Monday, August 31, 2015

The camera’s eye open and acutely

This morning the temperature was 7 °C, and 20 °C in the afternoon. The weather forecast promises similar weather for tomorrow, but then it will be getting colder, and rain is in the forecast as well. The dry and warm spell seems to be over.

The photographs were taken on July 29th.

(Posting title is from the poem New York American Spell, 2001 by Tom Sleigh.)

Sunday, August 30, 2015

There is no happiness like mine

Today I walked for 2 h 20 min at Vaakkoi. This time I got 19 deer flies (Lipoptena cervi), almost as many as yesterday. However, one of them hit me in the car while driving to Vaakkoi, and so it must have found me already yesterday, hiding in my coat or in the car until this morning.

I have got almost 14 hours of exercise this week. However, weight has gone up by 2-3 kg since I started at work after the summer vacation even though I have got plenty of exercise. I guess I have been eating a bit too much.

The photographs were taken on July 27th at Koli.

(Posting title is from the poem Eating Poetry by Mark Strand.)

Saturday, August 29, 2015

And laid my weapon next to it

This morning I walked 2 1/2 hours, visiting lake Tränuhals. I got 21 deer fly, a new record. Having a deer fly crawl on your skin is not something to appreciate.


The photographs were taken on July 27th at Koli, except for the deer fly photograph which was taken today.

(Posting title is from the poem I Killed a Fly by David Ignatow.)

Friday, August 28, 2015

And the sliding of the water

I have got about nine hours of exercise so far this week. Maybe a bit too much, as the leg muscles are aching.

The photographs were taken on July 27th at Koli.

(Posting title is from the poem Patterns by Amy Lowell.)

Thursday, August 27, 2015

About looking into the face of desire until it blinks

I have been commuting by bicycle, which means 1 1/2 hours of exercise each day. Today I walked for one hour, getting extra exercise, and I'm rather hungry.

The photographs were taken at Koli on July 27th.

(Posting title is from the poem Steady Digression to a Fixed Point by Elizabeth Willis.)

Wednesday, August 26, 2015

Where, where? You can't see a thing

I was feeling sad today. It was not due to rain, as it is good to have rain once in a while. Perhaps it was due to being excessively busy, or perhaps due to thinking about mortality.

The photographs were taken at Koli on July 27th.

(Posting title is from the poem Son of Fog by Dean Young.)

Tuesday, August 25, 2015

And pretended they were not mirrors, but clean

The photographs were taken on July 27th at Koli. It was raining for most of the time we were there, so much that the paths were flooding. The sun came out just as we were leaving.

(Posting title is from the poem Immortality by Leigh Stein.)

Monday, August 24, 2015

Embraced in being

These photographs were taken on July 26th at Koli.

I have been using Flickr for storing my photographs since 2008. Currently I have over 45,000 photographs stored, 130 GB in total. Recently Flick changed the terms for "unlimited" Flickr Pro accounts, and I'm bit unsure what that means in the future. A price increase quite possibly. But at least my Flickr stream remains ad-free.

Flickr Pro offers a new kind of statistics display for view counts, but I'm a bit unsure whether I have any use for it, or whether such things are in fact harmful to know. Today I had a look anyway. During the summer the daily view count dropped to 300, but it is now coming back up to 3000...4000 daily views. It seems that Flickr users are systematically going through the photographs, generating a lot of views. Another source is searches with the search term "lx100", which generates hundreds of views every once in a while.

(Posting title is from the poem Holding On by Richard O. Moore.)

Sunday, August 23, 2015

The world is a rare case of selective asymmetry

Today I realized it is not only deer fly season, it is also hunting season. In the morning I walked for two hours at Odilampi, and heard sounds of shooting. I got one deer fly and some raspberries.

The photographs were taken at Koli on July 26th, while it was raining.

(Posting title is from the poem Mad Lib Elegy by Ben Lerner.)

Saturday, August 22, 2015

But there must be some kind of satisfaction

Yesterday I got five deer fly crawling on the skin, the first time this summer. They used to be rare, but now there is plenty of them almost everywhere in forests and swamps.

Today I explored forests and swamps northeast of lake Odilampi. I have never been there before, and will probably return there. Near the Petikko landfill area there was a lot of noise coming from the machines, but otherwise it was quiet.

The photographs were taken at Koli on July 26th. It started to rain soon after we arrived at Koli, and from Sunday afternoon to Monday morning there was 30 mm of rain, half of the average amount of rain for a whole month.


(Posting title is from the poem Shift by Jamaal May.)

Friday, August 21, 2015

I put my hands to my face

This morning I walked for two hours at Tremanskärr, exploring swamps and forests in the east part of the area, taking photographs and eating some raspberries and blueberries. It was quiet, and I found new places to explore later on.

At noon I had eye and tooth checked, needing to breath deeply and cover eyes with a hand, and it was ok.

During this summer I have started to use non-square aspect ratios, all the way to 16:9, especially while traveling in the middle of Finland. Perhaps the wide landscape was the reason, or then I just can't see things as squares any more. It used to be that over 90% of the photographs I took were square, but now less than half are. And I'm using the aspect ratio switch more and more, exploring the possibilities.

These photographs were taken at Koli on July 26th.

(Posting title is from the poem Makeup on Empty Space by Anne Waldman.)