Photos from Ekenäs autumn

Porvoo panorama

A month without meat (?)

A week ago, I decided to stay for a whole month without eating any meat at all. The first week hasn't really been any different from any other week really, since I have tried to be without meat earlier too.

The only thing I have noticed is how much more you have to think about what to purchase in the supermarket. I have also cooked my own food almost every day, since it's easier to compose vegetarian meals than to look for pre-made ones. Pasta with kidney beans, green beans, cashew nuts and onions is a nice completely vegetatian meal that's also quite inexpensive since the ingredients can be purchased as frozen or in tin cans. Fry everything until nice, and put a bit of chili sauce on it if you want to. It's also good with fresh cut rucola salad.

Many people have different attitudes towards meat, myself included. Before this experiment, I ate meat almost every day (which isn't good for you), and I don't know yet if this month will affect my eating habits later on in the future.

Editing your photos in Adobe Lightroom

I have been using Adobe's photo processing application Lightroom for some time now. I really enjoy the control it gives me over my pictures before I "develop" them. By developing I mean the processing of RAW format pictures. Using this format, the camera user gets the full range of image information from the camera (if it supports this format). Many times, the white balance or the exposure time hasn't been optimal; in these situations it's preferable to be able to modify these values later.

Some of the features in Lightroom include selective colour editing, image histograms (where one can brighten or darken shadows, compensate for too bright highlights etc.) Since my own camera has quite a high noise ratio at higher ISO speeds, I also appreciate the noise reduction feature (which surprisingly doesn't reduce too much details in my pictures). Photoshop's own Camera RAW-feature also has most of Lightroom's capabilities, but I prefer Lightroom because of it's excellent file organizing and labeling functions.

Lightroom can also (obviously) be used for regular JPEG processing, so more consumer-oriented camera model's pictures can also be enhanced with this software. However, if one has a camera with RAW capabilities I highly recommend using them when doing Lightroom editing.

Lightroom 5 introduced the new Radial Filter, which gives the user more control over specific parts of the image (for example the ability to bring forward certain details in an image and make other details softer).

Another important thing to take into consideration is your monitor. Usually, the monitor that comes with your desktop or laptop computer is quite badly set up from a colour perspective. Your monitor has the ability to be calibrated however, which basically makes the colours more comparable to how your pictures will look when printed out or viewed on other (calibrated) devices. I have used the Spyder 3 Professional calibrator myself, and noticed quite a big difference after calibrating my monitor (the colours are much warmer and looked incredibly cold prior to this process).