My new photoblog is ready and published. It’s called (at least for now)
and you can find it via the actual address http://kulmakivi.com/blog/ or the link http://photos.kulmakivi.com/.
Welcome!
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-e-
Peaceful Christmas and
Blessed New Year 2010
Tried some night photography for a change. This didn’t turn out bad at all, or what do you think? Taken in Turku a couple of weeks ago, with my trusted Tamron lens – and a tripod, of course. No post-processing other than a slight unsharp mask.
This is the calendar I made for my friend Lorna for her 50th birthday. All my photos, of course. The cover is here without any cropping but for the rest of the calendar I cropped most of the calendar part away. As for the photos – some of them you have seen earlier, some not. Oh, and these are screen captures from MS Word so the IQ isn’t superb in any way – and the original calendar of course was without watermarks.
I printed the thing with my Epson all-in-one printer (DX4850 which now seems to be pretty much dead) on thin, matte photo quality paper, size A4. It turned out pretty nice even though I did the printing via MS Word and the printer did everything possible to avoid spitting any decent sheets out of it. Yhe problem with these calendars is that the calendar tables come best out via a word processor or equivalent whereas the photos should be printed via a photo processing software. I have yet to find a solution for this – as well as the problem of attaching the sheets to one another so that hanging the calendar on the wall and turning the pages would be easy. But here we go. Clicking each image opens it bigger into a new browser window.
The first snow this year came October 19th. A thick layer of soft, wet snow – in huge flakes. I’ve never seen that huge snowflakes in my life! This photo isn’t a very good illustration of the beautiful sight of yellow leaved birches being covered with the cold whipped cream, like illuminating the snow and giving it some of their colour in the grim autumn morning light. The best shots would’ve been available at the motor way – but I couldn’t stop there, especially not in that weather!
I think for this photo I used an extension tube with my macro lens. But to tell you the truth, I’m not sure about that. Anyway, the spider-looking thing is seed fluff from the yellow strawflower. Pretty neat, isn’t it :)
I’m hoping these photos look at least close to what they look like at my computer. My screen isn’t calibrated and yesterday’s trial order of a few prints came back very random-looking…
Yesterday after Spikey was gone I let the dogs out again. Pepe went back to look for him…
Guess what? No flowers today! Not yellow ones or any other colour either! Today I’m giving you something sharp but still so cuddly looking: A hedgehog!
This fellow lives in our garden. Hedgehogs move in the night, during the day they sleep. For some reason this one was on the move in the afternoon today – and my pooches went just crazy seeing him behind the garden swing! Of course the hedgehog huddled up and the pooches were powerless against its sharp spikes. I took the boys inside and came back with my camera – and some doggy treats. First Spikey remained an angry ball. I carefully tried to get some disturbing grasses away and he’d angrily hiss and growl – and jump! Have you seen a curled up hedgehog jump? It looks really funny! However, he smelled the doggy treats (yeah, hedgehogs love dog food) and cautiously started looking for them. I tried to catch his eyes and nose with my camera – but as soon as he heard the shutter click he’d huddle up again! And since it was overcast and low on light, this was the result with 1/40 seconds exposure:
Slowly he got used to the shutter sound and just munched away the treats from the grass, without minding my camera. I was using my 70-200 mm lens – its shortest focusing distance is 1,2 meters and at times Spikey came so close to me I couldn’t make the lens focus anymore!
When all the treats were gone he didn’t care sticking around anymore. And he still was convinced that I was to be totally ignored. So off he went and disappeared under a huge spruce. But I finally caught both his nose and eye in the same picture!
I guess you all are getting sick and tired of these yellow flowers. But I can’t help it – I love them and I have many good photos of them in my archives – and no time or energy to go out and shoot something new!
I guess the extra light ball under the flower should’ve been cloned out… But I didn’t, at least not yet. This is pretty much SOOC.
