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ThePhotoWatcher

Nikon D7000
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The pageview ticker has reached 10.000. Thanks a ton. No, ten tons. :D


A lot been going on lately. I'm now living in Jurva on my own. It's a bit secluded but I like it here. School's good to say the least. We're making a newspaper and I'm writing two articles. 

I've really been getting into PC gaming lately, I've bought CS:GO, Skyrim, and Mirror's edge off Steam for basically nickles. Still kinda crap with the keyboard. GO is a great team based game to run with friends and Skyrim is addictive when alone. Mirror's edge is just something I've been wanting to play for a while, and it hasn't disappointed. I'm amazed how well my laptop runs these games, it's just a baseline laptop with a crap Celeron CPU and an integrated GPU...

It's great to live where I live - Basically next to a race track, the Botniaring. Just yesterday I was out there at the finals of the Finnish drifting championship & Time attack. It was great, but the pictures I got could have been better, because the 70-200 f/2.8 is back home with my dad so I had to use the 18-105 kit. Will still something though, will upload once I get around to it :D

Coming to cameras, I'm thinking about switching to a FX format Nikon DSLR sometime soon. I know someone who's looking for the new D750 and I might be able to buy off their old D600 from them cheap. But that means I have to sell all my  lenses and get new, expensive FX ones. But I've had my chances to use the D600 and even though it's an outdated system these days, I've gotten and seen some great images from it. (We have a D800 at school and holy moly is it good... too expensive though :(:XD:)

I had no idea this'd turn out to be a sold ad, but if you're interested in Buying my Nikon D7000 w/battery grip & 18-105 f/3.5-5.6 kit and 35mm DX Nikkor f/1.8G lenses, hit me up with a note. Camera has about 9000 shots in it. Everything comes with minimal exterior wear, as of being used. Everything works perfectly. (You've seen the stuff that comes out of it ;))

There might be an increasing amount of digital art coming from me, as I have yet to find any interesting sights here in Jurva to photograph, and I'm learning photoshop and other Adobe CC programs in school, and we have pretty good drawing tables there.

Thanks for the years & views
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I don't even know where to start.


Well, have to try something. Long long time since the last post. I managed to finish my service period in the army, unsurprisingly I miss the whole thing every now and then. 


I've been kicking back the whole summer now, doing some cool sh*t like cottage weekends with friends, photographing, drifting events, swimming, stuff to make this the one summer to remember, living the life... Hell, I even spent a week in Austria, what's not to like? :D I'm at a turnpoint here. This'll probably be the last summer I get to run around like this before my retirement days.

That's right, I'm moving off to live on my own, and not in the neighbor house, I'm moving over 200 kilometers away from home to a small town near the east coast called Jurva.
 Why's that? Well I'm finally in for studying to become a photographer :nod: I'm on a 2 year schedule for becoming something called "kuva-artesaani", and after that I'll run for Valokuvaajan ammattitutkinto (Qualification for photographer) Which'll take a year extra. School starts early in August.

About that... I haven't got a place to live there yet :O I got the word from the school a couple weeks back, I accepted the invite, and off to Salzburg I was. After we got home and I got everything sorted out, I went to Motopark to check the cars out. When I got home, I was told that our modem/router got fried by a thunderstorm :D So our household was without internet for days and only yesterday I was back online to send inquiries. Let's keep our fingers crossed for that.

Late June I was at Pesämäki raceway with my friends to check out the new race track for drifting - FPDA Drifting SM (Finnish championships) was the name of the game. Quite an in-tight track with lots of good corners.

Power to drift by ThePhotoWatcher

The reigning champion Tuomas Yli-Knuuttila took the gold here.

A couple weeks from that and it was off to central europe.

Around 12 hours of travel, 3 airports, buses and a sleepless night later it was boots on ground in Salzburg, Austria. First thing on the to do list was checking out the Red Bull Hangar-7. The place was top notch, with an amazing collection of extreme cars, bikes and aircraft on display. Not forgetting the architecture and offerings of the Mayday bar and restaurant Ikarus. Shame they don't let you publish the photos you take there, which I have a ton of :P
After that it was time to hop on the bus and get to the hotel. The room was nice, breakfasts more than adequate and what was over the top was the rooftop terrace. Perfect place to sip off a coffee in the morning or chosen beverages later. The views in the city were almost abstract for a Finn. Mountains, mountains everywhere, even in the middle of the city with big castles and a museum on top :O

Moenchsberg festung view by ThePhotoWatcher I visited a lot of interesting and unique places, including Schloss Hellbrunn, which was a castle with various trick water fountains and nozzles coming from surprising places and got wet :D Anif Zoo had some exotic animals including monkeys, zebras and lions which I have never seen before. One day I rode a cable car up the mountain in the first picture - Untersberg and had a little bit of walking/climbing to do to reach the peak. The view there at 1839m was stunning.

Rooftop terrace view. by ThePhotoWatcher


The first night I watched the Soccer WC finals Germany - Argentina. Of course interpreted in German. It was a good game. After the Germans triumphed, someone started a fireworks show nearby :D

Zone des Talpunkte by ThePhotoWatcher

After the week there, a ton of chocolate, cheap prices and testing various food & drinks you can't get up here, it was time to get back home. The trip was very tiring and I ended up sitting and waiting for a bus for around 3 hours in midnight Jyväskylä. After sleeping the night (and the next day) I was again off to Motopark and Radalle.com festival. Another SM drifting included ;)

Heavy artillery Evo by ThePhotoWatcher  Pitwork by ThePhotoWatcher
The pit was bigger than usual, they had time attack and quartermile races the same day & weekend so there were some pretty impressive cars out there.
Holding on for dear life by ThePhotoWatcher Juha Pöytälaakso and Power2drift team were the names of the day. It was extremely hot so the cars were allowed to run without their hoods on to prevent excessive heat issues.

Black rain by ThePhotoWatcher

What's next? I'm probably going to be shooting photos in the Finnish WRC Neste Rally event in and around Jyväskylä, because it's right here near me. 
 
All the shots here and more - in my gallery ;)

Long time no post so long post.
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What's up? 

I haven't been on for a long time. I managed to pass the EOD course. The final exam was a beast, I got four cases of unexploded ordnance, and managed to clear three of them without a hitch, which is enough to get me through. I even managed to clear a nasty IED 8-) Now I've taken my place as a EOD team leader, with my team still in training :D So basically all I do now is gym and errands for my superiors. Been spending a lot of time behind the wheel of a Defender for sure :D Now that I'm basically expendable for a while, I get to spend my plentiful stock of holidays :D I think I'm finally close to getting rid of my braces.


EOD by ThePhotoWatcher

We got this specialization patch on our uniforms from the course.

I have been steadily spending money to upgrade my photo kit. I bought the Nikkor 35mm f/1.8G DX lens. I like it for portraiture and because of the speed. I also bought a remote trigger to get those steady long exposures, a battery grip for my D7000 to make it more stable and increase performance (plus the thing looks like a beast now ;) ), a full glass Hoya ND400 filter and one of those tripods with bendy legs for close-up. Last but not least my Cokin filter kit with various ND, ND grad, polarizer and UV filters is being shipped to me as I write. I'm still looking for a ringflash, some reflectors and most likely I'll be picking up the Photoshop Elements 12 sometime.

That gets us to another thing. My laptop's hard drive got fried last weekend and it can't even boot. And you'll probably guess that I haven't had time to do backups of my files... So I lost all the photos on that drive. Well, wasn't that much of a loss as I haven't had time to shoot much because of the army. Still lost the photos of last summer drifting events and such :/ Well I'm glad I have something on our home desktop which I'm on right now. Today I took the poor thing to the store for diagnostics and repairs. Warranty will hopefully still be in place to cover it :)

I'm skipping the site manager studies I planned for; I'm going to be a photographer Nod I applied for a few nice places around the country. Let's hope I make it in :D As a backup I applied for a machinery engineer study, which also sounds interesting, so ain't bad for a backup :D

"The explosive only needs to work once. The technician needs to achieve 100% guaranteed succeess. Every single time."
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2014, 8000, 169

2 min read
:wave:

New year's was good! I had some fireworks of my own, a ton to eat and I even got to spend the holiday home.

I also actually got to open my christmas presents, which I couldn't have opened before because I had to stay in the army over Christmas. It was actually pretty cool to be there, football and gym all day long 8-) the van I had in my use for the week had a broken battery charger so I had to jumpstart it all the time which was a pain.

Pink by ThePhotoWatcher

Some of you have made the mistake of clicking on my page over 8000 times, which makes me happy :aww: :D
Starburst by ThePhotoWatcher

I've started using Spotify premium, and I just wanna say it's great if you have the money, but it also means you do't have to buy any other form of music. Don't know how long I'm gonna keep paying for it but it's a good thing to have for sure!

I still have 169 days left for me in the army, and I realized that I don't have any clue what to do after I get out of there. No idea about what and where to study...
Firestorm by ThePhotoWatcher Bouncy by ThePhotoWatcher

Oh, and the fireworks photos I've featured here and more are in my gallery ;)

Gonna have to put my thinking hat on...
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Completionist

3 min read
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NCO course is over. Today, we had our promotional festivities and became corporals.

Corporal! by ThePhotoWatcher

As I got back to the unit, I soon received word that I was one of the possible entrants to the renowned EOD-1 course. The thing in EOD-1 is that if you manage to blow something up, you've probably botched it, as the disposal techniques on that level aim for making the ordnance unable to function as it should. Hours later I received word that I was actually selected. I'm so happy right now, as only a very select few in the whole country get to study this level of ordnance disposal. Some of my leaders are already tipping me off about getting promoted to sergeant in the future ;) 

I'll tell you a little bit about last week, we had our final leader test. 150 kilometers of marching, 90 by bike, 60 by foot. 3 days, 7 hours of sleep. Carrying a full set of tent equipment on icy roads in the middle of the night. The marching wasn't even that bad, but I had my worst army experience so far there. Our tent was made on snow, so the fire melted the snow and it somehow got onto the snow mat. I had all of my clothes next to my sleeping bag on the mat, and when I woke up to water dripping through my sleeping bag I noticed that all of my clothes and my gun were soaking in 5 centimeters of cold water. We just had to run out of firewood at the same time so I couldn't dry them. I had to wear them dry. It was so damn cold... I fell with my bike 6 times. Was nothing compared to that :D I still think that the test could've been a lot worse, as I was barely tired after we crossed the finish line. Our squad was first, led by me as we crossed the finish line :salute: 

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