Lavonardo

Spent a couple of hours watching fireworks on friday.

The Töölönlahti park was packed (official estimates are around 120′000 attendees), but not too tight, it was possible to walk around pretty much the whole time. As long as the ringside positions were not concerned. Watched the first bout from the Hesperia park, and the rest much closer to Töölönlahti.

The event was the finnish championships of pyrotechnics, and the five participating teams had used a lot of care and money to put up semi-spectacular displays in the dark sky.

According to passersby, this year’s competition returned to using music in the background - last year’s having been all about loud bangs. The selection was rather predictable, with a surprise use of Tina Turner’s Simply the best, most of the teams used metal - Nightwish to be exact, three of the participants relied on the finnish band.

Photography-wise the subject turned out to be challenging indeed as I expected. The hit rate of bearable images amongst all of those shot was in single figure percentages. And even there the artistic allowances in quality have to be more forgiving than usual.

I shot with the S3, handheld, using exposure times between 250 ms and one second. This brought in a lot of jitter, as the aging imagestabilizer was unable to provide much assistance.

A couple of pictures did turn out all right, but most were just colored blurs on a pitch-black background. And some images do not really resemble fireworks at all, rather than things picked up by the Hubble telescope on a bad hair day.

Next time demands much better preparations. And scoping out a good location where a tripod can be used without putting it in the way of too many drunken kids.

Nelonen organizes the annual finnish fireworks championships today.

I’ve chronically missed the event for years in a row, and definitely aim to see the finest domestic pyrotechnics today.

Capturing fireworks with a camera is a new task, but the plan is to catch a few. With the more easily packed S3. I’ve no idea how packed the shores of Töölönlahti will be, and the lack of a tripod will anyway serve as an equalizer between the cameras.

Spent friday evening on Senaatintori, enjoying the free concert put up by Helsingin Juhlaviikot. The subject was the year 1968, and covering the songs of the year were a bunch of finnish vocalists, singing to a well-stocked house band.

Walked in as the last of the warm-up bands, Eternal Erection, was finishing its set. The intermission before the main event was considerably brightened by a reel of snippets from Helsingin Sanomat running on screens next to the stage. The reel consisted not only of news (the occupation of Czechoslovakia, assassinations of King and Kennedy and sports featured prominently) but nostalgic ads from forty years ago also got their fifteen seconds of fame.

The concert kicked off predictably. Tipe Johnson’s (off Leningrad Cowboys) rendition of Steppenwolf’s Born to be wild was faithful to the original and not at all a bad start.

The artists changed quickly on stage, and alternated between individual songs and medleys.

The song selection (of which there seems to be no official set list available) was picking the cream of the crop of the year, and with a couple of exceptions consisted of familiar takes.

My favorites were the Zeppelin’s Good times, bad times, the Who-medley (Pinball wizard, Pictures of Lily and See me, feel me) and Rolling Stones’ Jumpin’ Jack Flash and Sympathy for the Devil.

The latter Stones’ piece was sung by Maya Paakkari, an artist unknown thus far, but based on her output (also sung Piece of my Heart) definitely worth of further investigation.

By far the biggest production values were used on Fredi’s Kolmatta Linjaa. Ismo Alanko was accompanied by some thirty members of the Cantores Minores on stage, and the rendition was somewhat unorthodox.

Marzi Nyman’s take on Hendrix classics (All along the Watchtower and Crosstown Traffic) was inspring, but seemingly too long and boring for some audience members. I figure the loudest singalongs happened with Mrs. Robinson and the final duet of Paula Koivuniemi and Mike Monroe of Hey Jude. The sole encore was the only song performed by the original artist from forty years ago - Eero Raittinen’s Vanha Holvikirkko was a spine-tingling finale in the quickly darkening Helsinki night.

The conditions were pretty much optimal. The weather was warm and almost windless. The crowd large and milling, but not packed like sardines. Drunken kids, always a plague on Night of the Arts events, mostly absent.

My n95 is still out of action (supposedly news of its condition should arrive next week), and the loaner phone’s basic 1 megapixel camera was not going to do well at all in the twilit conditions, hence the lack of pictures.

Noux (or Nuuksio, as it’s known in finnish) is the nearest national park to Helsinki. It was established in 1994, and embarrassingly enough it took me fourteen years to visit it. The day spent there was pleasant indeed, and I’m willing to bet that the next visit will happen with a much shorter interval.

The day was pretty much clouded over. Which was good temperature-wise, but not so good when it comes to photography. But it didn’t rain at all, which was a definite bonus.

There are three paths of varying length in the park, but we pretty much ignored all of them, and just walked randomly (unlike me, the others were veterans of the park). The lake highlands were good for variety - from trampling through mossy marshland to crossing faster by walking on the crest of a cliff.

Didn’t spot the emblem of the park, the rarely sighted flying squirrel, but saw my first ever red-throated divers (that’d be kaakkuri, the closest relative of kuikka, in finnish). Also sighted and shown here: plenty of lingonberries, fancy looking lichen, and a really big and bright green grub.

My Cup of T is a blog-savvy new t-shirt shop in downtown Helsinki.

Which is so going to get checked out soon.

Missed the annual Hiroshima anniversary on Töölönlahti this year completely.

So no pictures of pieces of styrofoam holding candles that sail into the dusk this time around.

As noted in yesterday’s macro-photography posting, spent a couple of hours today in Korkeasaari, the Helsinki Zoo.

The weather was pleasant - cloudy but warm, but not warm enough to cause the animals to go lethargic.

Which was good, since I aimed to take plenty of photos on the island.

Exercised the telezoom mostly, and used the macro lens only in the couple of buildings housing terrariums.

On my previous trip two years ago the tigers and leopards were the stars of the show, both growling in their enclosures while walking around lean and hungry. This time they both were extremely sluggish, both of them confined to just lying around in the rear regions. Fortunately the lesser cats put up a good show instead. Korkeasaari is famous for its program that’s provided lots of snow leopards for other zoos, and the himalayan cats were quite active - walking and pouncing in the cliffs of their large cage. Lynx is another cat that’s usually well-hidden, happened upon a trio of them in plain sight.

The other highlight of the visit was the selection of frogs in the Amazonia-house. This year being dedicated to amphibians, it was nice to see multiple species up close and personal. While the south american poison arrow frogs can’t be beaten in their color scheme, I was quite impressed by the camouflagy abilities of the vietnamese moss frog.

Didn’t spot any major new arrivals amongst the animals, apart from an eurasian hobby falcon (that’s nuolihaukka in finnish) that was being nursed to health. The body of the bird was surprisingly small, and it seemed to be not thoroughly enjoying its confinement.

All in all snapped more than a hundred photos, which will be flickred in due course, this post has just a skimming off the top of the animals mentioned - there was plenty more available: including a very playful otter for the lutraphobic, an icecream-eating squirrel and a kangaroo in quite an inappropriate pose.

Meh.

Björk just cancelled her open air concert on thursday because of problems with her voice.

Didn’t have a ticket, but was quite prepared to loiter outside the arena to listen to the music.

Blinked twice when the Helsinki metro rolled in to the station today.

The traditionally thoroughly orange cars had been replaced by replicas from New York and London.

Helsingin Sanomat in running train-sized mobile ads, and this caused quite a few doubletakes by fellow passengers.

Sadly, the insides of the cars did not emulate the originals.

Wah.

I went away for a single day, and news kept piling up in Finland:

• Nuevo Latino’s staff proves that cluelessness, when combined with arrogance, is never good PR for a restaurant.
• A list of alleged finnish Stasi-collaborators (commonly known as Tiitisen Lista) has to be made available to media. Probably it’ll be a long road, through multiple court cases, before it actually really sees the light of day.
• Symbian, Nokia’s foundation for its S60-series smartphones goes open source.
• A Swedish school sacks a teacher on account of him playing in a metal band.

It’s been seven years since my first live exposure to Neil Young. Seven really long years, as I thought the gig was in the summer of 2003.

The Ontario-born musician returns to Helsinki in August, and I seriously hope to attend the show.

It’s pleasantly dry, sunny and warm outside. As a contrast to many other mayday eves that have been celebrated in horizontally zooming sleet.

Time to head back out. Not downtown though, that level of chaos is not appreciated.

Might it be spring already, despite the ground persistently being greyish brown instead of verdant green?

• No frost on the ground in the mornings. Check.
• First utepils. Nope, not yet, though today seemed mighty attractive.
• The idea of buying new sneakers comes and goes. Check.
• Ice cream eaten outdoors. Nope.
• First miniskirt. Nope, but that’s probably just on account of badly chosen routes.
• Seagulls have arrived. Check, they are plentiful indeed.
• Skateboarders assume control of their usual territories. Check.
• Face-to-face NGO people assume control of their usual territories. Check, though the numbers are limited.
• First wagtail sighted. Check, saw multiple today.
• Pages upon pages of ice hockey speculation in the newspapers. Foul ball, the championships are organized post-vappu this year.
• First bumblebee. Check, seemed to be very groggy, though.

Spring it is. Though the criteria is met with the narrowest of margins.

Yeah, it would seem that the oddities of the 2007-08 winter never cease.

Easter is white, whereas christmas was mainly green.

And that’s not a jolly reference to the neighbourhood drunkard, but to the unheralded arrival of Lush to Finland.

No company that names its products after fictional bands in Nick Hornby’s books can be disrespected at all.

And having been a user of Sonic Death Monkey for months, I can assure that the combination of all-natural chocolate, coffee and lemon is indeed pleasant. And long-lasting, so there’s no immediate need to head into the shop in the Iso Omena-mall.

Been one of the less-than-überachieving weeks. And that’s shown here in the blog as well. Just haven’t been able to summon the energy to write anything sensible.

Attended the first scandinavian Ignite-session on friday. Ignite is an O’Reilly-initiated variant of pecha kucha, a session where presenters have five minutes, and a steady tick of a slide per fifteen seconds. Nothing more, nothing less. Rather merciless, if you forget what the segue to the next slide is supposed to be.

The occasion was organized in Dubrovnik lounge and the location turned out to be pretty good. There were very few empty seats and no massive crowds milling around the door being denied entry.

Got in ten minutes after the kickoff, just in time to see the warm-up act, a fifteen minute bout of standup-comedy. The set consisted of nicely self-deprecating humor that drew heavily from the artists finnish-swedish background.

The seven presentations were of variable quality - both technically and topically. Some showed the highlights of Keynote’s abilities, some relied on plain text. The subjects ranged nicely from car tuning for geeks to entrepreneurial collaboration via a rapid-fire introduction to the agile software development method.

The next show is planned for late spring, and having been reasonably pleased with this session, plan to attend.

Woo. On the double.

George R.R. Martin will be Finncon 2009 (Helsinki, 10-12.7.) Guest of Honor!

As will Alastair Reynolds.

Hopefully the former will have published A Dance With Dragons by then. And should the book actually emerge this year, a finnish translation would not be an impossible target for the con.

And the latter ought to have regained his feet after the literary disaster that was Absolution Gap. Haven’t read any recent Reynolds’ books, but have Pushing Ice on the shelf, so the return to the category of “pleasant authors” will be validated soon enough.

And speaking of conventions with an impressive set of guests of honor - Orbital 2008, this year’s british eastercon, is hard to beat. A single representative of the Neil Gaiman / China Mieville / Charles Stross-triplet would be plentiful, let alone all three of them.