Now that we are no longer in daylight saving time, it is getting dark early, and there won't be many possibilities for daytime photography except for weekends. The dark season is upon us...
While I was returning from the workshop at Noordwijk, a colleague on the same bus to the train station asked: "They say it is a land of thousands of lakes, but how many lakes are there in Finland?"
I should have know, but only managed to say: "One hundred thousand." Later I checked this out, and I had been too modest.
The number of lakes depends on the definition, but if we take the mimimum size of a lake to be 0.05 hectares, then there are 187,888 lakes in Finland. Of these 56,000 are more than one hectare in size. (See the Finnish Wikipedia for more details.)
Anyway, today I walked around three of those 187,888 lakes, in the Luukki forests: Väärälampi, Mustlampi and Halkolampi. All of these are much larger than the miminum size of a lake in the definition, despite the word "lampi", pond, in the lake names.
Today it was clouded, and there were few autumn colors left, but it was nice to be out walking.
The same colleague who asked about the lakes asked also: "What do you do with all the photographs you take? Do you store them all and process them on the computer?"
I answered that I delete most of them, without going into details.
But here is my recipe for post-processing: Transfer the photographs to Aperture from the memory card using a workflow which stores them in a convenient location. Then go very fast through the photographs, and delete 90-95% of them during the first round. And then you may delete some more.
I rarely do any other post-processing besides deleting, except once in a while I adjust the exposure of a photograph if there is a real need for it.
During the dark season of the year I might shoot RAW and process the files in noise-reduction software, but so far there hasn't been a real need to do this. Almost always I use JPEG format, and try to get the photograph right in the camera.
In the last three months I have taken 31,000 photographs with the Panasonic LX5. And before the LX5 I used the LX3, taking 203,318 photographs with it until it got broken in a thunderstorm.
Speaking of photography, at TOP there is a posting written by Kirk Tuck, and he goes deeply into photography blogging and the reasons why gear-related postings generate so much feedback but other subjects go uncommented.
The big insight in the posting was that although the non-gear topics are seldom commented, reading them is an important daily ritual for many people. Well, I guess life (and photography) is so complicated that it often is hard to know what to say. Gear is so much easier to talk about.
And that goes for me too. I have often neglected to comment even though I have seen a beautiful photograph or an insightful posting. I'm indebted to Andreas, Markus, Mark, and all the other photography bloggers who are presenting such deep things to ponder.
On Wednesday I made a posting titled "Late autumn feelings", and then I was traveling for a few days. When I looked at the landscape on Saturday, it had changed as if a week or two had passed. Now it is very late autumn indeed.
I went for a long walk yesterday, taking some photographs. There is a little bit of autumn colors still left in trees, but not much. The landscape starts to be ready for winter.
Here is the last posting from the visit to Noordwijk (through Leiden), this time views of the urban environment.
Here are some more views of Noordwijk aan Zee, taken early in the morning, before sunrise. It was cloudy, and thus the color palette was limited, but I enjoyed the delicacy of it.
I attended an Open workshop at Grand Hotel Huis ter Duin which rises high above the shore in Noordwijk aan Zee.
The season starts in May and lasts to September, and then all the hotels are fully booked. But now it was different. I managed to go for a walk during daytime, but even then there were few people on the shore.
This is quite a place. I was overwhelmed with the scenery, and it was almost impossible to focus on anything, there was so much to see. Here are some impressions of the sea during the first day.
Today I managed to go for a walk just before sunset. It is getting late in the autumn.
The next few days I'll be traveling, to an Open workshop by the sea. So there will be a break in the postings here.
As yesterday, I didn't manage to go for a walk until late, this time together with our second youngest daughter, to a nearby park.
Soon it is that time of the year when it is dark when you commute to work, and dark when you come back home, and most of the day you are inside a building in artificial light. That gets depressing after a while.
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