hiidenkonttibeta

Within 10 minutes I’ll jump in to Tuomo’s trusty Skoda (which he trusts so much that we’ll probably borrow 母の Peugeot from Tervola) and drive 北, to Muddusjärvi, Inari. It’s about 550km from Oulu to Muddusjärvi, so most of this day we’ll spend sitting in a car. I’ve still got no way of blogging by mobile phone, so another set of back-dated entries will follow..

A lot of entries dated in the past lately.. Anyway, about the photos. Until I started using the 7610, all of the photos were straight out of the phone, with no retouching (other than rotating when needed). But, as I said before, the 1Mpix images the 7610 produces are too big, so I started downscaling them. While doing that I realised that it is even better to crop some of the photos first.

So, nowadays the photos are not straight from the camera phone – if there is some uninteresting stuff around the main subject of the photo I crop it off and then downscale the image to 800×600 pixels. Or, if the main subject is very small, I crop the image to right size without any scaling. This is like using the digital zoom afterwards (but with a lot better quality in this cameras case :-) If the quality of the photos seems to have improved a tiny bit lately, this is the reason.

Some friends of mine were going to visit Hailuoto and I managed to force myself in their company. Hailuoto is a big island in the sea about 30km from Oulu (by road). There’s no bridge going there, but a ferry:

The first stop was an emu farm. There’s a man who raises those oversized Australian birds because of “emu oil” which is some kind of miracle drug. They also make funny sounds. Here’s some of those which were staying outside:

Most people psobably visit Hailuoto because of the beach. There’s sand dunes and the water was surprisingly warm. A “nature path” went by the beach. The second photo shows an example of a sign along it, explaining some details of nature in Hailuoto. And this one is in a pretty good condition, compared to the others…:

There’s windmills in several locations around Oulu by the seaside, and in Hailuoto too. Here’s a bird floating in the wind by a windmill, two more windmills, and the Hailuoto lighthouse:

木曜日に雨がふりました. 小雨ありませんでした. 私は雨の中にじてんしゃで三キロメートルしました. It was a nice weather when I left, but on the way it started raining. And it was a serious rain, not some idle drizzle. People were hesitant to run the five meters from their car to the shop. The rain formed small lakes on the streets and parking places. I managed to get so wet that I formed small lakes in the shops just by standing ten seconds in one place. The coupon for getting my film back from developing in photo shop was dripping wet, and I had it in my wallet.

And the .. well, I could go on but maybe that’s enough – it’s just so much fun to experience a little summer rain every now and then ;-)

There was a wonderful, very stuffed book/CD shop in Turku, called Alfa Antikva. Most of their space is taken by second hand books and comics and new(?) CD’s, but there was also a good selection of manga (English translations) and some DVD’s.

In one corner, between a table/shelf of comics and under a shelf of 2nd hand sci-fi books, there was the set of about six brown cardboard boxes labeled “proge”, full of CD’s. I picked the box which had ‘H’ bands, and found the album I’ve been looking for years: Huono parturi by the Finnish prog group Höyry-kone. うれしかった!

From another second hand bookshop and from some seller in Finncon I bought a set of sci-fi fantasy books:

• The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson
• Childhood’s End by Arthur C. Clarke
• Dragonsong by Anne McCaffrey
• Star Trek the Next Generation #1: Ghost Ship by Diane Carey
• Starship Troopers and The Door Into Summer by Robert A. Heinlein

The other trip in Turku area was the ruins of castle of Kuusisto in Kaarina. The castle was built in 1317 and the Russians destroyed it in 1318 :-) It has been rebuilt and re-destroyed several times, until in 1528 Kustaa Vaasa ordered it to be taken down. Now there’s only ruins which are being restored – but up to which point, I don’t know.

The surrounding area looks nice, it’s countryside with turnip rape fields and pieces of forest with big leaf-trees:

The private road through the forest to the castle ruins was particularly nice:

And here’s a stereo photo pair from the forest (too bad the second photo of the pair showing the road in the forest was badly shaken):

It was raining hard and there was a little wind so some of the branches and leaves have moved a bit between the shots..