nothing else. No background or people or anything. Or you shoot a painting on a train in the middle of the night with a 400 speed film hand held. If you were lucky you used 800 speed but usually the cheapest film possible. I surely do miss the gas station rolls… Kodak Gold 200, Fujifilm Superia etc… Good films but abused a lot.

Nowadays shooting film is pretty expensive since its scarce and a trendy hipster thing to do. For a dude getting back to film the price is too high. I think that learning to shoot while documenting it, using just film would be too costly and painly difficult. I am pretty sure that I will progress quicker if I see the results more often.

So this blog is about me learning to take good photographs, not me showing how it is done. Because I don’t know. I just know a good image when I see one. And how it is done does not matter to me, good is good. Also good for somebody may not be good to another person and vice versa. Some might like post processing so much that film simulations are out of question. Some don’t like to crop etc. For me, I like to see how the image looks in the camera, I don’t mind too much about post processing. But who knows what will happen in the future!

Anyways there are some photographers that have a warm place in my heart. Martha Cooper, John Free, Bruce Gilden, Man Ray… and lately Jake Wangner, check him out. Basically you could just put every famous street photographer here… Henri-Cartier Bresson, Garry Winogrand, Vivian Maier… Tatsuo Suzuki… From Finland I could mention I.K. Inha, Arno Rafael Minkkinen… and Timo Saarniemi! Yea… there are so many good ones…

One more thing, the name of the site, The Power Of Wow. In 2014 I started a Tumblr site with the same name. I also think that I haven’t updated it after that year, so it was short lived and not very good. Actually so much so that I forgot its existence. There are few photos that are nice and artsy but many aren’t.

Now when I started to think what name should I give to this site, I first named it Shoot To Kill. Pretty upsetting maybe, but kinda cool name when you relate the name just to photography. Well then at the same time the war in Ukraine started and I also thought that some platforms might not get the name and ban it etc. And then I remembered the long lost Tumblr site. There also was .fi domain name available so I grabbed it and here we are.

Hope you enjoy this as much as I do.

Cheers,
Sampsa