Factory Town – Hometown
Prenzlauer Berg
- Eberswalder U-Bhf w. Fog
Trains
I have always been a fan of playing with the shutter of the camera, so as to have flashy pictures, however, I have previously only taken such pictures of motorways and intersections. Â Today, as I went for my evening walk, I took along my camera and I’m glad I did. I walked for a good hour and by accident ran into an area between a couple of train stations; it was the perfect place to kick-start the winter, photography-wise. Obviously, the scenery is not that “winterish”, but I am still happy with the shots I got of the S-bahns that flew by the bridge where I had setup myself to shiver in the cold and lie in wait for the trains. Next time though, I’ll take an umbrella with me…
A Moment
A Random Moment From Prenzlauer Berg
When this year started I had a lot of time on my hands. I had just moved back to Finland and returned from my awesome internship to the not so awesome classrooms once more. The following months I would be occupied with my thesis (which if anyone is interested in a 50-page sleeping pill, you can find it here ) battling, struggling, trying to find my way, always seeming to lose time that I shouldn’t lose! I wanted my thesis process to be over so bad, that I wished I could’ve just skipped into June from January. Now when I look back at my spring, there isn’t a single day I would skip.
Sure, my spring consisted of days that were pure agony, due to having to just in front of a laptop writing my thesis or doing research, however, those days also often included having the casual beer at a local pub with my friends. The moments I had those beers, took probably an hour or two out of the day, but occupied a place in my mind for ever. I have so many good memories and moments from last spring that I would not ever want to skip over, even if I could. Heck, if I would have leaped forward to summer, I wouldn’t have even met as awesome of a person as I did on one cold February night, not to mention the many other encounters that wouldn’t have taken place. I would have been more mad at past me for skipping the spring, than anyone has ever been at any referee at a soccer game.
It’s only when looking in the past, do we often see the value of that particular time. Of course, there are a lot of bad times and things you wish you could jump over, but for most of us, in those seemingly bad times, when looking back at them, there is always something good as well. I especially, have a tendency to think too far ahead and thus stress about things that I cannot influence. When I constantly just think about the upcoming things and where I would want to be, I forget to live in the current moment and those are the moments you will never be able to relive.
I think everyone should just stop, take a second to think about this very moment and then enjoy it.
Back in Business
This spring I’ve noticed that I haven’t been that faithful to my beloved camera, having neglected it during my thesis writing process. Now that my studies are finally over, I can once again focus on my other interests, such as photography.
A couple of months ago, my “not so trustworthy” work companion resigned i.e. my computer died on me, leaving me not only deprived of Photoshop, but it also left me in a problematic situation where I had to write the rest of my thesis on a laptop smaller than most women’s purses. This is one of the reasons why updates on this site have been scarce during the past months, but I am working on correcting this void of pictures and text here. Starting today.
Now, for many when I say I am from Finland, the image in their mind is that I live here among Penguins, Eskimos and other characters related to cold snowy scenery. Many are even disappointed when I, like the mythbuster, bust their images and stories about Finland, unraveling the country to be a fairly normal European state. Especially Helsinki feels like any other seaside city. For some reason though, I have been more “camera shy” here than I have in other places, not taking my camera out as easily as in some other cities. Today as I toured the busy marketplaces in Helsinki, I noticed that I had far less of an edge to take pictures. Why? Because there were tons of tourists taking pictures as  well, thus no one really noticed that I snapped a few “hipshots” of random objects ( which are usually the most interesting to me).
It is no secret that Helsinki is not as busy, pedestrian-wise, as Berlin, where I could easily take pictures about anything, since everyone was doing this, but try taking a picture in mid-March at an intersection in midtown Helsinki: You will get noticed. Sure many at this point say that “so what if you get noticed?”, well, there is some culture aspect of myself, which makes me at times want to blend in with the masses, not on purpose, but that’s how many feel in Finland “don’t stick out of the crowd” “just follow the others” “do what others do”. Â The only way to get rid of a mindset like that is to act against it. Sure, it might be at first difficult for some, easy for others, but in general we should all learn to live not fearing what others think of us.
Again, this is perhaps just me being me, but I thought I’d share my 2 cents alongside a couple of nice photos that I randomly took during my walk in the city today.
I couldn’t decide which one of the traffic light pictures was best, so I made a compromise and put both up. Feel free to tell me your opinion, whether colours are in or are two gradients enough to make a picture.
Thursday Thrills
Here are today’s cold pics! Enjoy!
“Red brick” Wednesday
Good day people! As promised the cold pics keep on coming like the hits from your local radio station (with a bit more originality in the selection though ;) ). Among these photos is one of my favourite pictures of this year, so far. I don’t exactly know why I like these “red brick buildings”, but I at least think they look nice when contrasted to the white snow :)
More photos again tomorrow, don’t forget to check ’em out!
Tuesday
Morning, or good day, or some other greeting, fitting to your timezone whenever you might see this post. Here are today’s chill-pics!
Spring-Cleaning
As mentioned in the previous post a while ago, Spring often brings along with it not only the warmth of the soon to arrive summer, but for many people the sudden enthusiasm towards household chores. A phenomenon first mentioned in 1857 (Merriam-Webster), spring-cleaning is the task of doing a thorough cleaning of a place. I already did some cleaning here on my page, but now it was time to go to work on my picture folders and take out the trash (so to speak)!
This spring I have been heavily occupied with my Bachelor’s thesis ( which is nearly finished, thank you for asking), but I still managed to go out and take a lot of pictures, which I sadly didn’t really have time to work on in photoshop…that is until now. Seeing that even in the coldest corners of the world (ok, Finland is still relatively warm) the sun has done its magic and scorched the earth so efficiently that snow is nearly a thing of the past, I felt it was also appropriate to get the “snow” out of my picture collections. I devoted an hour today to go through my folders like a raccoon going through trashcans, finding eventually some bits and pieces worthy of my time.
This week I’ll be serving up a couple of cold pictures from late February each day till Friday so as to not overload people with sudden feelings of “chillyness”.  To start the week off here are the first few cold pictures to remind us, when we complain about the “not so warm” weather that it could always be worse.
Autumn
This post was due already a couple a weeks ago, but because of technical difficulties, a lengthy post that I wrote on a cold October night never saw the light of day i.e. Â never made its way onto the world wide web. Sometimes my life feels rather hectic, even though when observing from a far, it isn’t, perhaps it is just my own mind that makes everything so difficult and complicated in my small world, but at times I feel that I need to unwind.
I often clear my head by going for long walks during chilly autumn nights, thinking about the past, present and future. One evening as I headed out, a scarf around my neck, a beanie on my head and a camera in my hand, I reminisced about a lot of things as I took deep breaths of  the fresh air outside. It’s funny how climate can bring to our mind our own past sometimes, as if those things had happened just yesterday.
As I walked in my local park, that had gone silent for the winter, inhabited now only by small bunnies running mindlessly through the leaf covered scene, I remembered how I always linked autumn to anticipating something. I remember how as a small kid I waited eagerly for the leaves to fall and the colder weathers to come, because with cold weather came ice and with ice came ice hockey. Even though I have had periods in my life when hockey hasn’t been that important, as a kid it was. Partly because that was where all of your friends also were, on the ice. Only now as I’m a bit older I’ve noticed that in fact my oldest and most trustworthy friends were indeed my line mates as I was 6 or 7. Some of my friends continued to play hockey, I didn’t, I moved onto skiing, downhill that is.
When I started to ski and film my friends for snowboard videos and stuff (LINK), I got into new fun circles for which I am to this day still damn grateful. Every autumn as the weather started to get colder, we watched ,nearly non-stop, the webcam of our local ski center, to see if the snow-cannons had started to paint the slopes white, and when they did start to cover the hill with what was more Ice than snow, we headed to the center to film something. Waiting for the ski season to start was for a long time a part of my autumn, but that changed once I moved to Helsinki, and especially now that I live in Berlin.
Sure,I could have continued to ski in Helsinki, but it would’ve been way too much of a hassle to travel to the nearby towns, with public transport, not to mention not having the familiar faces of my “crew” there. As if by accident my road started to lead back to my former hobby, although this time to the rafters. A good friend of mine started to lure me into going to see the hockey matches in Helsinki, needless to say it didn’t take long for me to be hooked again to ice hockey. As the hockey season starts usually around September, this “spectator sport” started to be the new thing that I awaited to begin during autumns, we even went to see my team’s (IFK Helsinki) training matches in August, because at times it felt that the season couldn’t come quick enough. Needless to say, I haven’t been to IFK’s games in a while having moved to Berlin.
I have tried to follow both my team’s games and the local Berlin team’s games here, but it hasn’t felt the same. I do still watch the Finnish league (and the NHL , if they didn’t have a lockout season), but nowadays I’ve noticed I enjoy spending a lot of time with my camera. Even on that cold October night, as I was kicking the maple leaf piles with my feet in the empty park, I had my Sony with me. I perhaps lacked the anticipation of something “seasonal” but I have a continuous hobby now, which is surprisingly chill and allows me to clear my head as well. Dwelling through the park, snapping photos and enjoying the lack of noises is just bliss at times. That night I spent a good few hours walking around, stopping now and again to sit on a bench to observe the wild life that had still stayed in the park for the upcoming winter.
I believe Nietzsche once said ” All truly great thoughts are conceived by walking” and I do believe he is on to something there, since at least for me, when I walk alone in the evenings I am able to clear my head of the  less useful thoughts and focus on the good ones, which is something that for me is hard to do at times when surrounded by people. I might have walked out that night out of the door, with a big stressful mess of different thoughts, but returned with a much calmer mind and even a couple of nice photos, all thanks to a “sleeping” park and a late evening walk. I also know now that I do not need to have anything to anticipate during the autumn anymore, sure skiing would be fun, but in the end, taking pictures or writing nonsense isn’t a bad hobby either, and you can do it anytime of the year.
IAMJPR 