I think misty nights like this are one of the nicest things about Finnish summer. In this case, I don’t even regret that I didn’t have a DSLR with me because the mobile phone did a fairly good job in capturing the scene.
I created the image by merging three exposures in Photoshop and removing some unwanted elements, after which I applied some noise reduction to it in Lightroom.
I went out to photograph the sunset on a cold January afternoon because it looked like there might some nice colors in the sky. As I was looking for a good position, this man skied past me and I knew I had to get him in the frame with the sun. I had my camera hanging on my neck, but I wasn’t really prepared to take any photos. Luckily he wasn’t too fast and I was able to adjust my camera settings and take this photo. Looking back, I think this was the best photo I took that day.
For those of you who are interested in tech stuff, the image is a blend of two differently exposed versions of the same file. Blending allowed me to adjust the exposure of the snow and the sky more easily to my liking.
There’s a small hill with a relatively nice view near our apartment where we sometimes go. I originally shot this photo bracketed to make an HDR image, but ended up using only one exposure. Apart from the sun there wasn’t much need for the extra dynamic range. I think I’ll try to make the HDR version later when I have more time.
Here’s another image from 2007. Google was kind enough to give me a free copy of Nik’s plugin bundle and this was the first image tested it on. I used a very randomly selected set of filters from Color Efex to get this look and the image instantly became one of my favorites.
As a side note, I’ve created a Facebook page for my images. If you don’t like RSS feeds, you can now keep keep up to date with this blog by liking the page. If you like the images there (or here), feel free to share them to your friends.
I’ve still got loads of exciting news to share, but I’ll try to keep my posts short, so more on those next time.
I’ve neglected the blog for quite a while again, partly due to work and partly because I was updating the layout. Finally everything works almost as it should so it’s time to start posting new photos. I have also decided to move my old photo blog at scumbucket.explodingfish.net to explodingfish.net. From now on, you can find my travel photos by clicking the Travel tab and the photos from Scumbucket by clicking the Blog tab.
You can now subscribe the RSS feed by clicking the rss icon at the top of the page. There are also links to my social media sites.
I’ll start adding old post and photos to the blog little by little and try to post new stuff once or twice a week. I’d like to hear what you think about the new site.
I originally created this site as a travel blog when I visited Japan in 2009. This site has since gone throuh a number of changes and it’s now more of a photography site than a travel blog. I wanted to keep the original travel entries here, however, because personally I like to read this kind of travel descriptions.
During this trip to Japan, my first in seven years, I traveled from Tokyo to Kyūshū and a number of places in between, accompanied with my sister and her boyfriend. This was also when I started taking photography seriously after dabling with it a couple of years.
We left Jyväskylä to Helsinki a day before our flight so that we could stay overnight at my friend’s place and get to the airport early in the morning.
I had been packing frantically the whole night and spent the first leg of the trip in a coma on the backseat. I woke up when it was time to eat our breakfast/lunch, which meant a couple of cups of coffee and a Japan-themed cake made by the others. The main ingredients of the cake were cream candies, chocolate and brandy – plenty of them. It tasted like a kiss from a chocolate-loving rummie, but it did the trick and woke me up.
After arriving at my friend’s place we left our luggage there, had dinner at the local Chinese restaurant, walked around for a while and bought some breakfast. We had to be at the airport at 6:50 in the morning, so we spent the rest of the evening watching TV and went to bed early.