I was visiting Rome few weeks ago. One word, architecture, architecture and architecture! Ok, lets add also art&design. I didn't shoot that much but I was still surprised about the results. Only problem was whether to choose the B&W (semitone) versions or the color ones. As I couldn't really decide, I decided to add them all here... So here is my first Rome photos ever. Yes, I know there are cliches but I just had to take those...

Pantheon:

Citylife:

This was shot in the morning. The sun started to warm dark trees and they were literally "smoking"!

I just love details in buildings:

Pantheon again, this time during a heavy rain:

Yet another Pantheon picture, clichee for sure:

When I saw these patterns in the inside yard of some architecure related institute (if I rememver correctly) I just had to photograph it:

Some spear-like decorations inside Vatican:

The main exit from Vatican museum. Very nice staircase...

This is about interesting colors in the windows:

I was one day just browsing through my photos from this summer. I found something that I thought as failure after shooting it but now it looks nice in a way. So enjoy these "candy" colors shot in Mikkeli at sunrise in July at 4:04 am.

Our camera club was on the move again. This time at Tammela and the main course was rocks! The location was selected because there were supposed to be lots of rocks and water, and it was true.

At first we were just checking the place. There were indeed lots of rocks but but I managed also to took few landscape photos without any:

And then to "the rock photos"!

And of course there were also the sunset...

Overall very successful and fun trip. This was also the first real field test of the my Olympus Zuiko 24mm. It was the only wide angle that I had with me and all the above photos except the closeups of rocks were taken with it. I have to still practice more with it but it seems to work very well.

Some time ago (after been infected by serious GAS because of a frined's new purchase) I searched for the best 24mm wide lens ever. Of course "the best" here was only relative term, I wanted to find some reasonably priced used wide angle lens. Naturally I had to skip Lecas right away... Finally I spotted somewhere that Olympus Zuiko has made very good wide angle lens to its OM system. After searching a bit more I found out that there were also adapters to Canon EOS and these lenses were available through Ebay. That started the search and last week I got my used lens from US and yesterday I finally got also the  Olympus OM to Canon EOS EF adapter.

So here is the Olympus Zuiko 24mm f/2.8 lens attached to my Canon 5D. Metal lens hood is also attached to the lens. It is very tiny compared to every other lens I have.

Unfortunately I have had only time to shoot some test shots with it. Here is one:

Everything looks very promissing! I really like the build quality, it is not by any means a cheap plastic lens, it is metal and feels like a real lens. Focusing and aperture rings are working smoothly. And what is best it is small and light. I have plans to use it when taking landscape photographs while traveling light. Image quality and contrast seems to be very good. Of course everything is now manual, but I don't mind.

I'm pretty sure that I'll be posting more "real" images taken with the lens soon.

Lately I have only been shooting few times "seriously". Last time was in Kuttilankoski, Salo two weeks ago. There were rapids and classic countryside river landscapes. From those two the latter got more attention and I also liked the outcome more. Here is one of the countryside shots:

Like I said early the rapids were not that interesting after all. Here is one of the few rapids shots:

The last picture was shot without a tripod when it was already too dark...Surprisingly it succeeded better than I thought:

I'm currently on vacation and I hope that I have time (and opportunities) to shoot some photographs. At least I have some plans already...