Year of the Monkey

Soundtrack by The Warheads: soundcloud.com/jrs-1-1/samba-suave Because the brains melted in the heat... =D

...since 1865: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia#History Inspired by The Sunday Challenge 'Slogan', I made a day trip to Nokia, a neighbouring town of Tampere. That is where Nokia company and corporation got it's name and origin. First Nokia Co. made paper, but rather soon rubber coated electric cables became as the main product for decades. Later on Nokia started to manufacture all kinds of things made out of rubber, like tires, rubber boots and yes, even rubber batons like seen in the image! This kind of rubber batons were used by policemen, and bent like seen in the image, they were rather compact tools. On old advertisements, selling these batons, there were slogans used like: "When words does not help, there you need Nokia baton!" In 1970s Nokia Co. started to engineer and manufacture electronics. During the next decades they made things like radio phones, military communicators, televisions and even computers. In the end of 1980s Nokia Tyres and Nokia Rubber Works split away from Nokia Corporation, which then focused only on communications. At the same time started the golden years of "fully portable mobile phones", and time when the slogan "connecting people" became launched. People may think Nokia Corporation became fully owned and "killed" by Microsoft. However, it was only the mobile phone division and Nokia phone brand that were sold. The Nokia Corporation continued as Nokia Networks, and it still is a large multinational data networking and telecommunications equipment company. UPDATE December 18, 2019: One should not forget also Nokia rubber boots ! In Finland there is still a custom to have rubber boot throwing competitions, except we do not throw Wellie but Nokia. And as similar to that there are even Nokia phone throwing competitions arranged. Moreover, I just discovered that Nokia phones came back " home " (Finland) again! UPDATE December 20, 2019: I wonder why there are no following competitions as well: ▪ Throwing at Nokia community with something, or throwing something away from Nokia. Either throwing something at or away from Nokia town hall, or throwing something (like Nokian Footwear) across the border of Nokia from neighboring communities or vice versa. ▪ Throwing Nokia Tyres, aka tires. Like done on this FirePower CrossFit's First Annual Tire Throwing Competition YouTube video.

"Honey bunny! What do you say? Should we move to the countryside, away from these giant rolling boulders?" "No way! There are all sorts of nasty bloodsuckers and beasts in the countryside! It's much more comfortable here in the city..."

Soundtrack by Pilote: soundcloud.com/pilote-1/shapeshifter-blues Because it is the only way he knows.

Soundtrack by Pilote: soundcloud.com/pilote-1/the-sixth-street-ramble Because the weather was fine to ramble about... Supposedly Pilote's musical composition refers to Sixth Street (Pecan Street) in Austin, Texas. Sixth Street has an interesting history going way back to year 1839, when Austin got established [1]. Also the city (town) of Tampere in Finland has somewhat similar history. Although Tampere was established already in 1779 [2], it became as major city only after Scotsman James Finlayson came here [3], and established the factory (cotton mill) and hydro power station in the beginning of 19th century. During the same time the town growth and the similar grid plan as in Austin became built in Tampere. And that is also when the Hämeenkatu street became established. Hämeenkatu was not the main street of Tampere at first [4]. The town growth to the east, the Hämeensilta bridge became built over the Tammerkoski rapids, and the railway reached Tampere in 1870s. At this time the eastern part of Hämeenkatu was built to connect the railway station to the rest of the town on west side of Tammerkoski. Ever since the Hämeenkatu street has been the "heart of the city", the main street where all the major saloons, banks and shops can be found. In 1990s, when I arrived to Tampere, Hämeenkatu was filled by cars. At that time shop owners and their customers believed they just have to have the right to park their car right in front of the shops. It took somewhat 20 years before the plans to make the city centre as car free zone finally became somewhat true. Today there are huge underground car parks, and only buses and taxi cars are allowed to drive along Hämeenkatu. So, now the pedestrians can finally ramble along the Hämeenkatu more freely. The "technical" yada yada This picture is my contribution to The Sunday Challenge, where we had two options for this week: Either 1): Use the random point generator www.geomidpoint.com/random set your co-ordinates and select 1 point. You can decide how far away you will be prepared to go in miles or kilometers. Go to the point and take a new photo. Or 2): Take a walk and take 4 pictures with a personally pre-set distance between them. for some that may be one per mile, for others perhaps one per 100 paces. the key is really having a fixed focal length on the lens.The 4 pictures can then be collaged to create one. For this picture I sort of combined the both. I first used the random point generator to generate few random points within 1 kilometre radius from my home. Then I chose the one pointing right in the east end of Hämeensilta bridge, because I found that the most interesting point to start with. I decided to do the challenge on my way home from work, and that is why I decided to start the walk from the given point, and continue from there to the direction of my home, and take the rest of the picture after every one hundred meters. I also had an idea to make a collage out of four vertical 9:16 images taken with full optical zoom. So, the all pictures would become taken with 780 mm equivalent focal length, and would be some random views along my way home. And that is what I did. Finally because of feeling once again disappointed with the limits of my camera, I decided to edit the images heavily. JPEG images taken with small sensor just have started to look bad in my eyes, and then the best solution is to "make the bad images even worse". On notes you see also my first attempt on this challenge: www.ipernity.com/doc/serola/42459338 There I tried to take a panorama image in the very first random point I generated for the option one on this challenge. That is a rather lovely location within three kilometre radius from my home, banks of stream at the east end of Iidesjärvi lake: goo.gl/2dwBjl On that picture I took the exposure from the upper part of the scene, and used bilinear gradient to keep the tones on sky, and bring more light on the foreground. But as you may see, the quality indeed is very bad... Sources [1] Austin’s ‘Street of Dreams’: From Pecan Street to Dirty Sixth www.artslabormagazine.com/austins-street-of-dreams-from-pecan-street-to-dirty-sixth [2] History of Tampere en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tampere#History [3] James Finlayson en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Finlayson_(industrialist) [4] Hämeenkatu www.cs.tut.fi/staff/pk/OldTampere/html/hameenkatu.html

Soundtrack by Goloka: soundcloud.com/golokamusic/p-d-electric-clock Because "he" got a subconscious impulse =D

...means anything. Soundtrack by Pilote: soundcloud.com/pilote-1/lesson-51-a-tailchasers-wa Because I do not understand anything I see =D

Inspired by The Sunday Challenge: Use the random point generator www.geomidpoint.com/random set your co-ordinates and select 1 point. You can decide how far away you will be prepared to go in miles or kilometers. Go to the point and take a new photo.

...layer. Inspired by The Sunday Challenge 'Car'. Original on notes. On GIMP editor I first used 'Polar Coords' to create an orb, then 'Lens Distortion' to "stretch" the orb to the corners. No need to crop or use any background to fill the "canvas" ;-)

Soundtrack by KILN: soundcloud.com/ghostly/kiln-roil Because it was on my way =D