Last summer, about a year ago exactly was the first time I’ve visited Tallinn in almost 20 years. My first visit was in the December of 1990 with a group of friends while it was still a part of the Soviet Union. The Tallinn of today is a far cry from the first memories I hold. All I really remember is a gray and dreary city where even the interesting old town was drab.

Although the first building apart from the terminal’s that you see when walking from the ferry from Helsinki isn’t exactly an uplifting piece of architecture, even it manages to avoid looking drab (the leading picture of the post).

My colleagues and I only had a few hours on shore during our cruise, so we quickly headed into the old town, which is far from grey and drab these days. Still, many vestiges of the years of neglect still show and are best seen in the seam of the restoration work on St. Olaf’s Church.

And by reading the Wikipedia entry I learned that ages ago it has been the world’s tallest building, so during some future trip I just may have to climb up to the top to contrast it with Willis Tower…

Be prepared for a few follow-up posts once I manage to go through my photographs a bit more since Anna and I visited Tallinn again later last summer. And in a few days I’m heading there again.

Sweden’s metallers Amaranthe finally made it all the way to Eastern Finland in support of their new album The Nexus. Amaranthe is one of those bands that metalheads without a sense of humour love to hate going as far as describing them as E-Type metal. Admittedly, when I first saw the video for Hunger from their first album associations to E-Type came easily, but the backbone of the Gothenburg sound was also easily heard. Keep reading for more thoughts and photographs, but also check out our full gallery of photographs from the gig.

While the sound is definitely pop-metal, the use of three differently styled vocalists combined to the catchy and mainly happy songs is a good combination. And the fact that the whole band can pull off a live gig without any issues in vocal harmonies is a testament to the amount of skill on stage.

To me Amaranthe has always been a refreshing burst of positivity in my Gothenburg playlist among all of the various death metal acts from Southern Sweden and of course Evergrey. And Amaranthe has its own connections to the Gothenburg scene.

The challenge in photographing Amaranthe came from the fact of having three vocalists on stage who moved around actively and had to be captured every now and then all in one frame when they were signing harmonies. It was a refreshing challenge and great gig to photograph since they really interacted with the crowd and photographers.

And, it was the first gig that I have ever seen in which hearts are made on stage and in the crowd :)

I wasn’t the only photographer present, Rami Saarikorpi was there shooting several 360 panoramas of the gig (you can spot me in most of them, just look for the camera and Evergrey shirt). The following two photographs are taken at about the same time that two of the panoramas were made from.

A quick sneak peek of the most fabulous light show I have ever seen. Had to interrupt my editing of the pictures of last nights gig to photograph this light show. Good night, I will be back with more tomorrow.

I’ve had the Sigma 50mm/1.4 for a year and a half now and have spent much too little time with it. However, I did get it for a specific reason – too bad I haven’t been following up on the plan that I had. And this post is one that has been waiting for quite some time to be written.

In June of last summer I took a series of stacked photographs of Topi (stacked as in standing in a formal show ring pose) after he got placed quite high. When looking at the photographs on the computer on noticed horrendous chromatic aberration that the 50mm had caused. See below for a 1:1 crop as an example:

However, based on DPReview’s review of the lens, this shouldn’t have been a surprise for me since they have quite clearly noticed it:

However the appearance of magenta central CA at F2 indicates that the plane of best focus has shifted slightly to the rear at this aperture compared to F1.4, a symptom of residual uncorrected spherical aberration.

The photograph was taken at exactly F2 and shows some slight focusing issues (that I thought I had already solved). Since I haven’t noticed significant CA in other photographs that I have taken with the lens (and looking at Lightroom statistics last year I took about 800 photographs with it) it appears that F2 is an aperture worth avoiding – at least with an APS-C sized sensor.

Luckily though, Lightroom’s lens profile corrections and specifically the chromatic aberration portion of it help remove the issue completely. Here is a 1:1 sample after the CA correction has been turned on in Lightroom and slightly fine-tuned:

And yes, I still love the boked that the lens provides when fully open…

Note unlike my typical blog posts this post is fully in Finnish. It is a follow-up to my previous post in Finnish dealing with a particular photo competition and it’s less than ideal rules. This time I can gladly note that there has been a change for the better.

Kirjoitin ennen vuoden vaihdetta Metsästysmuseon hieman kyseenalaisin ehdoin varustetusta valokuvauskilpailusta. Sain alku viikosta iloisena yllätyksenä Metsästysmuseolta sähköpostia, jossa todettiin että runsaasta palautteesta johtuen kilpailun/lahjoituskampanjan ehtoja on muutettu.

Nyt “kilpailun” sivulla kilpailun tavoitetta on selkeytetty ja kuvien lähettäjälle tehdään moni asia erinomaisen hyvin selväksi. Jo sivun otsikko – lahjoita noutajakuvasi museoon – kertoo hyvin mistä on kyse. Enää ei ole lahjoituskampanjaa piilotettu kilpailun alle vaan kuvien keruutarkoitus tulee hyvin selväksi.

Vaikka en vieläkään ole täysin tyytyväinen kuvien käyttöehtoihin ei niissä ole mitään suoranaisesti väärää ja ne ovat erittäin hyvin ja selkeästi ilmaistut. Hatunnosto Metästysmuseolle sääntöjen miettimisestä uudelleen!

Just keep repeating the title until you set up a good backup regime. If you already have one, try what happens when you imagine one drive just broke.

Still here? Then this post is not for you ;)

In all honesty, please build a good backup system where everything is not on one drive and in one device. Our basic setup so far has been two 1.5TB drives in a RAID-1 setup in a separate NAS box. Sounds technical right? Basically, we have a device hooked up to our home network that has two drives that show as one as everything is automatically mirrored on both drives. In addition to this, I periodically make backups onto an external 1.5TB USB drive. Which, *cough* in theory, should be stored offsite between weekly backups.

As I’ve mentioned, I’ve been going through last years images. While I was doing this I got (yet another) email from our NAS box telling me that the error count of one drive was increasing. I ignored it because at the same time I’m building a new image server for our house with more storage. Last Sunday, while Anna was editing photographs, our NAS died. Even after several reboots it did nothing.

So, out with the drive that was reporting errors and now everything was up and running. Except for the fact that I only had all images on a single working drive. So, frantically I hooked up the external drive to make sure that I had everything on at least two drives again. This moral of the story? Make sure you have at least two copies of everything that is important – you never know when a drive may fail.

BTW, both of our computers are continuously backed up to an external drive and I’m also in the process of setting up Crashplan on both our computers. Alas, I still don’t know how to sensibly get the image server backed up to Crashplan as 1.5TB is a bit slow to stream…

The picture above is one found during my archival romp and is from early 2012.

There is really only one clear photographic resolution that I have in mind for the coming year and it is quite simple: be quick to tag, edit and prune photographs. I have just started tagging metadata to all of our photographs from last year. Trust me, there are many – slightly over 23 000. Of these almost 19 000 were untagged this morning.

The second part of the resolution means that I have to mark good shots somehow (Lightroom’s ratings anyone?) so that I can come back to them even if I don’t edit them immediately. And then, the most heart wrenching part of it all – deleting unwanted shots. Were are running out of storage space for our photographs at the moment. This means that there are 1.5TB of photographs that we have. Although I’m building a new server for our photographs with more storage space, the increasing file sizes and amount of photographs we do take means that more curating and pruning needs to be done.

We will see how it goes. Unfortunately I’m fairly certain that this time next year I’m going to be making exactly the same resolution…

Pictured above, Topi and Emil from a previously unpublished photograph from last January. At least this one was easy to tag. A single snow covered black dog sometimes takes some investigating before it can be tagged.

When photographing the image shown yesterday in Life of Jalo the final image I saw in my mind was the one that was posted (also seen below). However, while editing and slightly fooling around I came across a cross-processing preset that looked interesting.

However I didn’t pursue editing it any further the other but continued late last night to edit another option with a very different mood of the exact same image. While the LoJ version of the image is purely warm with a strong sunset feel to it, the photo above includes both the coolness of wintery shade and the hint of warmth from the low midday sun. To honestly get the sunset warmth of the LoJ version we have to get quite a bit closer to summer for the sun to be higher up in the sky.

As an experiment on how simple processing and selecting the colors that are emphasized in a photograph this was quite successful. Honestly, I can’t even choose which version I like more.

And if you are interested in another take on the duality of winter coldness and the warmth of the sun, Finnish photographer Mikko Lagerstedt also published a photograph yesterday with the same range of colors.

P.S. I’m not really satisfied with the lens flare in the photograph. I need to do some more testing with the lens to see what I can do about it. It just may be that I will find myself removing the UV filter from the lens.

Another year changes, at least according to the default calendar in most modern computers. For me it brings new challenges and the promise of even more time spent “to the dogs.” Although literally in my case and not figuratively.

I hope you had a good and safe start to the new year!

And as a final installment of images from the house fire exercise we had a month ago, some of my favorites of the fire as seen from outside of the building.

Remember also the previous installments of the timelapse and a look at the inside of a burning building.