Ces't la vie

Soundtrack by Pilote: soundcloud.com/pilote-1/the-sixth-street-ramble

Because the weather was fine to ramble about...

Supposedly Pilote's musical composition refers to Sixth Street (Pecan Street) in Austin, Texas. Sixth Street has an interesting history going way back to year 1839, when Austin got established [1].

Also the city (town) of Tampere in Finland has somewhat similar history. Although Tampere was established already in 1779 [2], it became as major city only after Scotsman James Finlayson came here [3], and established the factory (cotton mill) and hydro power station in the beginning of 19th century. During the same time the town growth and the similar grid plan as in Austin became built in Tampere. And that is also when the Hämeenkatu street became established.

Hämeenkatu was not the main street of Tampere at first [4]. The town growth to the east, the Hämeensilta bridge became built over the Tammerkoski rapids, and the railway reached Tampere in 1870s. At this time the eastern part of Hämeenkatu was built to connect the railway station to the rest of the town on west side of Tammerkoski. Ever since the Hämeenkatu street has been the "heart of the city", the main street where all the major saloons, banks and shops can be found.

In 1990s, when I arrived to Tampere, Hämeenkatu was filled by cars. At that time shop owners and their customers believed they just have to have the right to park their car right in front of the shops. It took somewhat 20 years before the plans to make the city centre as car free zone finally became somewhat true. Today there are huge underground car parks, and only buses and taxi cars are allowed to drive along Hämeenkatu. So, now the pedestrians can finally ramble along the Hämeenkatu more freely.

The "technical" yada yada

This picture is my contribution to The Sunday Challenge, where we had two options for this week:

Either 1): Use the random point generator www.geomidpoint.com/random set your co-ordinates and select 1 point. You can decide how far away you will be prepared to go in miles or kilometers. Go to the point and take a new photo.

Or 2): Take a walk and take 4 pictures with a personally pre-set distance between them. for some that may be one per mile, for others perhaps one per 100 paces. the key is really having a fixed focal length on the lens.The 4 pictures can then be collaged to create one.

For this picture I sort of combined the both. I first used the random point generator to generate few random points within 1 kilometre radius from my home. Then I chose the one pointing right in the east end of Hämeensilta bridge, because I found that the most interesting point to start with. I decided to do the challenge on my way home from work, and that is why I decided to start the walk from the given point, and continue from there to the direction of my home, and take the rest of the picture after every one hundred meters.

I also had an idea to make a collage out of four vertical 9:16 images taken with full optical zoom. So, the all pictures would become taken with 780 mm equivalent focal length, and would be some random views along my way home. And that is what I did.

Finally because of feeling once again disappointed with the limits of my camera, I decided to edit the images heavily. JPEG images taken with small sensor just have started to look bad in my eyes, and then the best solution is to "make the bad images even worse".

On notes you see also my first attempt on this challenge: www.ipernity.com/doc/serola/42459338
There I tried to take a panorama image in the very first random point I generated for the option one on this challenge. That is a rather lovely location within three kilometre radius from my home, banks of stream at the east end of Iidesjärvi lake: goo.gl/2dwBjl
On that picture I took the exposure from the upper part of the scene, and used bilinear gradient to keep the tones on sky, and bring more light on the foreground. But as you may see, the quality indeed is very bad...

Sources

[1] Austin’s ‘Street of Dreams’: From Pecan Street to Dirty Sixth www.artslabormagazine.com/austins-street-of-dreams-from-pecan-street-to-dirty-sixth
[2] History of Tampere en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tampere#History
[3] James Finlayson en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Finlayson_(industrialist)
[4] Hämeenkatu www.cs.tut.fi/staff/pk/OldTampere/html/hameenkatu.html