the merciful house

The past week here in Helsinki has been quite magical as all the trees have been covered in a thin layer of frost due to some weather condition of fog pouring down to sub-zero conditions. I fail to remember when was the last time I saw something like this in Helsinki. These are the kind of moments I forgive winter for the dark months of November and December.

Here are a few photos I took while taking a walk in a park a few days ago. They turned out a tad surreal I thinks.

Filed under: photography by Ude at 3:17 pm
Tags: frost, photography, winter
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Earlier this autumn I dug up my old soviet Zenit slr-camera and bought a roll of black and white film. I actually have two Zenit bodies, but I wasn’t sure which one of them leaked light inside, so I was pretty much snapping photos just to get them developed so that I can see the technical results.

It turned out this was the faulty one (most photos from the top were also underexposed due to the apparently badly positioned mirror), so I’ll be using the other one next time. Here are some selected (untouched) photos. Feels refreshing to play around with old-fashioned film again.

Filed under: photography by Ude at 9:24 pm
Tags: film, photo, photography
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I’m throwing in some images I fooled around with Photoshop a few months ago. I call these kinds of images I make “scrubs”, image files that don’t have any purpose other than practicing different kinds of effects with varying success.

In these particular scrubs I was focused on photo retouching (playing with colours and contrast mainly).

There are lots of scrubs lying around my hard drives, so I might dig some out for display in future posts.

Filed under: illustration, photography by Ude at 12:59 pm
Tags: images, photo, photoshop, retouching
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Some time ago I noticed one thing.

Basically ever since I bought and used my now broken 35mm/2.0 lens with my Digital EOS camera, I aimed for crisp, clean photography. While I managed to capture good photos, somehow I lost track at some point what photography is all about (or can be). Surely it isn’t about how sharp the pictures are, but how they touch the viewer, right? (more…)

Filed under: photography by Ude at 11:32 pm
Tags: experimenting, photography, photoshop
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Spontanious sketching

Over a month ago, one afternoon while just idling on my sofa wondering what to do, I suddenly got up, grabbed my Wacom-tablet’s pen and started to draw something in Photoshop. It didn’t matter what, I just wanted to do something creative instead of wasting the day away.

After some no-brainer sketching, I ended up with some simple black’n'white figure. A rather typical sketch from someone (or at least me) who hasn’t got an idea in advance what to draw.

The initial sketch I did with my Wacom Intuos2 and Photoshop CS3 (A4 sized).

I didn’t want to stop here however and call it a day, and decided to see how far I could take this within one day.

(more…)

Filed under: illustration by Ude at 2:04 pm
Tags: animation, art, flash, photoshop, wacom
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