Tuesday, February 27, 2007

Tired Earthwalker

On long walks taking photos one just might get tired. Then it is time to take a little rest and relax a bit.

Monday, February 19, 2007

The Art of Wushu

Chinese calendar turned to the year of the pig at New Year, 18th February. To celebrate this a festival was held at Lasipalatsi Square in Helsinki. On the square there were many little stands offering things to eat and information about China and all that sort of stuff.

But the thing that caught my attention was the main (an only) stage on which were different groups performing. There were chinese dragons and lions and a wide variety of wushu performers. Here is one example for you people.

Friday, February 16, 2007

Squirt

I have seen my fair share of fountains that spout high columns of water every now and then. But this one was inside a shopping mall in Mammuth II, Budapest, Hungary. The column of water reached to the level of the third floor (the floor the fountais is beign floor 0) very easily. And the water shot up so straight that barely any water at all sprinkled outside of the fountain below.

Over the last couple of weeks or so I have found myself longing for Budapest. Despite all of it lacks and flaws that became apparent after living there for 3 months and some odd weeks I actually do miss the city. Yes, the poor city is in sad state of disrepair but it is being renovated. Yes, poor me don't speak hungarian and only a small minority of locals speak english. Yes, my Diners Club card is practically useless there. But still, the city is beautiful, it has beautiful parks and the people are nice even though we might not quite understand each other.

As much as I wanted to get away from there during the last month I lived there, now I just want to get back.

Tuesday, February 06, 2007

Solar Eclipse By a Sculpture

I just had to test my camera back in Hungary just to see how it would handle the backlit situation. Pretty well I would think.

This patricular statue is located at Hősök tere in Budapest. I like how well the details of the statue are visible even when taking a shot against such a strong lightsource as the Sun. If I remember correctly I couldn't see any details with naked eye on the site.

The settings for this shot were 1/400s, f/14.0 and ISO100

Sunday, February 04, 2007

Until Death Do You Apart

We happened to stumble upon a wedding party in Budapest. The happy couple was wed in St. Stephen's Basilica, which is quite magnificent church. The whole wedding party, as far as I could tell, was dressed up in pretty extravagant clothes. All that white cloth shined quite bright in the midday sun, lucky me I had my sunglasses on.

But that is one heck of a wedding dress the bride is wearing...

Thursday, February 01, 2007

Art of Ice

We had an ice sculpting competition last weekend here in Helsinki. The competition had participants from variety of countries and the resulting sculptures were mainly amazing. To make the scultures even more impressive than they already were, they were backlit with colored lights.

The sculpture presented here wasn't the winning one, but I did like it quite much. But the main reason I am posting this one is that I think this was the best picture I shot that evening. It is pretty hard to take pictures in dusk. And the fact that I was just about freezing didn't make it any easier.

I'll look through my pictures from the competition again later. Maybe there are some others worth posting. There should be if I weren't so selfcritical about my photos.