There was a time when I blogged quite frequently. In recent years however, it has become more rare. Partly because I feel I have less to write about publicly and also because other services like flickr, twitter and last.fm have scattered my random updates into other parts of the Internet.

Still, I feel this site is none the less the heart of my web presence and will most likely continue to do so for some time. Funny how personal websites feel now a bit old school and maybe even troublesome in an age of social media.

Maybe I should be a bit more active this year here. I’ll think about that.

For the time being, here is another small random photo set (colour adjusted photos from my third trip to Japan 2006, all from Kyoto).

The theme this time around has been converting ordinary photos into black and white, trying to make them a bit more interesting that way. Some turned out pretty okay and they can be viewed at my Flickr account.

Here are a few extras for those who happen to follow this blog.

The merciful house is cool again with the World Wide Web.

If you tried to visit the merciful house during the past week, you have noticed it hasn’t been possible. Also, if you have tried to send e-mails directed to addresses under this domain, they have bounced back to you undelivered.

The reason behind this is that I decided to move the domain under a new webhotel and the transition didn’t go anywhere as smoothly as I hoped, resulting with a domain that was sitting on nothing for a full week. The situation was a tad irritating as there was nothing I could do about it.

Anyway, happy ending, everything is back online and running normally again. Sorry for any inconveniences during the downtime.

Sure, it is something that can be done with Photoshop and the likes, but it was somehow a refreshing change to see the results on the fly and skip the post-processing stage which can tend to get time consuming.

Below a few selected ones, straight from the camera as is (aside from rescaling them).

Perhaps I should play around with these kinds of settings more often to get even more out of my camera (and that way more refined results).

Älymystö performing @ Kuudes Linja, Helsinki (2009)

As I thought about it afterwards, I remembered I did have some old live video material I took during one of their live gigs years ago in a small live venue in Helsinki. Since I had iMovie ’09 installed on my MacBook Pro, I decided to give it a try what I could come up with it.

Overcoming technical limitations

So there was roughly 15 minutes of video from two separate live performances in the same venue (Factory, which sadly closed its doors two years ago). It was taken with a Sony DSC-717 digital camera and the resolution was a modest 320×240. Since the video was in plain mpeg-files, I immediately had the problem of getting them imported into iMovie, which didn’t support the format. Even if it did support it, I would still have the problem with the next to unusable low resolution of the raw material.

Then I got an idea. I picked up my new Canon IXUS 860 IS digital camera, start playing the original videos on my monitor full screen and re-record them into new video files sized 640×480 resolution. Basically I was already editing video for the final version by panning and zooming around the screen while making sure the focus won’t get too sharp to reveal the technique with monitor pixels.

Raw video material on iMovie.

Syncing with the music track

Once I had enough material, I imported the new material into iMovie which it accepted with no problems. Since iMovie was basically aimed for home videos and not accurate sync-editing with sound (in this case music), I picked a track from the band that didn’t have singing, as it would otherwise have been a major headache to find clips that fit with them sync-wise.

Even without vocals the process of syncing audio with video was a bit awkward with iMovie, but my enthusiasm was greater than the frustration and after two evenings I managed to come up with a something that might be called a low budget fan music video.

Rewarding project

The band wasn’t aware of my doings and were happy to find out one of their tracks got wrapped up in a video when I gave them a look. Now, after five months or so, it got put online on YouTube by the band itself.

Making the video was fun, although I will think twice about doing another one with iMovie. As simple as it is, it wasn’t meant for making music videos. Also, I’d like to use material in a much higher resolution next time.

Given the crippling limitations of source material, editing software and even the fact I rarely play with video, the result was still quite pleasing. It’s nothing professional by all means, but I wasn’t expecting it to be. Anyway, here it is:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fec4CgGYciQ

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.

An old Zenit SLR-camera with a helios lense.

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.

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.

Empty plate

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?

The noiseless, detailed photos that a large portion of my photos are about were at times … static. They didn’t always seem to encapsulate any kind of mood. Sure, the photos seen in Flickr hardly have any people in it (for privacy reasons), but not even living things are required to evoke a feeling in a photo.

So I selected some random photos that I never would have considered publishing as-is and with a little help from Photoshop, did an experiment of trying to inject some life into them by blurring and off-setting some colours. Making them fade away with time like visual memories in one’s head.

The experiment reminded me that at the end of the day, flawless image quality doesn’t always raise chances that the photo will be more interesting. In fact, sharp, clinical photos sometimes leave no space for any emotion to breath in. Pretty basic stuff, but somehow I forgot about that.

I’m clearly not abusing my photos with Photoshop enough.