Berries

I had to drop by at work to take care of something in the morning. I got the job done and was heading back home at around 10 a.m. At 10:30 I was on my way to the wilderness. I picked a bucketfull of blueberries and half a bucket of cloudberries. For my photoproject I took a few pictures while I was picking berries:

My butterflyspot didn't let me down:
A slightly different shot of a pine cone:
This butterfly seemed to love my backpack:
The osprey came to check me as I walked towards the nesting tree:
There appeared to be some birds in the nest:
Cloudberries:

All in all, a nice day and a good trip.

Tired but not sleepy

Do you know the feeling? When you stay awake for a long enough time, you become so tired that you cannot get to sleep. I know it sounds crazy, but that's how it goes. I'm in that state at the moment. I've been up way too long and when I tried to go to sleep a moment ago, I sleep just would not come. This character from a children's tv show used to be a sure sign that it was time to go to bed when I was a kid. Maybe seeing mr. Sandman will make me sleepy:



Good night and sweet dreams to everyone who might be reading this.

Yearning for summer

All of a sudden I felt a strong yearning to get under a palm tree. I'd love to have a rum cola in my hand and feel the sandy beach and the heat of the sun. Somewhere in the caribbean would be nice. But since I don't have any spare time from work and no money either, I have to make do with the feeling created by a song from some years ago:

At moss level

As the rest of the family headed of to visit some friends yesterday, I packed my backpack with my camera, 50mm lens, a bottle of water and some mosquito repellent. I also grabbed with me a bucket and a lid for it. My idea was to spend a little time at the swamp, pick some cloudberries and then come back home for a nap before heading off to work for the night. At the swamp I walked around, picking berries here and there. Approximately 1/3 of the berries were ripe, so picking them was a rather slow process. There is not much point in picking raw berries, they are hard and completely tasteless, so I left the red ones alone and grabbed only the ripe yellow ones. I'll go back for the rest later when they are ready. If somebody else gets to them before me, so what? The person picking them has earned them just for going to the trouble to get to them.

While walking along with my nose in the moss, I had a great opportunity to take some different type of pictures than usually for my project. Here are the days pics:
I must say I am very pleased with the days walkabout. I got pictures I needed and were long overdue for my project and a bucketfull of cloudberries. The only downside of the trip was that my ½ liter water bottle was much too small. It was 25 degrees, sun shining down and because of the mosquitos and horseflies, I had to keep my camo jacket on and my water consumption went sky high in a flash.

All of the above pictures were taken with a 50mm f 1.8 lens. Far too often I myself and many others I know think of "nature photography" as something that requires a lot of money to get long lenses. I think we should just remember to keep our eyes open as we move along, there is a lot to see in nature at a very close level, and photographing it all does not necessitate long lenses and big bucks. Just stick your nose down into the moss and see what comes up.

Into the wild, at last

Today, in the late afternoon, I managed to get out into the wild again. Nea, my five year old daughter tagged along. At first I was a bit dubious of taking her with me, since I was planning on going all the way to the swamp. I doubted if a little girl could walk that far in rather tough terrain. We parked the car at the end of the dirt road as usual, and proceeded on down the path that follows a clearing cut into the forrest and leads to the edge of the swamp. As we reached the swamp, I think both of of us were a little doubtfull if a little girls small boots would be sufficient to get her thru the wetlands, but as we got past the toughest part, we had a great time walking around, observing nature and even taking a few pictures. As we stopped at my hide, I was happy to see that even after a month of inactivity, it was still in place and in good condition. As we headed back home, Nea told me that she enjoyed our trip a lot and wanted to come along again sometime in the future. The day's pictures:

Rainy day things to do

I got home from night shift in the morning. I had planned on going out and getting some pictures, but the weather forced a change in plans. Rain that started during the night seemed to continue steadily and everything looked rather gray and dull. Not really the optimal weather for photography. In a way it would have some documentary value as rain is as essential part of nature as any, but my project needs pics with more vivid lighting conditions, at least at the moment. Or maybe it's all just my lack of vision and skill speaking, but in any case, I stayed snugged in tight at home.

I decided to make the most of my time indoors and sat down in front of the tv, watching the usual crap that comes out of it and programs that I had for some reason or another decided to save on our digital receiver. I could take it all of an hour and then I had to find something else to do. I started going thru pictures that I had downloaded from memorycards into my computers "sort and file later" -file. Most of the pictures are just basic family snapshots, but they all have a significant value in the sense that they all contain memories of a situation, event or happening that I have felt the need to document for later times. There are a surprisingly large number of pictures in the file. I guess being lazy earlier got me back ten fold, as usual.

Writing my blog, I decided to try and be a little lazy once again. I tried google translator to do my blog for me, or at least to translate it from the original finnish to english. The result was dissappointing. I know my old english teacher, dr. Hendrickson would strangle me for all the mistakes I make now, (all are result of not having to use english as much as I would like) but google really hit the bottom with this one. The "translation" lost a significant amount of meaning and put finnish words that it didn't know in to the ready text as is. I feel confident in writing my blog as before, first in finnish and then with a day or two of delay, in english as well. Writing the text myself seems much faster than trying to correct the gibberish the translating software was able to produce.

After a long break

It's been quite some time since my last post. The reason (or excuse) is that I have been busy re-doing the bedrooms in our house. In the middle of it all, I haven't had the energy to give a thought to computers or the net, much less blogging. A little time away from the net felt pretty good, sometimes it is just time to concentrate on something other than a keypad and screen. There were moments that made me feel like what you get from listening to this song:


Not so much the lyrics, but rather the general feeling that comes from the music. This held especialy true to the couple of days that I spent wallpapering.

During the past month, I did manage to take a few pictures. Nothing spectacular, but I took them anyway and at least I got to get some feel for my new camera.

These birdies I managed to photograph at lake Lappalanjärvi, just a 15 minute drive away:
Then it was time to celebrate my mothers birthday. Quite a few people showed up and the party was a success, eventhough the rain and cold wind tried to make a garden party a not so great idea. For the group picture we managed to get everybody except me, since I was behind the camera and tried desperately to get our kids to look the right way, without any success:
A friend of mine, Jussi, dropped by and took a picture of me. I was amazed how fast the whole process was. While I was changing into my camo outfit, Jussi had set up his lighting system in the small spot of forrest just behind my backyard. All that was left to do was sit down on my backpack, and snap, snap, snap, a few quick shots and we were done. It's obviously easy, when you know your system. Jussi is a great guy, and I feel lucky to have gotten to know him and now I got to see what his type of photography is about. An enlightening experience.

After our little photoshoot, we called up another photographer and headed into town for a cup of coffee, some talk on photography and the world in general and a small walk around the town, snapping pictures of this, that and whatever.
In the top picture, photographer "virus" is showing of his surfing moves behind our town hall. He spotted a loose cement block and decided it was time to show a balancing act. In the lower picture a young lady, out in town with her friends for her bachelorette party is showing us some aerobics moves.