I commuted by bicycle today, and it went fine, even though I got more tired than usually. I have been able to sleep two nights well, which helps a lot.
Yesterday evening I had a little walk, and it was a surprise how far advanced the summer is already, even though the weather has been cool and rainy. Lot of flowers had started blooming.
The photographs were taken on May 17th in Vaakkoi.
(Posting title is from the poem The Simulacra by D. Nurkse.)
The Panasonic LX100 has a sweep panorama function, in which you move the camera across the view and the camera takes a succession of photographs and generates a panorama out of the individual frames. Today I tested it out, and at first the results were disappointing, because for some reason the exposure changed in the middle of the series, and thus the resulting photographs were vertically striped.
Then I tried setting the initial exposure in the bright part of the view half-pressing the shutter button, moving the camera to the end of the panorama sequence, and then starting the exposure. This worked much better, and here you see the best of the resulting panoramas. The place is lake Tränuhals, in Meiko, and the view is about 180°.
Nothing to brag about, but reasonably good nevertheless. The size of the photograph is 8176 x 1920 pixels, plenty of details to look in the original file at Flickr.
(Posting title is from the poem Music by Juhan Liiv, translated by H.L. Hix and Jüri Talvet.)
I'm jumping ahead to July 18th 19th, when we walked for 4 1/2 hours in Malla Strict Nature Reserve, all the way to Kitsiputous, which one of the highest waterfalls in Finland. It was hot, over +25 °C, and almost no wind at all. Big biting insects were interested in the hikers.
I don't usually do panoramas, and the technical merit of this one is far from flawless, but I feel that this photograph hints at the open vistas all around us when we were walking on the Malla fells. The fells you see near the horizon, behind Kilpisjärvi lake, are part of Sweden.
The panorama was stiched from 22 portrait-orientation photographs in PTGui. These days some cameras have software which allows stitching panorama photographs straight in the camera, which might be rather nice to use in situations like this one.
Next, I'll return to the scheduled program with the postings, using photographs taken in Norway on July 17th 18th.
(Posting title is from the poem Beautiful Poetry by Camille Guthrie.)
I'm not really into panoramas, I'm rather square, but here is a panorama taken at lake Saaren-Musta on Saturday a week ago, walking there with the children to have picnic on a little island near the shore.
(Posting title is from the poem Beautiful Poetry by Camille Guthrie.)
This posting is not really about photography but instead about ice halos. Today we had them at daytime, caused by the sun, and at night from artificial lights.
The halos are generated by light reflecting from small ice crystals in the air. The first photos shows sun dogs, which are colored halos on both sides of the sun. The other photos show night-time halos (one of them is a panorama made from four photos). Actually, I'm not sure whether they are halos at all, or just light reflected from particles in the air.
Today Panasonic released firmware version 1.1 for the LX3. I installed it at once, and had then of course to test it. Although it was late, I went for a walk in the dark (except for the lights provided by mankind). Here are two panoramas, both stitched from three LX3 photos.
First one shows a construction site where the work was paused for the night. I lightened the foreground a bit in LightZone.
The second one shows some of the colours visible in the thin cloud cover over the city. The colors are quite near to how the eye saw them. I didn't do any postprocessing in LightZone for this one.
Today we went for a walk at Lake Myllyjärvi, which is the third lake in Espoo with the same name (there may be more, three I know of). Never been there before, so this was nice exploring.
I couldn't let be making a panorama of the lake. This was put together in PTGui from five vertical photos taken with the LX3. The size of the image is 6510 x 3064 pixels.
At the beginning it was very difficult to make any photos succeed. Perhaps it was the stress of the week, perhaps the light was too bright still. But when it got a bit later in the day, I started to feel that some photos will turn out well, and it was once again nice to use the camera.
And it so happened that the very last photos I took today were the best. At that point I was not much thinking about making photos, just doing it once in a while while thinking about other things.
I don't know what it is about these panoramas, but I like doing them. This time I had learned something new about the LX3. I was using manual focusing (hyperfocal), aperture priority, and exposure lock. And even though I got the sun in the image, I feel that the result is quite nice. A relaxing hobby, making of panoramas.
Yesterday we walked around Lake Kaitalampi, today we visited four different lakes: Kaitalampi, Halkolampi, Väärälampi and Mustlampi. In all, our walk took three and half hours, but we stopped in the middle to grill some sausages on an open fire. The weather was excellent today, some clouds but also sunshine, and temperature at about 15 degrees.
The photo shows a panorama of Lake Halkolampi, which is about half a kilometer from end to end.
Update: I replaced the panorama with a slightly corrected version where there are more midtones. I shot today 318 photos, of which a couple of dozen were worth preserving (although not great).
Today we went for a walk around the Lake Kaitalampi in Espoo. The route is partway only a slight path which goes up and down rock walls, but mostly it is quite nice walking, about 3-4 kilometers in all (it took us two hours).
The weather was nice, cool enough for walking, and - most important - it was not raining. The sun even showed up at one point. There is a nature park on the other side of the lake, so the forest is quite untouched there.
The autumn leaf color was not yet visible in a large amount, only a bit of it there and there. But next weekend may be already in full season.
Update: I forgot to note that this panorame was made with PTGui, because for some reason DoubleTake did not work correctly. I had to do some tuning in PTGui, but the result is not all bad. The biggest problems is changing exposure, but with Canon Ixus 400 there is no manual control of exposure.
We went today to Jakomäki, a suburb in east Helsinki, known for its forests and marshes (or if not known, it should be).
We had a long walk in the Jakomäki forests, nearby the nature reserve at the Slåttmossen marsh. Due to the big road (nr 7) nearby, it is not so quiet as for example in Nuuksio, but the forest is quite nice, and you almost forget that there is a suburb nearby.
There are several ponds in the area, with clear water in them. This photo shows a panorama view of one of the ponds.
Today was a day for some exercise: 1.5 hours of commuting by bicycle, and 1.5 hours walking with the family during the evening. During the afternoon commute back home, I took a couple of photos with my Nokia E90 southwards over the Laajalahti bay, towards Otaniemi and Keilaniemi.
I tried putting the photos together into a panorama with PTGui and DoubleTake, and both applications had some trouble. It seems that the moving clouds cause problems for the panorama software. Perhaps a better result is possible with some manual work in PTGui, but I'm not sure it is worth the effort.
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