Lavonardo

This week’s Macro Day challenge is lengthy indeed, and concerns photographing something found on the ground.

My take is the attached image of an unidentified small mushroom. Might be edible. And likely is not lethal. But a single piece of fungus does not really make for a meal. Hence, I left it standing in the yard.

This week’s photo friday challenge is ordinary.

In Helsinki, there’s hardly a more ordinary largish bird than a seagull (with the small birds, the pick goes to the less and less common sparrow).

This is one of the images I took when testdriving the 70-300 zoom lens, and was satisfied enough to purchase it.

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.

This week’s thursday challenge is tools.

Faced with the cornucopia of powertools, screwdrivers and the like in the entries - here’s something completely different.

Tools for blogging: a glassed-in still pleasantly warm balcony, a moleskine notebook (lately under-utilized), comfortable banana-rattan chair and lynch the macbook pro.

This week’s photo thursday challenge is about storms.

Since this summer was about as boring as they get, storms-wise, I’m recycling an old picture from 2006.

While the set of crepuscular rays breaking through cloud cover looks dramatic, the gathering storm actually fizzled soon after the picture was taken, and no rain fell.

This week’s Macro Day challenge is logo.

I’ve used Apple’s logo in the past rounds (though in different challenges), so figured it’s time to try out something new. The selection fell on the long-gone Infocom, whose rounded-out logo is instantly recognizable.

This is the first time that war on photographers is waged on a location I’ve visited.

Even though photography at the Swan Point Cemetery in Providence, Rhode Island, is forbidden, the abuse heaped on the visitor who took a photo of H.P. Lovecraft’s tombstone is an astounding example of good customer service.

I visited the location in 2006, and took no pictures. Mainly out of inconvenience as my backpack was buried in the backseat of the car.

[ via boingboing. ]

It’s time to hop back on the photography challenges after a lazy summer.

And after the photo thursday participation, it’s time for the first Macro Day challenge in a while.

With the purchase of a real macro lens, a 100mm Canon, there’s no hiding behind equipment any more.

This week’s Macro Day challenge is wet. And today’s weather was just optimal to arrange for conditions, it kept raining for hours.

My take is a traditional “droplets on a leaf”. The nice bokeh is provided by the shallow depth of field used.

Walked through the galleries of the Anton Corbijn exhibition in Tennispalatsi art museum today.

It’s not a big show, just one floor is used for four selections, and a minimalistic video exhibit.

Three of the selections are of the expected kind - raw, over-exposed and grainy images of famous people. The image Clint Eastwood to the right was one of my favorites, but by no means the only one I wouldn’t gracing a wall at the HQ. Too bad there wasn’t a proper catalogue available in the museum shop (and the two books stocked were either very specific or flimsy, contentwise).

Photo thursday is back from a long summer vacation.

Thes fall season begins with a challenge on incomplete.

My take on the subject is the attached photograph, of Guggenheim Museum in New York, that was undergoing a significant renovation project in the spring of 2007.

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.

I’m late for the second week’s ABC Wednesday again.

And recycling an image used previously in a Macroday challenge.

No matter what, this was the most appropriate image for the “B”, after all, the ball in the picture is pretty formidably focused on.

The ABC Wednesday has started its third round, and now’s a good time to jump aboard.

The alphabet starts with the “A”, obviously, and the for the subject I’ve chosen the piece of Amazon in the corner of my living room - a 190 liter aquarium.

And based on the image, it’s rather clear that the aquarium needs a bit of redecoration, de-algaeing of the front glass and a couple of bigger fish.

(And while this is an ABC wednesday image - I’m still missing the magic dust needed to be able to include it on the original blog. Maybe this will happen in time for “B”. Maybe not.)

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.

Been playing with my brand new 100mm macro lens on a couple of days, but haven’t yet had a perfect photography moment.

Usually the wind is to blame, while the autofocus mechanism of the lens is indeed good, it cannot cope with rapidly swaying flowers and especially insects in them.

The attached shot of a bumblebee is perhaps the finest thus far. The bug itself is nice and sharp, the flowe it is walking on is pretty much in focus as well, and the background nicely blurred by the narrow depth of field.

Tomorrow the lens ought to get a lot more exercise, as it’s time for the irregularly scheduled trip to Korkeasaari.

This week marks the end of the first half of the photo thursdays of 2008. This week’s challenge is an image brought forward by Beirut’s song Sunday Smile (links to the song and video in the challenge page).

I didn’t find the song too upbeat or joy-inducing, so my participation is this smile-less lizard of an unknown species, who clearly is not having the time of his life.

My participation to this week’s Macro Day challenge is late for a couple of reasons, the biggest among them a failed attempt to upgrade the equipment - the shops downtown seemed all to be sold out of the 100mm Canon macro lens.

Nonetheless, my attempt to rise to the challenge of condiment lies above, had to check out the definition of the word from wikipedia, and happily enough, this collection of sampler bottles of strong chili-sauces fits the bill perfectly.

This week’s Photo Friday challenge is religion.

My take is the attached image of a Greek-Orthodox church in Vyborg. The photo is snapped with the n95, and the shortcomings of the phone as a camera are not at all apparent in the image.

This week’s Photo Thursday challenge heads for abstract waters once again with this week’s topic: whisper.

My take is one of the oddest discoveries recently when walking around Pikku Huopalahti with a camera. Despite the waves of nostalgia inspired by this loose piece of Brio railroad, I failed to heed the whisper to take it home - thus doing my part in not spoiling some kid’s future efforts in being the railroad tycoon of the living room carpet.