Scotland/London/Olympics 2012

I spent the last 10 days of July in the United Kingdom with my friend, first in Scotland (Glasgow with visits to Edinburgh and the highlands) and then in London. We attended a few Olympic venues too; football in Glasgow, boxing and canoe slalom in London. I really enjoyed my time and Britain truly showed us it's hospitality.

This was my first visit to the UK, but certainly not the last! There's so much left to see in London alone. Click to see photo album from the trip. There's a mix of mobile photos (Lumia 800) in there too, including all panoramas.

I also used Photosynth quite a bit for static and interactive panoramas. Here's an interactive view from inside the Glasgow Cathedral.

Quiet Summer Time on the Blog

Me and a reindeer in Lapland Finland =)

I'm sorry for the pause in my writing to this blog. It's summer time, my favorite season of all, and I have been outdoors, on vacations and in a news block so I haven't had much to write about. I hope I haven't let my few followers down! I expect this quiet time to continue as my second part of vacation begins and hopefully summer heat will finally reach Finland at some point as well!

To give you at least something fresh to look at, here's two mobile photo albums: one from my trip to Oulanka National Park in Kuusamo and the other from a lovely summer day at my home town of Rauma. All photos were taken with my Nokia Lumia 800. Sadly, the battery died at the end of the second day in the middle of the National Park. The third day, however, was rainy so there's not much you're missing except overall gray photos and not-so-jolly hikers =)

Photos from Oulanka National Park, Kuusamo, Finland
Photos from Old Rauma (UNESCO World Heritage Site), Rauma, Finland

Have a great summer time everyone!

Stockholm in pictures (taken with Lumia 800)

Greetings from Stockholm, the 'capital of Scandinavia'! =) Indeed, this beautiful capital of Sweden can rightfully claim to that title as it is a city with such a long and interesting history. In the 17th century it was the center of one of the most powerful empires in all Europe.

The city has a lot to offer, let it be historical sites, shopping or just the beautiful scenery - the city is located on many island in a spot where Mälaren lake connects to the Baltic Sea. If you're ever traveling there for a couple of days, you should get a Stockholm card to enjoy vast amount of museums and attractions for free! And it works as an unlimited ticket to the public transit too.

This was the one of the first times I left my DSLR camera behind when traveling as I didn't feel like carrying it around anymore and wanted to test if I could capture the memories just with my phone (Nokia Lumia 800). As a result I took over a 100 shots and put them to a gallery for all of you to view (I'll add captions later on). Most of the pics are completely unedited and the panorama shots were taken on-phone with Creative Studio, a free app available for the Lumia phones. Click the link below to view the gallery.

Stockholm travel pictures gallery

Hello from Dubai!

I returned from a short vacation in Dubai few days ago. The trip was a success since I finally got to visit Burj Khalifa, the tallest building in the world (on my previous trips to Dubai, it was closed).

Not going to talk much about the trip itself, but I can say that my new mobile phones, HTC Radar and Nokia Lumia 800 both with WP 7.5 were in active use. The Lumia 800 was my phone/back-up camera on the trip. The green tint is present in many of the photos taken in mixed-artificial light, but otherwise the quality of the photos is good, although in very dark they turn bit blurry. Despite some hard-time focusing, the HD 720p video in the Nokia is very impressive in quality!

HTC Radar worked as my Wi-Fi connector/poolside gadget/Angry Birds console during flights and did that job extremely well. I think it had way better battery life than the one of Lumia 800 (not sure how much the mobile network activity drained it's battery, though). When talking about pictures, HTC Radar had the color balance almost always correct + the Panorama shot mode was really a nice feature to capture some amazing landscapes in Dubai!

Check out the image albums below to see some photos from the trip. You can find the 720p HD (sample) videos shot with Nokia Lumia 800 from my YouTube account.

Dubai 2011 mobile photos taken with Nokia Lumia 800

Dubai 2011 mobile photos, taken with HTC Radar