Laura’s birthday party in Näsinneula: sparkling
Originally uploaded by FransBadger.
I have uploaded some new additions of photos both into my Flickr albums and into into www.unet.fi/pics collections; from Tampere (Laura’s birthday in Näsinneula), Berlin (IPerG EB workshop) and Athens (Medi@terra/Gaming Realities conference).
furby’s eyes
Originally uploaded by FransBadger.
Dear Furby, this “emototronic” toy — probably the least understood piece of talking plastic on the planet (available now at €15 from a local shopping mall). – This was shot in my living room from five meters away with a Canon S3 IS, which is basically a new generation digital compact camera, and actually much smarter in many respects than my trusty EOS D350; the quality of optics and manual control are not its forte, of course. But with its 6.0 mega pixels and 12X optical zoom it is one nice small package to carry around for daily needs.
This Saturday we did an improvised trip to the Ähtäri zoo. Generally zoos can be rather depressive places with all those animals kept in captivity, but at least in Ähtäri there is a rather vast forest area to explore (for all those tourists, at least). You can even spend a night with animals, since apparently if you go in and get your ticket before 4 pm, you can stay there as long you want to, eat your provisions, and wait and see how the daylight-shy animals gradually wake up and come out. It was a fascinating spectacle to follow. This shot is a close-up of a baby snow leopard we met (the parents Väinö and Shakira got a litter of two this spring) — a rather playful little fellow, and unquestionably one of the cutest things on earth.
Further on the road into impressionism — I decided that the pixel-sharp shapes and unprecisely captured colours really do not convey my experience of this hazy, hot summer (30-32C is what my thermometer is constantly saying these days). Heat is something oppressive, smelling of dying grass.
This Photoshop cutout conveys better some of that feeling.
There is always a beautiful sunset, rare bird or butterfly flying by when you do NOT carry your best camera and lens with you. With the crappy cameraphone, you can not really get the tones, nor details of the scene. What to do? Well, how about stepping away from the pursuit of realism for a moment, and try aiming for something clearly impressionistic instead? Couple of experiments with a cameraphone and a Photoshop filter.
As a continuation to the listing of forthcoming conferences, here are some memories from game conferences of previous years. Listed are travel pictures from:
— Whew, some years of travelling! I try to keep more to home from now on.
There are many interesting options that things like cameraphones and mobile blogging have opened for us: the instant thought or sight, documented right at the spot. But an early summer’s day like this one (very welcome after the cold spring) would require much more to be mediated with any kind of fidelity: how can I capture the sounds of birds, the warm touch of wind, or smells of fresh leaves and earth itself? Will there ever be a true mobile blogging device that would reach into any of these?
Ok, this is sample photo from 6630 from the dinner. It is clear that cameraphones are getting better, yet it is easy to find problems with the sharpness and colours.
Since yesterday, I have been trying out Nokia 6630, which has now replaced my worrisome Vodafone mobile data card. As far as I can tell, it turns out that my Thinkpad T43 uses a version of bluetooth stack that is not supported by Nokia PC Suite (a Broadcom one), so a USB cable is the only option for getting online; that seems to do it. But the phone itself seems to work fine. The camera resolution is 1,3 megapixels which is much better than the VGA of my old 6600, but way behind the 2 or 3 megapixels that the latest multimedia models are packing. But the OS is reacting fast, screen is clear and I like the touch of the keyboard. As the Nokia N series still has various baby illnesses, and E series delayed until summer, this model appears to be a nice compromise if mobile data is mostly what you are looking in a phone right now. The new HSDPA models are not far in the future also, and obviously we need a new communicator model with 3G/3,5G connection speeds. Until then, I will ride with this 6630. (Coming in from a bicycle trip, it just automatically transferred all shots via bluetooth to a date-format folder in my laptop, perfect! Now, if it only could use that bluetooth for a PC modem connection, too.)
Everyone is usually so cheerful about the coming spring that very few get nostalgic about the ice melting and snow going away. I like summer, but actually it is the transitions I like best — the movement from one state to another. “Liminality” is a nice catch-all-phrase, but I wonder can we really pin it down so easily. In the cultural and religious history fields, one can point towards change of seasons being the symbolic and concrete moment when we see in action the change where our lives are fundamentally just one part. In media studies it is not so typical to think along these lines, and in science and technology studies almost certainly not. But I would like to see us taking more seriously our urge to create multiple layers of reality, all on the top of each other, and ask what is so inherently enjoyable finally in these transitions, overlays, and complexities related to them.
frans goes blog 
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