Helsinki - city landscapes

Window, originally uploaded by jiihaa.

A Taste of Finland, originally uploaded by jiihaa.

Keep clean, originally uploaded by jiihaa.

Today I was in Helsinki again, in a meeting of the steering group for the classification of academic publication channels (Julkaisufoorumin ohjausryhmä). The day was clouded, and there were once again some problems in finding a parking place near the meeting place.

In any case, here are three photographs from today. Of the first I might comment something related to the use of HDR, but that may keep to a later posting. In the third one we have two synchronous walkers and a sign saying to keep clean.

The second photograph contains a sign saying "A Taste of Finland", and I just must to point to the Newsweek report which tells that Finland is the best country in the world. Who would have guessed?

Well, being Finns, we are eagerly tearing the report into pieces, finding problems everywhere. The statistics about education are misleading, the analysis is poorly done, there may be basic arithmetic mistakes in the analysis, and in any case it is of no use, Finland will never be an attractive country for foreigners. And so on, ad nauseam.

Well, to some more positive topics - reviews/previews of the Panasonic LX5. Namely, there is one from Sweden, and one from Australia. Both of the reviews/previews have weaknesses, but the camera does show some promise.

Get rid of HDR?

Field, originally uploaded by jiihaa.

Forest, originally uploaded by jiihaa.

Mark Hobson posted an excellent HDR photograph of which it is hard to see it is HDR. What a great thing! In contrast to the usual use of HDR, this is genius. (HERE is the photograph. Sorry for forgetting the link!)

One often sees HDR images which are unbelievably unnatural. And one thing that often is missing from HDR photographs is real honest deep black - it provides the ground for the colors.

I wonder will we get a new source of photograph "badness" when automatic HDR functionality starts to commonly appear in cameras. I shudder when thinking about this.

Of course, we, probably will get used to such gimmicks, similar to auto exposure, autofocus, zoom lenses, selectable ISO, etc. etc.

And this leads me to a suggestion to the camera manufacturers: might we have cameras which have less dynamical range than we currently do, and might this be a good thing for photographers?

Nowadays, I try to get some black in my photographs, because I feel that it makes the photographs more realistic, more actual and immediate. Sometimes this requires underexposure by two stops or even more.

Here are two examples. The first is of course one where one doesn't need HDR in any case. And one can think of trying to make an HDR photograph of the scene the second photograph - but would it be any good?