Scouting for Trolls
Finland beckons, promising the rare chance to experience Moominland Midwinter for real. My faint hopes of glimpsing the Northern Lights are pretty much dashed – despite Naantali having a decent lack of light pollution, the weather looks to be overcast. However, there has been plenty of snow, so I should get some decent atmospheric shots of my Troll bothering.
I’m bringing a small arsenal of cameras on this trip. The trusty Lumix LX5 is the mainstay – this is essentially a Leica with Panasonic branding and so half the price (even cheaper on eBay). For a compact, it is an awesome camera – a very bright 24mm that stops down to 2.0, and ‘pro’ features such as shooting in RAW format, a flash hotshoe, and some good shutter and aperture priority modes. A nice touch is the ability to change aspect ration on the fly via a slider on the lens barrel.
The aforementioned Fuji W3 is coming along for 3D shots; it works best in bright surroundings, so the snow should help reduce the noise on the pictures.
Last up is a vintage (read: 1980s) Nimslo. This was a brave attempt to bring consumer-grade 3D back that never caught on. It’s a solidly-engineered camera that shoots four half-frame shots over two frames of 35mm. There was a lenticular printing service as well, but this shut down decades ago; once the film has been developed it’ll mean spending some time in Photoshop reassembling them.
I’m also going to be spending a bit of time in various libraries and, thanks to the incredible diligence of the library staff, have a number of books and microfilms awaiting my perusal. Watch this space for some seriously rare Tove Jansson material in the very near future…