You only need one yes for things to turn completely in your favor.
Matti Seppänen
You can also listen to this episode with Matti on iTunes, Pocket Casts, Spotify, Castbox, and Google Podcast
Connect with fellow photographers and interact with the host, Perrin, gain access to monthly photo contests, discover daily inspiration, and much more!
Interested in contributing? Visit our Supporter page to find out more
Most photographers fly to Finland for the winter. Matti Seppänen grew up there, and he’ll tell you it’s harder to photograph than it looks.
There are no dramatic mountain ranges or iconic waterfalls to anchor a shot. The beauty is quieter than that. More atmospheric. Almost culturally encoded in the silence and stillness that Finns carry with them into the landscape. Learning to translate that feeling into an image, Matti says, is one of the hardest things he’s had to figure out as a photographer. And it shaped everything about how he works.
Based in Rovaniemi in Finnish Lapland, Matti has built a commercial career shooting for luxury travel brands, outdoor companies, and some of Finland’s biggest names. His work is cinematic and muted in a way that feels deliberately considered. But the road to get here was anything but straightforward. Photography wasn’t a calling for Matti. It was a reinvention. A music career ended in an accident, and he needed somewhere to put his energy. He started with a Canon M50, taught himself everything through YouTube, enrolled in business school, and spent years figuring out not just how to make good images, but how to build something sustainable around them.
In this episode, Matti pulls back the curtain on what that actually looks like in practice. He’s candid about nearly burning out earlier this year, about the viral videos that hurt his Instagram more than they helped it, and about the clients he’s walked away from even when the money was still there.
Here’s some of what we get into:
- Why Finland’s landscapes demand more creative thinking than almost anywhere else in the Nordic region
- How a passion for mechanical watches accidentally launched a photography career
- Why delivering great photos isn’t enough, and what commercial clients actually need from you
- What two million Instagram views cost him, and why he’d rather have a thousand of the right ones
- How he maintains a recognizable visual identity across wildly different genres
- What nearly burning out taught him about knowing when to stop
- Why he’s now deliberately making his footage look worse, on purpose
Matti is direct, thoughtful, and refreshingly practical. He’s someone who has thought seriously about the business of photography without losing sight of why he picked up a camera in the first place.
Hope you enjoy the conversation.
Q: What do most photographers get wrong about shooting in Finland when they actually show up?
Matti: A lot of people try to photograph Finland the way they’d shoot Iceland or Norway, but Finland is so different. We don’t really have those mind-blowing views or dramatic mountains that automatically look spectacular to the camera. When I go to Norway, it’s almost easy mode. I can point the camera in nearly any direction and get something decent. Here, if you do the same, you often don’t get a pleasing image. Finland’s atmosphere is quite subtle rather than grande. It feels emotionally powerful in real life, but trying to translate that into an image is actually surprisingly difficult.
Q: What did you learn about the commercial side of photography that you couldn’t have understood from the outside looking in?
Matti: Trust is really key. I’ve had many times when I could have basically milked a lot of money from certain customers, but from a business perspective, I think that’s a really bad mistake. Eventually they start to question why they’re paying so much for something that isn’t benefiting them, and that usually leads to losing the client. And so many photographers get it wrong thinking that if they just deliver nice photos, that will be enough. Clients aren’t only hiring you for the end product. They’re hiring you for your communication skills, your reliability. Every customer has problems they want you to solve, and really everything matters, from the first email to the last thank-you message you send them.
Q: Do you think being self-taught shaped your work in ways a formal education might not have?
Matti: I would think and suspect that I might not be as flexible or willing to try new things if I had gone to school. I kind of fear that if someone told me exactly how to do things, I might have taken that too literally and stopped breaking the rules. I’m a big believer that you have to learn the basics first, absolutely, but when you know what you’re doing and you break the rules knowing that you’re breaking them, that’s actually when a lot of good stuff happens. Being self-taught allowed me to try so many things because it all came from pure curiosity, not from the idea that there’s only one way to do it.
Connect with Matti
What We Talked About
Early Journey
- Matti grew up in Lapland, Finland, always a visual and detail-oriented person, but never planned to be a photographer. A music career ended after an injury, which forced him to find something new.
- He started shooting watch photos on an iPhone XS, moved to a Canon M50, and eventually enrolled in business school where he specialized in marketing, which is when photography began to look like a viable career.
- He’s entirely self-taught, spending hundreds of hours on YouTube and in deep independent study, which he credits for giving him more flexibility and creative openness than a formal education might have.
Photographing Finland
- Matti described Finland’s landscapes as subtle and emotionally atmospheric rather than grand or dramatic. Unlike Norway or Iceland, there are no obvious “bucket shot” locations that guarantee a strong image just by pointing a camera.
- The silence and simplicity embedded in Finnish culture carries into the landscape itself, and translating that into a photograph requires real creative thinking, patience, and attention to detail.
- He noted that visitors often try to photograph Finland the same way they’d shoot other Nordic countries, and that almost never works.
Building a Commercial Career
- His client work now focuses heavily on luxury travel and tourism in Lapland, alongside outdoor branding, events, and social media content. Past projects have included work for Canon and milestone campaigns for major Finnish companies like Stora Enso.
- Video has become an increasingly dominant part of his business, including vertical social media content and multi-day cinematic productions. He added drone work, which has helped him take on more complete projects for clients who need multiple deliverables at once.
- His advice on the commercial side: clients are not just hiring you for the final images. They’re hiring your communication, reliability, and ability to solve problems. Everything from the first email to the final delivery contributes to whether they come back.
Style and Visual Identity
- Matti’s signature look leans toward muted tones, restrained color palettes, and a clean but atmospheric feel that works across landscapes, travel, events, and product work.
- He described visual identity as the accumulation of consistent, conscious decisions that eventually become second nature, ranging from editing techniques to lens choices to how colors are handled.
- He’s currently experimenting with introducing more film grain and texture into his video work, deliberately working against his natural instinct for technically clean images.
Social Media and the Algorithm
- He’s had viral videos with millions of views and considers them a net negative, as they attracted bots and low-quality followers that damaged his engagement metrics and made it harder to reach the right audience.
- His perspective: 1,000 targeted views from potential clients will outperform 100,000 random views every time. Chasing virality for the sake of it doesn’t build a business.
- Staying authentic to your style matters more than trend-chasing, though he acknowledged that finding the balance between what performs and what represents you well is a constant challenge.
Advice for New Photographers
- If you’re entering this industry for money or recognition, you’ll be disappointed quickly. The photographers who make it are the ones who genuinely love the work enough to sustain the long hours and the rejection.
- Understand that running a photography business means doing a lot of things that have nothing to do with photography. Be prepared for that before you start.
- Showing up, pitching yourself, and handling rejection without being derailed by it is essentially the whole game early on. You only need one yes to change things.
What’s Next
- Matti is in a deliberate transitional period, focused on rebuilding his brand identity and overhauling a website that no longer reflects the quality and direction of his work.
- He wants to push further into cinematic storytelling, with references to Sam Newton as an inspiration for story-driven, emotionally resonant video work.
- Concert photography and automotive projects are both on his radar, with some promising connections already in place. Video will be the biggest area of focus for the rest of the year.
