This photograph brings back good memories from Laukaa. The rays of the setting sun really made the early autumn colours glow.

I always knew this photograph had potential; I just couldn’t dig it out with Lightroom. Silver Efex Pro made it a breeze to match the RAW image my vision.

Today’s photograph also comes from Berlin. A little dull park picture with the classical theme of lonely benches was made presentable with Color Efex Pro by accentuating the golden glow and adding some soft focus.

I made some more tests with Silver Efex Pro (of which a separate posting is forthcoming). The software allows me to quickly get out results that please at least my own eye. I may be just a pretend to be artist creep, but black and white does simplify photography in a way that captures it’s deepest essence – the shapes and shifting light. My yearning for a film camera disappeared completely after I discovered Silver Efex Pro lets me emulate that mode of expression to complete satisfaction of at least myself.

I got tired of the way my photographs are presented on this blog, so I’m moving to sharing them via Flickr. My purpose is to install a wordpress plugin (haven’t decided on which, yet) to share the photographs from Flickr to this blog. So the current, somewhat anemic picture post format is going away. Hopefully I can find more energy for posting pictures using Flickr and for photography in general, as it has suffered from severe lack of time.

Click to enlarge

We visited Stockholm onboard the Viking Gabriella and I when the opportunity to shoot some art photography (as my wife calls it) presented itself, I took full advantage. The weather was foggy and I gave a nice atmosphere to some of the images. I had a few good opportunities to shoot at the small islands, and rest of the time I focused on the ship architecture and structures.

Have a look through full gallery of the images.

A thread called The XR Rikenon 50mm f2 sharpest 35mm lens claim got me very intrigued about this lens. At a glance it seemed to me to be comparable to a Pentax-M 50mm f1.7 in that it is said to possess a good sharpness wide open and goes for very cheap on ebay. When one came up on a Finnish photography forum for 30€, I knew I had to buy it to see if there was anything to the talk. Only when the lens arrived, I noticed it was the Ricoh XR Rikenon 50mm f/2 S.
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