Archive of news which did no longer fit to front page

2008-03-25 Cheap memory and ultra clean desktop

I just received (finally; waited almost a month) 16GB SD-card for Canon EOS 1D Mark III. There are few deals where you can get these 16GB cards for ~65EUR. These cards are naturally not very good performance regarding the writing or reading speed, but provide nice field backup: copy from compact flash cards at end of the day all photos to this SD card and store on different place than the compact flash card. Naturally I'm able use the card for example when travelling, 1Dmk3 reported that it can fit 908 RAW images to the card, that is a plenty, specially if you add 8GB Compact Flash => total 24GB memory in camera...

I got my card from here but cannot honestly recommend (have to prepay, no communication I had to email them "are you going to ship it or not" etc.) if you are in a hurry.

After moving from MacBook to Mac Pro the desktop got really clean (to put things in perspective the display is 24 inch - yes the Apple Wireless keyboard is really compact):

BTW. I have traditionally used a textile surfaced mouse mat, which has some support for the wrist. I decided to try a professional mouse mat this time and it was worth it. With Razer Pro Pad makes the mouse much more accurate than it's with standard textile based mouse mats, I highly recommend.

2008-03-24 23 winter scenery photos added

I have not had time to do the "darkroom stuff" and as you have seen not many photos have been added lately to picturebank. I managed to go through my March photos and added them. You can find them at end of 2008 gallery.

2008-03-23 Upgrade of digital darkroom

After long time considering I upgraded to Mac Pro. I ordered minimum 8 core setup from Apple and upgraded with standard parts, which are considerably cheaper than Apple branded components. I have now two 4 core 2.8GHz Xeons, 4GB of memory and ATI 2600 GPU. I also added internal 1 terabyte SATA hard drive for my photos. Apple has done really good work when designing the case of Mac Pro: very sturdy case which makes in practice no noise at all and removes heat from inside the case (the front of the case is cool, the back of the case gets a little warm). The side panel which needs to be removed when installing hard drives and memory has rubber gasget to prevent vibrations going the the side panel. I have never had PC case even close to this quality.

After upgrade all slowness is now gone and Aperture is flying now. Apple should have been honest in marketing and not claim that Aperture works with laptops and iMacs. Few first times I exported websized images I had to check that it actually did write the JPGs to hard drive because I could not see it doing anything.

I don't know how much the multiple cores add speed since graphics should be memory bandwidth limited but usage of PhotoShop CS 3 is much much faster than it was with macBook, much more than 2.0GHz vs. 2.8GHz would let you assume. All normal operations, which used to take few seconds, like doing Quick Selection -> Refine Edge, are real time and there is no delay at all. The timing consuming operations like Merge to HDR and Photomerge are also considerably faster.

Naturally the new Mac Pro came with Mac OS X Leopard. I was quite suspicious with it since many people have had problems with it. However it seems that most of the problems have been solved and it's running smoothly. Also there are plenty of new things which I do find extreme useful: Spaces (I use 4 virtual screens, one for email/Safari, another for iWork programs, 3rd for PhotoShop and 4th for Aperture - I have configured mouse button 4 to go to spaces and I can switch between screens instantly):
Another feature which came with the Leopard is the Time Machine which automates backups and makes it possible to go back in time to fetch old version of some document. Also scripting has been improved, both Automator and AppleScript have got new features. I also have started to study Xcode and object C, just for fun.

I also got iWork while local shop selling Apple stuff had special offer for price of 50EUR. I haven't yet used anything else than the iWork '08 Pages, which is Apple's equivalent of Microsoft Word. I like Apple's approach to such boring subject as word processor: to me the Pages is much more creative approach than MS office is. I don't think Pages would be very good on real work (at least kind of work what I do, e.g. writing technical specifications) but I really liked how easy it's to create very good looking documents with minimum effort. Also integration to iPhoto was seamless and I haven't used preview generation in Aperture but I might reconsider in order to use my own photos in iWork '08.

2008-02-26 Canon EOS 1D Mark III article added

I sold my Canon EOS 5D and purchased Canon EOS 1D Mark III. I have been pretty happy to the new camera. Here is short article about the new camera.

I upgraded my aperture from 1.5 to 2.0. There are new functionalities but performance could be still improved. Apple is losing users to Adobe Lightroom due to the performance problems with Aperture. Let's see how this goes...

Weather has been quite lousy for photography. Therefore there are just few new photos on the picturebank. However I have added few photos to 2008-gallery. And also I have been catching up with 2006 and 2007. For example I have added 2006 4th of July photos from USA, Rio de Janeiro photos and some Chicago cityscapes.

2008-02-17 Nine photos added

On Saturday I did few "studio" experiments. There are quite different than my usual photography. Photos are taken by using mirror as base and then coloured paper as background, reflected from the mirror. This was inspired by Strobist. Using mirror has drawback that there are internal reflections in the mirror and therefore the reflection may have two "ghost"-images.

Another photos are from one of closest forests from my home, a path from Hervantajärvi to Taivalpirtti. This was first time I got to test my brand new Canon EF180mm f/3.5 L USM macro lens. It seems to be good performer, but it's too early to say. A review will follow later when I have more experience of using this lens.

Mentioned photos can be found from 2008 gallery.

2008-02-12 Tampere night photos and other stuff added

I have added Tampere by night photos to picturebank. Many of these photos are panoramas and are made with Canon TS-E45mm f/2.8 lens which makes it possible to do panoramas without any mapping in software and due to that every pixel is as sharp as in original images. For a long time it felt really nice to be outdoors and photographing, for reason or another I didn't do any photography during the fall 2007.

I first suspected the quality of TS-E45mm but I was worrying for nothing, it's a great lens and is extremely sharp, on same level as my Carl Zeiss Distagon T* 28mm f/2.8. I have added page for TS-E45mm and it's almost complete.

Also I have started adding 2006 photos to database.

2008-01-30 Canon EOS 40D

Summer went and winter came, and I haven't had time to update the website at all. Actually there would have not been much to update to update except all old photos since the 2007 was quite busy year.

I'm in USA and did purchase the Canon EOS 40D. I was mainly just interested about the live view functionality. I haven't yet actually used the camera just some testing on the hotel room, but the live view did feel excellent for manual focusing purposes. Eagerly waiting to get into real action. If live view also works in real life situations then it might be time to consider moving to EOD 1Ds mk III to get full frame and live view.

BTW. I'm selling 5D and 20D to get room for 1Ds mk3.

2007-07-14 Denmark photos added

On June I was on training on Friday & Monday on Trelleborg Sweden. Since I have spent already a lot of time in southern Sweden I decided to go for weekend into Denmark.

I decided to explore east side of Denmark and specially wanted go to island of Møn. I had hotel in place called Ringsted. Comparing to Finnish standards the opening times of grocery stores were ridiculous, nothing was open on Sunday and Friday&Saturday they closed early.

In Saturday it was raining until 6PM and I was quite disappointed. This was good and bad: I got change to go "scouting" for photographic opportunities for Sunday, but also found that this area of Denmark doesn't have much to photograph. However Møn was much more interesting than the eastern part of Denmark.

See the Denmark photos here.

2007-05-17 First photos with Canon EF 85mm f/1.2 L USM Mk II

I finally received my Canon EF 85mm f/1.2 L USM Mk II lens. I have been in couple nights taking photos in Sesquicentennial State Park in Columbia, South Carolina, USA.

First impressions from the lens: big, fat, heavy, not very well balanced on 20D. While taking photos first of course noticed how bright the viewfinder is. Right after this I found out that Katzeye micro-prism collar don't work very well with the lens - somehow the view is so bright that it's almost impossible to see if micro-prism goes dark, since it doesn't - the picture just goes "broken" when it's out of focus, unless it's really much out of focus when it also darkens.

Second thing I noticed that focus & recompose doesn't definetly work with this lens. Since 99,9999% of my photos the subject is off-center, so I have to always use the other focus points than the central one with this lens. With 20D didn't seem to be big problem since the focus points are quite well spread - however with 5D (which is waiting me in Finland...) there might be problem since the focus points are all in center of the screen. I did order Ee-S focusing screen, which is supposed to be good for manual focusing with 5D. Good thing about focusing is that when manually focusing the turn from infinity to minimum focusing distance is really long. This makes the manual focusing very accurate. Also I didn't feel that autofocus would have been slow - but I would always liked to prefer more precise autofocus than fast. I don't like the principe how Canon autofocus works: autofocus measures how much it's focused incorrectly and then tells lens to go direction x amount of y - I would prefer that Canon camera body would check the focus before focus lock and re-adjust the focus automatically to get for sure exact autofocus. With the current method focusing is acceptable (according to Canon standards) when it will focus inside depth of field - I would prefer autofocus always focus exactly middle of depth of field and then manually give small adjustment.

After taking photos the initial impression is that 85L has quite good "pop" on images. However they were not as good as I expected on plasticity and creation of "3d feel" to images was lacking. Lens seems to be very sharp even at f/1.2 but usage is very difficult as well as finding subjects, which are suitable for such thin depth of field. Bokeh generally is good looking and for example when stopped 2 stops down to f/2.5 the bokeh is still very good. It seems that I really have to make proper comparison between 85L and Leica Elmarit-R 90mm f/2.8 - if it seems that Leica is better on creating 3D look / "pop" to images then it's quite obvious that 85L will be sold and I start to find alternative (Leica Summicron-R 90mm f/2.0 APO or Contax Planar T* 85mm f/1.4) lens to replace 85L and 85 f/1.8.

For some reason I took all 5 photos I selected to picturebank on vertical orientation, well strange things happen... Link to photos (the 5 last photos of this selection from the link).

2007-05-13 Added new "3D" photos

I was reading Fred Miranda's forums on Friday evening and found interesting thread about 3D effect in photos. When I went to see Little River Trail I could not get idea of 3d look in photos out of my mind. So I decided to try to make my photos as 3D as I could.

While processing photos it was quite obvious that Canon EF 50mm f/1.4 USM is not up to the task of creating 3D images. It lacks microcontrast and contrast required. This is the major difference between Leica Summicron-R 50mm f/2.0 and Canon 1.4. After fixing the colors, contrast to similar as in 200L on computer there started to be something but I was not able to create the edge sharpness and punch required for 3D - this comes automatically without any corrections with L-lenses (not with 17-40...) and Leica&Contax lenses I have.

I really look forward of getting the Canon EF 85mm f1.2 L USM (the delivery just missed this weekend) and Canon 5D (waiting me in Finland...just couple more weeks) to try yo create some 3D photos. I have great expectations regarding microcontrast and other stuff from 85L, not only with f/1.2 - my Canon EF 85mm f/1.8 USM doesn't have great microcontrast at any aperture.

See my 3D effect photos from Saturday.

I also added two other photos from Saturday's photographing session.

2007-05-12 Added new photos from last weekend's Sunday

Added Sunday 6th May photos to Picturebank. One panorama (thumbnail on left side) and one tree photo.

2007-05-08 Added new photos from "Smoky Mountains - Roaring Fork"

First visit to Smoky Mountains left places to go and many places to visit again. On first time sky was quite clear and there were not much rain. On 2nd visit it rained whole Saturday but I decided still to go and see if there was something to photograph. First I planned to drive around Roaring Fork car route and take photos from car, but after a while decided to go out since it was raining very lightly.

After a while it started raining more, so I made rain cover for the camera from plastic bag and rubber band. It worked quite well and I made small hole for viewfinder and used the standard eye-cup to fasten the plastic bag to viewfinder. This was not perfect solution but sufficient enough for the light rain. On the end of photographing session it was raining more heavily and I used umbrella to protect the camera. Luckily the rain was really warm since I didn't have any rain gear for myself.

Link to Roarin Fork photos. I took some photos also on Sunday but I haven't yet had time to organize them and publish them, I'll try to add Sunday photos later this week.

BTW. I found photographing in rain so interesting that I went and added Kata E-702 from B&H to my Canon EF 85 f/1.2 II L USM order. It seems it was last one on B&H since they are out of stock now. Let's see how well E-702 works!

2007-05-01 Photos from 2007 added

I had planned to add photos on order: rest of 2005 photos, then 2006 photos and finally 2007 photos. I did add some photos from 2005 but then get motivation problems, due to huge amount of work needed to be done on categorizing, putting meta data in and rating images. I had all this done on all 2007 photos so they were added instead.

These photos are mainly from USA where I have been working, but there are few from Finland as well. On USA I have been mainly been in South Carolina and due to that majority of photos are from South-East USA. On USA I have found out State/National Parks quite good. Major difference between USA and Finland parks is that in Finland National Parks are free, but in USA you almost always have to pay some sort of fee, however there are also free parks.

I have now added 62 photos to gallery 2007. They are from February to end of April. There will be soon more coming and I'm in process getting rest of 2005 and whole year 2006 also to Picturebank, when I get my motivation back... Here is link to 2007 photos.

PS. These photos are done with Apple macBook with calibrated display and then converted to sRGB. If your browser does support having color profiles in pictures * you can see pictures as I have them adjusted - otherwise you may not see correct colors.
* (mac Safari has this functionality - I don't know any other browsers at the moment supporting this functionality)

2007-02-11 Camera backpacks page added

Just purchased LowePro CompuDaypack for business travelling with 2 laptops and camera gear. Link to the page.

2006-12-21 Apple "blog"

Due to decision to switch to mac on personal computing (95% image processing) I created a "blog"/news page. Link to the page.

2005-05-03 Toronto (2005) pictures added

2005-05-01 Camera pages updated

Camera equipment pages updated due to changing from D30 to 20D. Also G1 pages have been moved from Tampere University of Technology pages to here.

2005-04-30 Australia (2004) photos finally added

I have been working with Australia photos over 2 months to put the in to the picturebank but since lack of free time it has taken quite long time to finish the project.

2004-01-05 CD database modified - now also DVD movies included

CD database was programmed again and now the CDs and DVDs are in SQL database. Added availability selection in public side, in admin side it's possible to manage loans more easily than it was in the old version.

2003-07-18 New link system added to site

Now links are in SQL database and they can be easily managed. Now I will update all my links on the fly, if I find interesting site I'll add it to the site. I use this site as my "favorites"/"bookmarks", because I use a lot of different computers and transferring the links from machine to other would be too cumbersome.

2003-03-23 New fully functional picturebank opened!!!!

I got frustrated developing my own php-software for picturebank and decided to use Pekka Saarinen's exellent Exhibition Engine software. Now I have uploaded my best film photos to "Before 2003"-exhibition and I'll add exhibitions also for "2003" and "Test photos". Recent photos will include best of my recent photos. Photos will be kept for some time in this exhibition and then deleted or moved to Best photos. Test photos are photos related testing camera equipment etc. You can access my picturebank by clicking picturebank link on the left side menu.

2003-02-24 Canon D30 link page added

Finally bought Canon D30. This page contains mainly links to other D30 pages. Use left side navigator to go my other D30 pages

2002-12-31 Depth of Field (DOF) calculator added

My new DOF calculator is JavaScript based, instead of Java applet, what the old DOF calculator used.

2002-08-25 Nissin 360 TW page added

I have old flash, Nissin 360 TW, and often people ask thinks about and I decided to create FAQ page about the flash.

Page contains pictures of flash, using instruction and some FAQ questions.

2002-03-01 Vahonen.com site opened

Just basic information (About me) page added.