hiidenkonttibeta

Long time no blogging, and then it’s straight to bad news. My employer downsizes the R&D department of the unit I’m working on, firing up to 40% of employees. Because of the negotiations for finding another job within the company takes 6 weeks, we’ll all live 6 weeks in uncertainity. Not fun.

This means uncertainity for まんぴつ as well. If I get fired, I need to find another home for my blog.

There’s a joulukortti / New Year card exhibition in the lobby of Oulu main library. The old cards are a bit .. different .. than the modern cards:

For example, on the top of the first photo, there’s a snowman hanging out with a bottle, and a pig which seems to be eating fly agaric mushrooms (punainen kärpässieni) which grow in the middle of a snowy street. Those are not so common themes on modern cards, at least in the ones I’ve seen.

In the middle of the second photo, two pigs stare horrified at the ham painting on the wall. What do they do in that living room anyway? They’re just now figuring out why they were invited inside? And who hangs big paintings of ham on their walls anyway?

I’m not sticking to lo-fi photo theme so strictly any more. Ever since I started shooting with 7610 I’ve done a little editing – cropping and scaling. But from now on, I’ll also do some tuning for colours, if the photo is worth it or if simply doing auto-levels is sufficient. I’ve already edited all of this year’s photos that way, except this photo of Laananoja with bright new lighting by the city hall:

for which auto-levels did nothing at all and it’s actually more effective to have the snow on the right hand side (lit by normal street lights) be ugly orangish.

Around midnight, people were firing fireworks around the city. We briefly visited the marketplace – some flew horizontally and exploded in the crowd, but we didn’t see any injuries happening, and according to Kaleva’s web news no injuries caused by fireworks happened in Oulu. It’s also pretty hard to get photos of fireworks exploding in completety random directions. I only got about two photos, and they are really bad, but at least the quality of this year’s photos can only improve from now on. Here are the first two photos of the year:

This morning there’s litter from used fireworks everywhere:

This year also begins with all the flags in half mast, again because of the disaster in Asia.