Prologue: Instead of posting my photos to Facebook, I have been long planning and promising to start posting them in my blog instead. Facebook kills any quality photographs have no matter how you pack them. For some unknown reason, Facebook does not take real image size versus compressed image size to account, but will repack everything always. It’s not a problem for your average selfies and food shots taken with a cellphone, but anything above that is unfortunately lowered in quality to unacceptable levels. The lower quality of the images is not the only problem, the other problem has been my laziness to post the photos in my real blog since I have one instead of dropping them in my Facebook feed. This blog has been quiet for so long time that almost nobody even knows this exists, so now that it’s finally running on a faster hosting, I might start using it more also.
Today I don’t have an actual story to write, but thought I’d post a couple of photos taken with a Leica M240 and Leica 50 mm F1.4 Summilux Asph. and Voigtländer 75 mm F1.8 Heliar Classic. Although the weather was warm considering it was so cloudy, it was also very moist to the level that long distance photos were an impossibility. So today’s photos were taken on my way from work to home on 22nd of July, 2016.
It’s less than a week until the start of the Finnish round of the World Rally Championship, Neste Rally. The official start is on next week and about 270 000 people will attend, more than people living in the Jyväskylä area. That will show on the streets, but even now that there isn’t anything official going on besides the banners etc., there are people coming from all over the world. I’m living in the city centre on the last city block that is not closed due to special stage EK12 during the rally. During the actual event I can see the helicopters transmitting the live feed all around the world from my bedroom window. Maybe I’ll add some more photographs next week when the rally is actually started. I won’t be buying tickets, watch TV or listen to the radio, so the only thing I see is what happens on the streets of Jyväskylä.
I prefer the walking district since I live there and Captain Obvious reminded me of bringing up the fact about lack of traffic also, which is very nice to be honest. Living in a city centre is not usually the most quiet place of all, but where I live it’s relatively quiet considering how close I am from everywhere (distances are in hundreds if not in tens of meters).
Jyväskylä is not by the ocean, so this is the closest to real surfing people usually get near the city centre (this is taken about 1 km away near my workplace). I guess the lake Jyväsjärvi is not big enough for surfing, since it’s only a few kilometers across and 14 km around. It’s part of lake Päijänne which is of course a very large lake, but it’s not near the city. On the background you can see part of Lutakko district and also the harbour. All the buildings are not finished and the real Lutakko shoreline with high-rise buildings is not shown on the photo, since all that is on the other side of the area a little bit to the right. Anyway, the point of this photo is to show how people come up with ideas how to enjoy the water even when there’s no wind and not that much space either.
Unless you have lived in a cave for the last week or two, you probably have heard of Pokémon Go. This photo is taken in Church Park where lots of people are spending time playing the game day in day out. I’ve never tried the game nor planning to, but I guess since the Old City Church is a historical landmark, this is one of those so called PokeStops, which gather people together. I’m not fully understanding the point of the game, but if that’s what gets you moving (for me it’s my camera, for others it’s their dog etc.), I see no problem with that. At least so far I haven’t seen anyone dumb enough to drive while playing the game, so as long as it stays that way, I don’t mind. What I don’t like is people driving cars and doing something else than looking around them while driving.