2009/6/10 - Iceland, Land of Landscape Photography
I recently visited Iceland on a rather short holiday trip. We were staying in Reykjavik and because the trip was short, we could only circulate something like 50 kilometers from the city. Even this small circle around the city convinced me of the fact that Iceland is definitely a country for landscape/nature photographers!
The landscapes are just staggering and most importantly very often clear from human made structures. Local people mostly live in small cities (and nobody probably wonders why) so the wilderness is left like it is.
What made photographing problematic in Iceland were the weather conditions. It was almost constantly windy and there were short showers all the time. Of course that also made landscapes and skies very interesting even in the middle of the day.
Overall I am very pleased with my photos from that trip. Again it was not a photograph trip, but in this country the nature and photographing are just must things to do!
Although Iceland is not currently on my top list where to go next, I'd definitely want to go there again. There were so many places left that I didn't have time to visit.
And few more photos still. Somehow I just coudln't select only two or three photos, I liked so many.
2009/5/13 - Sunset and abandoned house in Veitakkala, Salo
Our "camera club" was on the move again, this time in Veitakkala, Salo. It is nice to find new interesting places so near to places that you drive by almost daily.
The first thing that caught my eye was the mud and specially the patterns in it.
And of course because it was sunset time, some classic sunset photographs were a must.
When we were about to leave, we thought it would be nice to check out the old abandoned house nearby. And wow, it was a place that I definitely have to visit again! There were just so many things to photograph, here is one:
Summer is here and it was time for the first bicyckling trip. I happened to take also my point-and-shoot with me and in the end it was like half cyckling and half taking photographs. Of course I had only my crappy old point-and-shoot, which actually only lacks two very importan features: manual mode and histogram! Nevertheless it was fun to take pictures without any expectations for a while, just firing away.
Today I went shooting without having anything special subject in my mind. Just walking towards the harbor. Then I saw the moon! And then something like 80% of my shots on that trip had moon... Funny thing is that I very well know that there are something like 100 billion similar photos of moon (and half of those most likely a lot better) and there was nothing special in the scenery either. Still I just had to take those photos. Well it was fun again and that's of course what hobbies are for.
Today I went for a short shooting trip to the nearby Kuusjoki river banks. The sun was shining from a pretty low angle and my vision was to shoot some classic colorful spring landscapes while there is still snow on the ground. I shot something like 4 different targets and had always a color image on my mind.
Then when I was finally tuning my images I of course created first the oversatureated-high-contrast color versions but...somehow they just didn't work. Then I "accidently" created also some b&w versions and that they were much better and nothing like what I had on my mind originally. Well, no big news here, luckily we now days have this change always available.
