Category: Photo

Signs of Summer

Last week was mostly flu and occasional fever. Managed a careful 7k jog on Saturday with newly bought Camelbak Fairfax (45eur + postage through amazon.de) . The Finnish retailers (including those at the HCR expo) seem to think that asking 69.90euros is just fine - no thanks!

The Finnish summer is cold but short - the last few days have finally been +20C or warmer. Quite similar to LA in late February.

Those mosquitoes were all hovering in a bunch, usually quite close to a tree branch. Took a lot of photos with a 200mm/F4 lens but with manual focus and shallow depth of focus the yield is low. Not sure what stage in their life-cycle they are in, I don't think they hover in one place and look like this later in the summer. Anyone who is a mosquito-lover care to explain? 🙂

Winter Wonderland

I took some astro-photos on Sat-Sun night, and then these "winter wonderland" pictures on Sunday morning. -15 C is not cold or unpleasant if you dress well and keep moving and generating heat. If you stand still or the wind is blowing then anything colder than -10 C is miserable. Shot with the 17-40/4L and a circular-polarizer(*) (from Dealextreme), which produces very nice deep blue skyes, and a gradient in the wider shots from almost white to dark blue. Something to practice with more in the future.

Astrophotos will appear when I have time to process them. Also stay tuned for "yellow submarine" fresh out of the mould!

Nerdy Physics Note:
(*) There's no such thing as a "circular-polarizer", in the sense that a single optical element would only pass circularly polarized light (AFAIK), and what they sell in stores as "circular-polarizers" should of course be called a "linear polarizer followed by a quarter-wave plate", but I guess "circular-polarizer" is just shorter and easier. The quarter-wave plate is there because the autofocus system on many cameras uses polarizing beam-splitters for different paths of the beam, so a simple linear polarizer would sometimes cause the autofocus to fail.

Helsinki Natural History Museum

After almost three years of renovations the Helsinki Natural History Museum re-opened its doors in May 2008. The museum has free entry on Thursday afternoons between 16 and 18 which we decided to take advantage of. It is housed in a 1913-built building originally used as a Russian school, then as a the Finnish Officer Cadet School, before taken over by the University of Helsinki and used as a museum. The English wikipedia page is a bit short, but the Finnish page has more information.

From my childhood I mainly remember the impressive stairs, and the two-headed calf. They're both still there!