This is one of the city blocks of old apartment buildings in Punavuori, taken in the inner courtyard. Early 20th century I believe. I love these buildings. It's the block you can see in the map link here, the square below the A pin. One archway leads into the courtyard from the Pikku-Roobertinkatu street and another from the other side of the block from the Ullanlinnankatu street. What with Google's street view: just double-click the A pin, click "street view"; then click once at the left-arrow to go one step along the street. If you then turn to view the archway, you can see a glimpse of the courtyard. I know concerns have been raised as to whether Google's thingy violates privacy, but I think it's pretty kewl: you can stay in street level and "walk" along the streets.
I've been rather overjoyed recently because I went ahead and bought a new lens for my camera, a 18-125 mm one by Sigma. I think I mentioned here in the blog that I managed to drop one of my lenses in the water down by the pier some months back. I had been planning to hold it out with the 55-250 mm one that was left, but finally got frustrated because there was so much I couldn't take pictures of: in the city streets you often don't have the space to back down sufficiently to get whatever you want to take a picture of to fit in the frame with a 55-250 mm. Like for example the interior courtyards of city blocks like in the picture above. The new lens is so much better than the one I had and with more range, as that one was 18-55 mm. And what's better is that the new lens was only 65 euros more expensive than the old one.
Other kind of photographs that I've missed are wide city landscapes. This is a part of the path of cargo train tracks that ran through here not too long ago. The cargo port was moved to eastern Helsinki, so the tracks became unnecessary and were removed. I think they're planning a biking route to replace them. If so, I do hope they'll let the greenery be and flourish!
Hopefully the new lens will also prove advantageous in the photo bureau, as it's good to be able to take quality pictures of a good range of subjects. Now I only need to find the time to sort out the ones to upload! Taking pictures is easy, but what takes an awful lot of time is going through and editing the RAW image files.
I came up with a new idea for photography: lately I've really been enjoying reading Finnish crime fiction, especially the ones that are set in Helsinki. So far only the Harjunpää books by Matti Yrjänä Joensuu, but I borrowed others at the library. What I'm planning is to take one of the books, go to all the locations mentioned and take pictures. The streets and houses in the stories are real, but since most of them were written in the 1980's, quite a bit is probably changed. Think I'll get to this next weekend, provided the weather is good. It takes a bit of planning, in terms of which book to get and how to get to the locations, some of which are in districts quite a distance from where I live. Should be fun.
Before that, in the next few days, I'm going to be trying to make further progress with the nucleus of a new article text I started yesterday and continued with today by reading some books on marriage, women and family in Athens. It's a prosopographic study on the foreign spouses of mixed marriages - all foreign women married to Athenian men - in Hellenistic Athens. I.e. I'm studying the ethnic appellations (e.g. Aphrodisia Milesia = Aphrodisia from Miletos) of the foreign spouses to find out where they originated from. Quite an interesting theme, and I think significant in terms of the question of social integration between Athenian and immigrant families. Of course, there is the question of whether such marriages indicate that the specific immigrant groups had a closer relationship with the Athenian population, or whether they are evidence of the integration of individual immigrant families with the citizen community. I need to dig and find out whether there's a way to find clues on this.
But now to reading non-research things: I got the book that I mentioned in the previous post, "Rööperi - The Years of Crime 1955-2005".
6 comments:
Great post Maria. Your photo is lovely, and I went to the map to see where it was. Am I right in thinking we walked around that area a bit when I was with you?
I think your idea of doing photos of scenes from the books is brilliant. It could be quite a project though! I'm so glad you're happy with the new lens. It really seems to have inspired you.
Yep, we did walk around about there. Maybe not exactly the same street, but not far.
What a cool idea to take photos of scenes from the book.
Pete Townshend wrote recently about loving Swedish crime fiction, and I am personally immersed in the Erlendur series from Iceland after reading the same Swedish book he was raving about- Faceless Killers. There is something quite gripping about the nordic crime writing- the style is quite pared down, and I am loving how dry and to the point the character dialogue is. Must be the lack of winter sunlight that makes the characters so bleak.
xx
AM
oh I would love to see the buildings in the first photo. (in person) I love this.
Anne-Marie, yep I read that. Was curious which Finnish crime writers he'd been reading. Matti Yrjänä Joensuu is the "grand old man" of modern Finnish crime stories and has been translated to English, so maybe that's one of them. I saw the Erlendur series mentioned, should check it out. I'm not a crime genre buff as such, but it would be interesting to see if I find that series believable - given that there's only about one murder per year in Iceland.
Grace, these old apartment blocks have some special charm that new ones lack, I think. Perhaps it's partly the design, partly thinking about all the lives lived in them.
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