Red Christmas...?

We had a Red Christmas this year as you can see from the picture above.
Well, not really, the picture is taken in the afternoon at sunset last Sunday when the sun broke through the clouds as it stopped snowing. White balance set  on "clouds" and Ingela got exactly the colour shade of our surroundings at that very moment.

I'm not dreaming of a Christmas this white...

The picture is from a webcam overlooking a traffic circle here. The snow is pouring down at 11:35 am. And more is to come the next days.
Nuff said...
Hans

The shortest day of the year

Sunrise at 10:12 am
Sunset at 2:42 pm
Length of the day 4h 40 min
That is not much if you need to work by daylight :)
The sun is "shining" but it is -12 C outside in the middle of the day.
In the meantime we can enjoy our Christmas tree

Winter at last!

The winter finally hit us, the temperature has occasionally plunged down to -17 C since Monday morning, last night we got about 6 inches of snow and in the morning it was like this outside when I left for work at 7:30 AM:

View from our driveway down our street

Our house as seen from the street

Our miniature tree is doing well and growing... And it seems that the jar has grown too...

just kidding, this is another, bigger one, than the one shown some weeks ago!

Today 92 years ago...

...Finland declared its autonomy in the wake of the Russian revolution. Lenin had his hands full with the creation of the new Soviet Union and could not let Finland disturb his plans. He thought that once the Finns have calmed down and returned to normal, he will orchestrate a Finnish revolution with the help of the Russian solders that were still in Finland and reconnect it to the USSR, but that attempt came to a tragical end in the spring of 1918.
That is why we are flying the flag this day, December 6.

Today 70 years ago...

...Finland was attacked by the Soviet Union. Many cities and civil targets were bombed the very first day, just to terrorise and demoralise the home front. The outcome was of course quite the opposite.

Vaasa: (swe: Vasa)

Helsinki: (swe: Helsingfors)

About 1000 civilians died and 2000 were wounded throughout that campaign known as the "Winter War" that lasted until March 13 1940. Finland had to give up the Karelian isthmus and other parts along the eastern border and the area around Hanko (swe: Hangö) town and peninsula inclunding big parts of the surrounding archipelago. The Soviet turned that area into a marine base.

The hostilities ended with some 23000 dead Finnish soldiers and 270000 dead Soviet soldiers.

My father was located on the coastal artillery in the easternmost parts of the Gulf of Finland in the beginning and was later transferred to the coastal artillery at Taipale in the lake Ladoga where fierce fights took place.

He escaped the Winter War without wounds but his soul was scarred...

Growing our own Christmastree

We are growing our own Christmastree in a jar and we hope it will grow into full size before the Christmas eve.

Just kidding... :)

There must be something wrong with the weather now, the sun has been shining from blue skies for two consecutive days now. But tonight we will have rain again...

I have to confess...

...that I got carried away by Ingelas new Nikon D3000 and made up my mind to get my own DSLR and refresh some of my old knowledge of the art of photography and upgrade it to include digital photography.
I started to google around and search eBay for something cheap and nice to suit my wallet. The brand was of course already set because of the Nikon D3000 and my first impression was that a D40 would be the thing to get because of the 6 Mpix sensor with big pixels, but much to my surprise I found that D40:s are still quite expensive (seems to be kind of "cult" camera nowadays...) though it is not in Nikons program of products anymore. That added to the fact that the autofocusing and measuring system in D40 is rather simple my attention was turned towards the D50 and D70 series of cameras, sporting the same 6 Mpix sensor but a better and more versatile metering system and as a big advantage, the possibility to use the older fullformat Nikon AF-lenses without motor. You can only use AF-S lenses with own built-in motors with the D40, D60, D3000 and D5000.
Taking into the comparition that the D50 is just a "crippled" and cheaper version of D70 that was concocted to fill in at the consumer starter level some years ago before the D40, my opinion was clear, a D70 or D70s  it has to be! As my son, Markus, owns a D70s since some years ago, and have praised the functionality of that camera, I stared to search the web.
I soon found a good looking D70 body (with the D70s software), fired just in excess of 9000 times, just in the middle of my expected price range so I threw a bid on that and much to my surprise I won the auction.
The camera arrived last Monday and it really was in nearly mint condition. No signs of use other than the info in the EXIF-file that the shutter had been fired less than 10000 times.
It works like a charm though it is of course bigger and heavier than the D3000 but it fits like a glove in my hands.
The only drawback is a rather small screen but you get used to it...:) That is a small price to pay when it was about half the price of the D3000!
And yes, Ingela had to be compensated with another toy that is most permanently sitting on the D3000 now, the new 35 mm f:1.8 AF-S DX from Nikon.:) If you buy this lens you will most probably use it all the time.
You can then really forget about using your flash indoors.

Last Friday night we spent the evening in the sofa with some Glühwein, lit some candles and I took some pictures with my new toy:

Yeah, it is a little noisy but it is shot in candlelight at ISO 1600 without tripod :)

Looks warm and cosy, doesn´t it? But the morning after we woke up in a landscape like this:

Seems that the winter hit us once again but today, Sunday, it is nearly gone again.

The BIG 6-0 continued

My son Markus and his girlfriend Tuuli came up from Helsinki the weekend before my birthday to celebrate my big 6-0. On Saturday evening we went to a nice restaurant to have a good meal. Ingela's mom joined us.

Afterwards we went home to our place for coffee and three different kinds of desserts.

And then followed the unavoidable SingStar competition:

The old lead singer :)

Ian

Lukas and Markus

Lukas and Ian

Ingela, the very excited listener, sewing together her granny square afghan.

The party continued the following Friday, but that is a different story :)

Wow!

Even the sun remembered my birthday and produced a new set of sunspots on October 23 :)

Solarcycle no 24 has been a slow starter so far but this set of spots are good looking. But I'm still predicting a cold winter here on the northern hemisphere.

The BIG 6-0

Still looking good... Eh?

Still feeling like 29 though I might well be looking like the autumn leaves below  :)

Or like my son Markus' impression of me looking into the mirror seeing the little kid I still am:

Some cold resistant species

Despite the low temperatures the last days there are some species out in our garden that do not really care. I found some rucola flowers and the gooseberries are still hanging in there.

-7 C and descending...

Last night the temperature dropped down to -7 C and the forecast tells us that it will continue to drop day by day now. Which tells me that whenever there will be a low pressure arriving from the Atlantic ocean we will have snow, lots of snow...
Anyway, the weather was crisp and clear this morning and the nature was beautifully glaced by the frost so I decided to take the new Tamron 90mm macro for a spin.
I am in the beginning of the learning curve how to use this new toy of ours and it shows of course.

A new Toy in the family

Let me introduce you to Nikon D3000 and friends:

After a long time of procrastination, thinking and rethinking, searching for the best fit for our money and needs we finally invested in a new camera, a DSLR with a few lenses. The camera body is the new Nikon D3000 introduced in August this year, the lens included in the package is the 18-55mm standard zoom with Vibration Reduction. As extras I chose the classic Tamron 90 mm short tele with 1:1 macro, now available with built-in autofocus motor to suit simpler camera bodies like this. From another resource I found a cheap Nikon telezoom, the 55-200 but without vibration reduction.

Well now nobody here in this house can blame the equipment if taking crappy pictures with this stuff...:)

Well, if you take a look at the specs for this camera you will see that the sensor is just a moderate 10 MPixels and the "old" camera, the Olympus SP570 UZ is the same so what´s the big deal?

The big deal is that the physical size of the sensor in this camera is twice the size, width- and heightwise which makes the light receiving area four times bigger as well as the size of every pixel itself which provides for better sensitivity with less picture noise in low light. And the resolution of the lens itself can be better utilised on a larger sensor.

I may not have mentioned it before but (as so many other people involved in vacuum tubes, radio and audio) I was deeply involved in photography in the good old days. Back in the beginning of the sixties I would run around with an old box camera my mom got from her sister Hilda who was living in the USA and later on I got my own box camera.

My first girlfriend's dad owned a Yashica two-lens reflex camera for 70 mm film and that was the first camera I ever used that could take really good pictures. I learned how to develop film and got myself an enlarger, a second-hand Opemus III and started to make copies in B&W. The first 35 mm camera I bought was a Nikkormat FT2 in 1975 with a hefty 35-105 mm Sigma zoom lens that was something new and exclusive then. Later I bought a real pocket camera a Rollei 35S for 35 mm film and that was a nice little camera that travelled with me everywhere. Started to shoot color slides and traded in my old Opemus for a new Durst with a color head and started to make color copies of my slides.

Nowadays all that equipment is sold and all cameras in this household are digital cameras, compact- and bridgecameras and now this new Nikon.

Some samples taken with this camera and the Tamron lens:

The Party Goes On...

...today! It is 19 years today since Ingela and I got married in this beautiful church:



Never a dull moment since... :)

Happy Birthday!

Congratulations to Ingela, my beloved wife!

Time to move forward

As you can imagine there has been a lot of thinking to do and I must tell you that it creates a lot of stress inside my head.
As I was my mom's only child I have to make plans for the future regarding my mom's stuff and what to do with the house etc. etc.
We have emptied the refrigerator and freezers and got rid of the flowers, taken care of valuable stuff and documents of importance and shut down everything except the circulation pump for the heating system.
There is oil in the tank to keep the house warm at a reduced temperature next winter but in the meantime i want to find somebody to buy the house because it is in much need of renovation and I simple cannot afford to do that.
We already have a house of our own and the small summer place so we already have two money-sinks on our hands.

Rest In Peace, Dina

The funeral took place Friday July 3. In the picture I'm surrounded by my sons - from left to right - Markus, Lukas and Ian.
Picture by Ingela.

She is gone

My mother died today, Sunday, June 21, at the age of 88 years, 6 months and 14 days.
Rest in peace, Dina!

Dina 2 1/2 years old in 1923

Dina 19 years old, in the spring of 1940

Dina 27 years old early in 1948 a few months before she married my father.

Dina surrounded by her grandchildren Lukas, Ian and Markus in 2005

This is the last picture of her at acceptable health in January 2009

Changes

My mom, Dina, is seriously ill and hospitalised since the end of April this year. The photo above is 1 1/2 year old and taken the day she turned 87.
She has struggled with cancer since 1993, it started with cancer in the bladder and she went through a bladder removal with a urostomy in 1996, after that they have removed melanomas from her forehead and she got her right breast removed in 2006.
The last six months her health has deteriorated and the results from several tests show that a lot of indicators for cancer are severely elevated but she denied any kind of agressive treatment, no operations, no drugs, no nothing at this stage. She just want to leave this life in peace and takes only pain killing shots. She is fading away day by day.
Her house out in the archipelago is empty and cold now and it gives me an odd feeling to think about that she won't go back there anymore.