Year of the Monkey

Food, decoration and wrappings.

Soundtrack by Phelian: soundcloud.com/insight-music/phelian-the-only-thing

Merry Christmas peeps! Testing one second shutter speed on mobile phone camera.

HFF!

This old building has been used as offices by the national railway company. Now it is abandoned, and yet seen as worth to save. But what would be done with it and who wants it is a different matter. Town council even planned to move, literally move the whole building away from the new street planned to be built on that site. What is current situation, that I don't know. It is beautiful building, but like many similar buildings (or very few of them any more), it has been trapped between fast growing modern buildings and streets. Soundtrack by Einstürzende Neubauten: soundcloud.com/muterecords/04-youme-meyou

R.I.P. Multiply, My Opera, Panoramio and ... "We are here to help you on a daily basis as on a long-term one to organize your thousands of pictures and all your memories to build in time in a unique and secured space your digital heritage." ~About Ipernity: www.ipernity.com/about/us Many great attempts to record and share the cultural heritage are somehow based on similar noble goals there were behind French revolution: Liberté, égalité, fraternité! The basic idea is that by providing equal and free access also onto information, we get to know more about each others, which then would strengthen equality, solidarity and freedom even more. Someone who comes from a different culture often looks strange and intimidating, but if and when we learn more about that culture, we very likely, or hopefully, start to accept the other. But as history has proven for so many times, even the most noble ideas may prevail because of many "counter forces", and worse of them is selfishness. Although, it is very human and natural for all of us to think our own best. In case of internet, the worst forms of selfishness are things like spammers, thieves of copyright protected materials, and "black hat hackers". White hat hackers (whitest of them) have of course helped us to fight against those evil ones, but the fight is still often lost. My personal claim is that the expenses of many great online communities would not be so high if they would not have to fight against thieves, spammers and black hat hackers. This is of course also highly political topic! However, as long as there will be inequality (e.q. between genders and standard of living), the cultural differences will be too great to overcome. Soundtrack by Thierry Soret, Pierre Miramont, and Christophe Hugues Loriot: soundcloud.com/orphangray/03-ekahalat

I suggested a topic "Use the edge of a photo to cut the main subject in half" at Saturday Self Challenge group, and after few days I almost started to regret it! My suggestion became accepted right away, and I soon discovered how challenging this suggestion turned out. First of all the subject has to be either symmetrical or easily recognizable enough, to realize it is cut in half for the picture. Then it has to be wide (or tall) enough to fill the frame, and make it look like it indeed is intentional composition, and not just accidentally popping out behind the image edge. And finally one needs to decide what to do with the rest of the space, not to place there anything that competes too much with the main subject. Luckily I once again got the idea in middle of the night. Some noise woke me up, and as usually, I had difficulties to get sleep again because of all the thoughts rushing through my mind. But I got my idea, and that's all what matters! =D This is a clock up in the clock tower of Tampere railway station. It is one of my favourite subjects, and more pictures of it can be found here: www.ipernity.com/tag/serola/keyword/34368

...like professional! =D Did you know there is also a concept of "gold panning"? ;-) en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold_panning I chose slides of carrot to be "fried" and stirred on the pan because they look nice and bright, almost golden ;-) Besides they were not causing much of the mess if dropping around. I didn't actually fried them. The pan was cold and I sort of faked the way how master cooks flip and stir the contents on a frying pan. This picture is last out of 22 shots. I relied on automatic setting, and it gave me the following settings: - Exposure 1/13 - Aperture f/3.3 - ISO 400 The "ambient light" came from two fluorescent and one halogen lamps. I held the camera on my left hand, used full 24mm equivalent wide angle, and tried my best to "pan the moving pan" held on the right hand. The whole session took no more than 10 minutes. The idea for this I got few days before, and I took two practise shots with a mobile phone camera to see how it would work.

Soundtrack by Eikona: soundcloud.com/eikona/engraved-in-torchlight Because it felt that way.

I was asked to decide the topic for The Sunday Challenge. I chose one of my personal favourite "style", maximalism . For me maximalism is actually indeed a very personal reaction on minimalistic pictures taken by my Czech photography friend . This happened in March 2013, at My Opera virtual community, which unfortunately became closed in 2014. I saw my friend posting some wonderful minimalistic pictures, and I suddenly started to wonder if there is such an art movement and style as maximalism. I of course searched for it, and found some documents on this, but I also immediately tried to put my own ideas on this into action. One of my very first pictures on what I understand as maximalism is this: I had thought about this style for a day or so, and in this very picture I tried to implement several goals. First is to make none of the subjects in the picture more important than the other, to force the gaze to wonder all over the image. Second goal is to make the viewer realize the borders of image by cutting the subjects close to image borders. And as third goal, which I sort of discovered right on the spot, is to add some story and mystery in the image (wheelchair, items on the table). Later on, I have sort of tried to "elaborate" the style, by intentionally trying to implement also what others have said about maximalism. On this Sunday's challenge picture I decided to implement several of my favourite styles and ideas. Urban landscape is a jungle for me, and without going into small details, the whole man made world is very opposite for minimalism! Human made landscape is full of all sorts of mess. Traffic signs, construction sites, ugly cars, and somewhat every building looks different, and yet the same. So, we surround ourselves with myriad of items that look the same and yet also different at the same time. I chose to combine two shots with "difference layer mode" on GIMP, to give this an unnatural ghostly look. I increased the saturation to make this look colourful as a jungle. Then I used perspective correction tool to "incorrect the perspective", to make it really look like seen from above. And finally I made the image round to take away corners where the gaze could "escape". To summarize what maximalism means to me, is that it is a satire of and praise for the diversity of artefacts (man made structures). Where minimalism is sort of an escapism from the reality, then maximalism is a way to acknowledge the reality and make people to really see it. Soundtrack by Data Rebel (Danny Howe): soundcloud.com/datarebel/sets/data-rebel-formant-ep

Inspired by M.C. Escher www.mcescher.com/gallery/back-in-holland/balcony