Category: photography

Black-n-white summer

Black-n-white summer: a black tulip
Originally uploaded by FransBadger.

As my holidays started this week, I was on high hopes. After all, this is my first proper holiday in … I guess pretty much ever. When you are in the status of a student, you spend all your summers on a summer work, and later, when I started working, I always was pushing some publication or other project until the summer, when I could actually start working (these days, academics’ working hours are all taken up by project meetings and admin work during the “working” season). This summer it will be different: I will have a proper, long summer holiday. And the first week looks already promising: it never stops raining. 🙂 Well, that is good time to do some housekeeping work, and particularly good time to go through your photo collections and do some editing stuff. I have intention to pick up some of the suitable shots, transfer them into monochrome and work with black-and-white photography for a while. There are already some samples (like this tulip) in my Flickr account.

A new Angel in our aquarium

A new Angel in our aquarium
Originally uploaded by FransBadger.

Vappu was too cold to be outside, mostly. So we fixed places inside instead. We got some new fish, including four natural-coloured Angelfish in our aquarium and seeing how they took the moving (rather well, and in good spirits) was fun. More photos of fish, butterflies and babies in: http://www.unet.fi/pics/2007-05-01/

Kuhmo, Finland

Kuhmo, Finland
Originally uploaded by FransBadger.

Ice melting, winter passing.

Media room project, part 2

Media room project, part 2
Originally uploaded by FransBadger.

I have now the projection wall and the rotating ‘tech tower’ mostly set up, but the sturdy table beneath it was not deep enough for my old CRT display. Well, it was time for a new editing screen in any case. My choice was Samsung SyncMaster 226BW — a piano black 22″ widescreen beauty boasting 2ms response time, 3000:1 dynamic contrast range and some clever new finetuning technologies. I must say my old photos suddenly gained new life. (The only downside is that my old media workstation is even more sub-standard now than it was before this…)

Geotagging for the future

As sites like Wikipedia inform us, geotagging is the process of adding geographical or location information into media, such as digital images or videos (or basically any entity: it is wide field). While we are currently looking into linking various games related tools and processes with the social media initiatives in our pervasive gaming research (read: within IPerG), I am also interested in the simplest possible way of making location tagging available for large audiences. While there are also developments of building GPS into digital cameras, and software tools for automatic location tagging with GSM cell data (in cameraphones), I still think that the approach of Flickr Maps is probably going to be most popular by short range, at least. It is so easy to drag your photo into certain location in the world map, and also browse photos with the same intuitive map interface. Example: link to few images I have mapped in my Flickr Map. (I think you need to zoom out a bit in order to actually see any of them, though.)

Local gourmet, Palma de Mallorca

Local gourmet, Palma de Mallorca
Originally uploaded by FransBadger.

I uploaded some photos from Mallorca to Flickr, including this enticing offer of street gourmet.

Season's Greetings

Snow-covered window
Originally uploaded by FransBadger.

Snow finally returned today, sheltering all under its protective cover. The attached shot is from the earlier, thicker snow conditions we had, but I use the opportunity to wish you all Peaceful and Happy Christmas-time; you can use our department’s Official Christmas-Card Application here: http://www.uta.fi/hyper/arkisto/joulu2006/

(There are more photos from this somewhat unreal winter in this of my Flickr sets: http://www.flickr.com/photos/fransmayra/sets/72057594051647547/)

Winter coming back?

Beneath
Originally uploaded by FransBadger.

This has been an exceptionally warm winter over here, after an exceptionally hot and dry summer. Today, walking in Hatanpää area I took some photos, and as you can see here, the power of cold is returning. I like the visual qualities of ice, and looking through it, into the frozen world that is waiting, trapped, until next summer, is somehow magical.

window into winter, blogging around the world

window into winter
Originally uploaded by FransBadger.

I was invited to participate in this global blog where people around the world write about their daily life:

http://topics192.blogspot.com/

In classic Finnish spirit, I used the opportunity to nag about the weather (only the British compete with Finns in their passion to discuss weather, as far as I know). And with this apparent climate change, there are obvious reasons to pay attention to what is going on in this blue-and-green planet of ours.

finnish nature photos 2006

Janne Heimonen's 'Pomppu'The association of Finnish nature photographers organises its annual competition, regularly attracting some top-quality work. The gallery on selected photos is located in here; the winner this year was “Lumisade” (Falling snow) by Esa Mälkönen (here).