Photo of the Day #80: Cloud Number Nine

Lately I've been a bit critical of shooting just clouds, as I've felt that they aren't sufficient by themselves as subjects of photographs. However coming across this photo shot in August 2004 I have to disagree with my current self. Clouds are so malleable and can display almost any color and most vividly. This photo reminds me of a Michelangelo painting. And all I did was be there, point and shoot.

Photo of the Day #79: Flying High

On the theme of colors, today's color is orange. Sometimes subject matters don't need to be very special to make an impact. This silhouette of trees with a fine line of an airplane flying over a sunset just seemed to work. Nothing much in line of photography technique, just the magic of the moment.

Photo of the Day #78: Blue Hue

It is amazing how colors can look different in different countries and circumstances. It was definitely so on my trip to Crete in 2005. The sun in Greece seems to shine a hundred times brighter and clarify everything. The Cretan architecture has a lot of white and blue hues, which somehow emphasize the blueness of the clear skies.

This blue orthodox church was on top of the village, up a steep slope, with a magnificent vista of the Mediterranean opening on us. I didn't go for the traditional post car picture with the sea looming behind the church. I decided to see what the interplay of the blue hues of the sky and the church would look like.

Photo of the Day #77: How Green is My Valley

For an Englishman today's photo might look just a bit boring, as this sight can be easily be found there. However for me I was forever amazed by just different England looked to Finland. What is exotic for Brits in Finland is mundane to Finns, and vice versa.

It just might be that this is a slightly saturated version of the original, but even there the depth of the color green was something out of this world. 

For the life of me I can't recall the exact location of the picture, but as I've marked the image England, I can guess that it's not from Scotland or Wales, where I also visited on the same trip (June 2004).

Photo of the Day #76: Streams of Light

Nighttime shots can be challenging, but when they work, they're just as rewarding. They're very often artificially lit, which poses all kinds of problems. In this photo the main source of illumination was from the street lamps, which were much lighter than the rest of the image. 

One option would have been to crop them off, but in this case the sky lit by the dwindling light of the setting sun would have disappeared from view. So I chose to include the lamps, which in the end became a strength in the photo rather than a weakness.

With the constant stream of cars it was easy to form  two white streams of light from the lights of the incoming cars and two red streams from receding cars. At least I'm quite happy with this.

Photo of the Day #75: A Lone Boat

At my 2008 trip around Ireland I saw many beautiful sight of nature and stunning buildings. However sometimes one sees things of beauty that are a bit more modest at first glance.

This rather run down looking fishing boat was waiting for better days on the shore. I guess most people would have just walk past it, but I saw something else. I did apply a Photoshop filter on the picture afterwards to emphasize the harsh colors, but even without it the picture caught my attention.

Photo of the Day #74: Tall Trees

Even though I take my fair share of panoramas, I'm seldom really happy with the results. It's quite demanding to fill an ultra long photo with truly interesting details, so one ends up just playing the "look at what I can do" trick.

On one sense this is an example of that, but not in the normal sense. My parents had rented a summer cottage in 2008 and while I was visiting them there, I was impressed by the tall pines right be the lake shore. The space was so cramped that I couldn't get the proper distance away from the trees to have them fully in the picture. So I decided to do something different and took a vertical panorama.

I do have to say that I am a bit bothered by the composition and the distortions at the edges, but the picture does look very unique this way.

Photo of the Day #73: Swamped in

The shoreline of Iidesjärvi lake is quite fluid, in a very literal way. In the spring the boggy ground swells into  patchy lake by the melting snow and leaves the trees stranded.

Even though everything is very brown and grey, the combination of the evening sun with the reflection from the lake make for quite a  unique photograph.

Photo of the Day #72: A Bridge Over Murky Waters

My first chance to be a passenger of a small (general aviation) aeroplane was in 2006. Unfortunately the weather was pretty awful, so all of the pictures turned out quite bleak. However some, like this one, looked nice regardless.

The trip was from Pirkkala airport to Hämeenlinna and then back. It's quite different to be on a plane which flies over just a couple of hundred meters over the ground at the lowest, compared to the several kilometers up of a commercial jet.

Photo of the Day #71: Lynx Lynx

I have seen this site a gazillion times and now that I don't see it much at all anymore, I can appreciate it a bit better.

The Ilves Hotel  (Lynx Lynx in Latin) is a landmark in Tampere, as it one of the tallest building in the city center and is purportedly the fanciest hotel in the city. Even with the grey concrete facade, it has its rugged beauty...

Photo of the Day #70: Tramway to Go

Continuing on the theme of Bordeaux, today's photo is of its tramway tracks. The tramway is quite a prominent feature of the city and the silently gliding Citadis trams make the city center surprisingly peaceful, especially as many of the streets are for pedestrians and trams only.

The paved streets and the highly ornamental facades create a highly personal look to the city. Apparently it has been an important factor in rejuvenating the city center.

Photo of the Day #69: Peekaboo

It's always hard to photograph someone statues, as one faces the question "what makes this mine, and not just a reproduction someone else's art". These two ladies playing peekaboo somehow pass that test for me.

While living in the south of France, we visited Bordeaux, the state capital of our adoptive state Aquitaine. The city, while not actually being that large (the size of Espoo, our current home), has an incredible history, which has resulted in a myriad of impressive parks, buildings and especially statues.

Place des Quinconceshe is the largest city square in Europe and the The Girondists monument at the center acts as a beacon for all local residents. The ladies are probably a familiar sight to everyone who passes by, but I wonder whether they've really looked at them?

There's just something alluring in their gazes. I guess they are meant to represent the fallen republicans during the French revolution. Is her face meant to portray courage under immense brutality, or something completely different. We'll never know, but we're certainly left wondering.

P.S. This might be December 27th (or 28th)

Photo of the Day #68: Waiting to Unmoor

At our summer cottage in Kirkkonummi we had a small boat at moored at the Humaljärvi lake. The lake isn't much in the way of pretty beaches and even the water is a bit murky, but the lake itself had character aplenty.

There were several steep cliffs jutting just across the lake and the lake was wide enough to create a sense of space. We managed to take some trips by our row boat, but in retrospect more would have been better...

Photo of the Day #67: Tammerkoski Rocks

I've finally finished my Copenhagen series (at least for now). This photo was shot in September 2009 on a sunny early Autumn day by the Hämeensilta bridge, in Tampere.

The bridge is the main thoroughfare (at least for pedestrians and buses) across the Tammerkoski rapid, which intersects the city. There are so many almost cliched ways to portray the bridge, so I chose to just have it as an abstract backdrop for the main theme of back lit leaves over an iron railing bordering the Tammerkoski.

P.S. This is for Christmas Day

Photo of the Day #66: The Soviet Street

On our last day in Copenhagen we decided to walk from the city center along Nörrebrogade just a couple of kilometers to the northwest as we'd heard that there were some nice second hand shops there.

The reason why there would be so many second hand shops was quite obvious: the relatively Danish faces one saw in the center rapidly changed into a much more ethnic mix, with a variety of kebab shops and other establishments more closely related to an immigrant community.

Unfortunately most of the merchandise in the second hand shops were less than thrilling and were really didn't find much to our liking. One interesting aspect of the area was this park. It has a large Moskvitš (Looks like Mockbny), a soviet star, and two banner with Chinese characters, one in a soda can. The whole place was very surreal, but represented the multiethnic neighborhood rather well.


P.S. This is for December 24th.

Photo of the Day #65: A Royal Bridge

Again continuing from the last post this one is of one of the bridges to the Amalienborg Palace. As I'd already mentioned the Danes don't hold to much excess lighting, the whole palace exterior, with the grounds and bridges, was almost devoid of lighting.

This bridge was only dimly lit be the scattering light of the street lamps across the canal. The positive thing was that it made the bridge look murky and just a bit scary.

So I jumped on the wide stone ledge of the bridge and set an exposure of thirty seconds. In the end this is what I got.

P.S. I'm still on running late -this is for December 23rd.

Photo of the Day #64: The Agony of Being a Stone Man

This post, which is for the 22th of December was incidentally taken on the same day (I seem to be catching up) in the Amalienborg Palace. I guess it is quite common in palaces to have Atlas figures apparently holding columns up, but I had never quite come across this sort of emotion on the statues.

Despite his remarkable physique, he seemed to under an enormous amount of stress, which is quite understandable as he was responsible for holding up a castle which had been destroyed (deliberately or not) quite a few times already.

I hope this angle goes to show that there are more than one way to photograph a statue and you can  make the photograph unique, even though the statue has probably been photographed a gazillion times.

Photo of the Day #63: Ramping Up

Today's photo is again from Copenhagen, and is of the Round Tower, or Rundetårn. The tower is quite pretty to look at from the outside, but I have to say its most amazing feature is inside. The inside does not house your standard set of old stair, but rather a ramp, or a corridor, made of bricks.

The corridor was built so that a horse and a carriage could haul books for the library and instrumentation for the observatory located at the top of the tower. Despite having seen a myriad of architectural feats, such as the Eiffel Tower and the Guggenheim museum in Bilbao, I was more struck by this ramp than anything else. It was just something completely different.

Photo of the Day Extra: A Bit of Google Magic

This post is not exactly a photo of the day, but something very close.

This morning when I opened my gmail box, Google announced that it had revamped some of the pictures from my blog. Apparently the clever engineers had come up with a way of detecting the topic of photos uploaded on their server, or someone at Google had a bit too much free time on their hands (or both).

So these two pictures just popped to my Google account. They're not exactly high art, but I'm still impressed.

Photo of the Day #62: The Light and Dark of the Tivoli

Continuing on the Copenhagen theme, today's photo is from the Copenhagen Tivoli, the second oldest amusement park in the world. Being more accustomed to Finnish parks, with a huge emphasis on thrilling rides, this version is more of eye candy than actual rides.

The amusement park is located at the smack center of the city in relatively limited space, which makes everything jam packed and quite claustrophobic. Especially around Christmas all of the people of Copenhagen feel it their civic duty to attend the Tivoli, at least just for the experience of being there.

The ticket cost 100 krona, or 14 €, and the only thing you get with it is the chance to see the Tivoli close by. Fortunately the park is full of other things you can do, if you have the money for it. We weren't really interested in the rides, so I just ate some rather lousy danish coffee, which is more famous for its quantity rather than its quality and a mediocre version of local ginger bread. Otherwise we just marveled at the lights and complained a bit about the drizzling rain.

This photo is from a rare quiet spot, looking over a pond at a magnificently lit tree, with it branches slightly swaying in the wind.

P.S. This is for December 20th.

Photo of the Day #61: A Mermaid in the Shadows

After a well deserved Christmas break, I'm back posting photos of the day. I try to catch up, but we'll see whether I'll be able to. Additionally I plan to post pictures of recent events, with themes much more close to each other than before.

Today's photo is a Danish classic. The Little Mermaid, written by H.C. Andersen, and of course made even more popular by Disney, is an odd landmark in Copenhagen. Despite all the tourist guidebooks warning tourists that the minuscule statue is located at an unremarkable edge of the city and isn't much to behold, there is a constant stream of tourist flogging to see it and photograph it.

We were there just before this Christmas, just about at the time of the winter solstice, and there was absolutely no chance of seeing it well lit, so we chose not to stress about it. After a day roaming around the city, we headed for the Kastellet, where we knew we would find the statue. However somebody thought that lighting the path to the statue would be too much of a bother, so we stumbled a bit in the dark, until we noticed a crowd of people in a shadowy corner.

There were half a dozen people taking photos in the dark of a statue of a small girl, just because they knew what it was supposed to represent. We waited a while for our turn and photographed other things in the dark and as the people had left, I set up my tripod an saw what I could make of the girl of stone.

The girl looks forlornly into the distance, waiting for something better. I guess this is as good as I could make the statue to be.

P.S. This is for December 19th.