Read This Post | Why Nordica Exists

[ By Cole ]

Who The Eff is Nordica

A little lightbulb went off in my head recently: Who / What the heck is Nordica Photography? I mean, obviously I know (and Jakob  knows), but for everyone else, you probably think we’re just a couple Eurotrash photographers who bombard the internet with our stuff.

So, let’s clear the air here today folks and give you the explanation of who we are, why we’re in Vancouver and how Nordica was born. It should only take 4 or 5 minutes here…

School in Sweden

Alrighty then. Let’s start with a  wee gander at these pictures:

Jakob on the right drinking Vodka, Cole next to him with something in a flask, an American dude and a wee fella’ from a town called Lycksele. It’s 3AM by the way and the suns still up..

Cole, Jakob, the wee fella from Lycksele, the lovely Therese and the American dude. Fun times.

Those drunkin’ party pictures were taken back in 2007 when Jakob and I met. Actually, when I met my lovely girlfriend Therese as well (she’s the girl in there eh).

This was from our graduation in Umeå, which is a university in Northern Sweden where we all met. We were all taking a masters program in business, and aside from partying a whole bunch and doing our damnedest to actually show up to class, the three of us all became high-fivin’ buddies.

That’s all well and good, but here’s a question I’m constantly asked: “Why the hell would you go to Sweden”? Great question! So why did I go to Sweden? I’m from 100 Mile House, which is splendid little village north of Kamloops and a far cry from Umeå, Sweden.

Well, this was back in 2006, and at the time my reasons for wanting to spend a year in Sweden went more or less went along these lines:

• Pretty cool scenery
• Free education (there’s no tuition for anyone in Sweden)
• Not a bad way to spend a year after my bachelors degree
• The education probably should be mentioned
• Smokin’ hot girls
• Why not?
• The program was in entrepreneurship which seemed pretty interesting
• I wanted to learn another language
• I just wanted to get away

So in a nutshell, those are a few reasons why I went. Another small influencer was probably that I had lived in Helsinki, Finland for a while back in 2003. I went to school there as well and while I was there, I had the chance to meander around that neck of the woods a wee bit, and I sort of fell in love with the place (the Nordic region). So, school seemed as perfect excuse as any to head back!

Application sent; application accepted; and off I go. Time to giver at a school in Umeå, Sweden.

Look north, my friends! Umeå is way up there, parallel with Yellowknife. It gets seriously cold there.

Getting Hammered with Jakob (Where we met)

So when the program in Umeå actually began in August of 2006, it was the first time I met Jakob. And let’s just clear the air here in case you haven’t met Jakob: He’s one quiet dude.

To give you some retrospect on why that is, let’s start with the fact he’s Finnish (not Swedish – he’s just lived in Sweden a shit load and his mother tongue is Swedish). If you’ve ever met a Finn, you know that they really appreciate silence. They would have no problem sitting in a room with 50 people in dead silence, and this culture is the sort that really only pipes up when it’s really necessary. Until you fire a few ‘adult pops’ in the ol’gullet, then you’ve got a none-stop-talking-Finnish-person, as was the case with Mr Jakob. So, he seemed like a pretty damn good guy for me to be around: A guy who would listen!

We first met at a student bar called Corona in September 2006 . I had been blazing through a few of the aforementioned wobbly-pops, and low and behold Brad-effin’-Pitt cruised on into the bar. What the hell was Mr. Brangalina It doing way up here? I had to ask.

“Brrrrrrraaaaaaaadddddddd!!!!!!!!!!”

“Forlåt, nej, jag heter Jakob” (Sorry, no, my name is Jakob)

“Ohhhhhhhhhhhhhh”

Turns out Jakob (that lucky prick) looks exactly like Brad Pitt, and I was having a delirious-intoxicated-stupid moment to think Brad Pitt was hanging out in a student bar in Northern Sweden.

But, that was about it. That’s where I met Jakob. After that, we continued our domination of the poopsies in Corona and continued afterward to the after-party.

Turns out though Jakob and I had every single class together for that year and we were sort of competitive with one another. Actually a whole lot of competitive. Whether it be my domination of him in classwork, my domination of him in a Swedish game called Kubb, my domination of him in bocce, my domination… you get the point – we were competitive (and I’m sure if he was writing this, he’d tell you the competitive domination was the other way around). But this competitiveness was a good thing for sure, and probably the foundation of our friendship.

Cole, the wee fella from Lycksele again, and Brad Jakob

This is bollé, a Swedish game like bocce. Cole dominated Jakob in this game…

The Years After Umeå

Alright, so you get the point if you’ve read to this point. I’m from a redneck town, Jakob’s a Finn, we met at school in Sweden and we both have backgrounds in business education. Big deal.

But what about after Umeå and why are we in Vancouver?

Well, after UmeÃ¥, Jakob and the horseshoes up his “you know where” got a sweet job in Stockholm. Literally right out of school. He could probably explain it better then me, but basically he worked as a website content guy for some government thingamajig. Something like that. But what this job allowed him to do was become a fucking all-star in photography and editing. If there was a photo-course in Sweden or a editing workshop to attend, he attended it. It was a dream-job. Maybe he’ll explain it more for all you folks, but basically he did this for about two years after UmeÃ¥.

My years after Umeå was basically a gong show that was comprised of job searches, moving, sleeping on laundry room floors, working at god awful restaurants, inflating a debt, living in villages of 50 people, not telling anyone where I was most of the time out of embarrassment, and becoming more and more frustrated with everything.

To break it down in a little,  here’s an abbreviated synopsis of my ‘moves’ from 2007 to now:

1. June 2007 from Umeå to 100 Mile House
2. September 2007 from 100 Mile House to Victoria
3. September 2007 from Victoria to Kelowna
4. October 2007 from Kelowna to Blue River (yes, Blue River)
5. December 2007 from Blue River back to 100 Mile House
6. March 2008 from 100 Mile House to Umeå, Sweden (yep, back to Umeå!)
7. May 2008 from Umeå, Sweden to Söderhamn, Sweden
8. June 2008 from Söderhamn, Sweden to Stockholm, Sweden
9. October 2008 from Stockholm, Sweden to 100 Mile House
10. December 2008 from 100 Mile House to North Vancouver
11. March 2008 from North Vancouver to Gastown

I think I got that right. So, Jakob was lovin’ life with a pimpin’ job in Stockholm, and I was nomading.

The key ingredient though for this whole nomadic post-Umeå adventure though was this: Therese, my girlfriend, was by my side the entire way. While I was jumping around from idea to idea, place to place, and job to job, she was straight as a frozen rope and didn’t fret or become freaked out by my million-ideas-at-once lifestyle.

Believe it or not, Therese stuck with me even when I looked like this. Yikes.

Here’s Nordica

“For the love of Peter, Paul and Mary! Get to the point of this whole post, Cole!” – I’m sure you’re feeling like that by now. So let’s wind this down folks.

Jakob had a rad job in Stockholm, and I had finally planted my feet in Vancouver with Therese. Calm, stability, happy times. But as I had been nomading, I was also knee-deep in photography the whole time. I had always loved photography because of my kick-ass photographer mother, so it was always hovering in the back-burner.

So when I moved to Gastown, I decided to start a photo blog. I figured a picture a day or something would be pretty sweet, and Jakob had been doing it for a while so those competitive juices started flowing again. I would have to dominate the Finn in photo blogging.

So I started the blog, and without even knowing it, my photography career began. Within a few months, I was doing headshots for people, had weddings on the go, was going to live blogging events, and – this was the part that absolutely blew my mind – people were actually paying me to do something that was part hobby / part passion / all fun. Sweet!

With that in mind, I figured may as well jump headfirst into the competitive shit and get a co-pilot. Enter Mr. Granqvist.

With some serious coaxing and a whole lot of manipulation (pictures of Vancouver really worked), he came in November of 2009. Awesome. Nordica was born.

Nordica Photography

So, there’s the background of ‘us’ and how we got here. Now, why “Nordica”? Well, we liked the name eh. Thought it sounded cool and I always had a vision of opening something similar to Corona (the bar in UmeÃ¥) and give it a jive name, such as Nordica.

But the name itself really connects back to where we met. Northern Sweden has a huge connection for us, and is really a reflection of what we try to achieve with photography. Keep it simple, keep it professional and just be ourselves. Just like our lifestyles back in Umeå.

That last bit is definitely important for us. While some photographers go on and on and on about ‘I became a photographer because I’m a dreaaaamer’ or ‘I call my photography company Beautiful Itty Bitty Cutesy Wootsy Footsteps’ or ‘bla bla bla’ – our story is just being us. Cut the bullshit, keep it simple and just be who we are. Nothing about us is made of fluffy bullshit and really, what you see is what you get.

There you go. That’s Nordica Photography and if you’d like to grab a pint one day and meet us, shoot us an email. We’re always game for meeting folks eh!

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