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Jigsaw puzzles

~ lauraleonilla ~ Leave a comment

I’ve always had a thing on jigsaw puzzles. Ever since I was child I could spent hours sitting on the floor until the puzzle was finished. In general I like puzzles from 2000 pieces up, this one had 1000 pieces but I chose it because I wanted to try something…

I recently came up with an idea to combine my favorite hobbies, photography and puzzles. I’ve always taken pictures of my puzzles before putting them back into their boxes but now I wanted to try something different. I had never made timelapse videos before, but the idea of beign able to see the whole process from the beginning was fascinating.

I tried it out by making a three second clip when I was flipping the pieces and was surprised how easy it was. With the actual puzzle it was difficult to estimate how long it would take to finish, sometimes it takes four hours, sometimes more than ten. I shot one frame per minute in order to keep the film fairly short. It turned out pretty well for my first one but I noticed things I will have to take into account in the future so I also learned a lot from my little experiment.

Enjoy, there will be more to come!

Beijing

~ lauraleonilla ~ 2 Comments

During my stay in China I had to of course visit the capital Beijing (北京). I didn’t really plan my trip, just booked one night in a hostel and took the train to the city. Later on my arrival night my three week-old iPhone broke down, so I had to came back to Shanghai already the next day. Two or three nights would have been enough time to see all the essential places, but with my Chinese skills, without internet or phone I just couldn’t do it. I recommend planning better than I did.

I didn’t know much about the city before going, I just wanted to see the great wall, which I had to pass due to my very limited schedule. But I got a couple of cool pictures to show. 🙂

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Some Chinese flags at Tiananmen square.

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Some kind of buildings.

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Garden expo had all kinds of plants, trees and different styles of buildings. The admission fee was about 100 yuan, a bit pricey, but we only live once…

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This was on my to do list right after the Great wall, the great Beijing duck! There was another one in Hong Kong before and now they’re everywhere. Since Chinese people love to copy, I’ve heard that they’ve made a lot of diffrent ducks for promotional purposes but I’ve never seen another big one besides this. A lot of stuffed animals with the same design are sold all over the country though.

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Beijing is definitely worth visiting while in China. It’s often packed with (Chinese) tourists, but if you want to see something very Chinese, then Beijing is the place. In many ways Shanghai is like any big city, except for the location, but I could imagine living in Shanghai is more fun than in Beijing.

 

Air quality in Shanghai

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The air quality in China and Shanghai is never the best possible, but right now it’s on its worst possibly ever. This is how the view from our balcony looked like today. It was already bad yesterday but this was something I had never seen before.

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According to Business Insider and common sense the pollution is caused by the lack of wind, increasing amount of cars and factories working for Christmas season. Yesterday (Dec. 5th) the air quality index was somewhere around 400, which is hazardous. Today it was over 500, “beyond index”. 

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My roommate said he had wanted to buy a mask but they were sold out everywhere. I’m just hoping the smog will pass asap, below a picture from about a month ago on a normal day and on the right side today.

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Chinese printing

~ lauraleonilla ~ Leave a comment

I’ve been doig some work for my roommate’s business and this time we wanted to get boxes printed for tablet pc’s. I prepared a file with Illustrator and we took it to a printing shop. They made us a sample, it was accepted and the production could begin. They printed us a bit over 100 boxes…

The original logo for the print.
The original logo for the print.

However, someone at the printing shop decided to use his design skills by modifying the original logo. Some of the straight lines on the letters were made curvy and something weird happened for the lower part of the X-letter.

The new logo.
The new logo.

There was also some stuff between the paper and the box. The guys were eating rice while working?

Something between the box and paper.
Something between the box and the paper.

We suggested the printing place would just print out new paper/ sticker whatever to cover the boxes that were messed up, but they said they couldn’t do it, so we’re now waiting for whole new boxes. Looking forward for the result!

And btw none of us are professionals on graphic design, but aren’t the businesses supposed to do what we pay them for, not what they think might look cool? Especially when not informing the customer of the changes made on the design.

China is sometimes like a box of chocolates, you never know what you’re gonna get!

Feeling lucky?

~ lauraleonilla ~ 2 Comments

Somekind of packaging found from a Chinese convenience store. I’m still not able to read 汉字 but i’m prettty sure this litte red box will help anyone to get lucky!

(Red is the color of good luck in China.)

Who wouldn't wish to get lucky with her?
Who wouldn’t wish to get lucky with her?

Connections

~ lauraleonilla ~ Leave a comment

So I spent almost the entire weekend watching movies, again. I watched the both Ron Fricke documents Baraka and Samsara. They were kind of slow to me, but interesting with nothing but the picture and music on the background.

Anyway, in Samsara there was this scene with some kind of a tree in a desert, it was filmed during both, day and night and the daytime shot looked super familiar. I first thought I had seen a screenshot on  http://whatthemovie.com/ but after a quick search, turned out it wasn’t there.

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It didn’t take me long to figure out where I had seen it. I use snapseed a lot… It’s not exactly the same, the colors are less vibrant and the perspective a bit different, but still, very similar.

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싸이!

~ lauraleonilla ~ Leave a comment

For almost a year now South Korea has been mostly famous for him… In most countries nobody understood a word (or maybe 3 words) of his most viral music video, but yet it was everywhere.

I discovered Gangnam Style a bit after it was released via Facebook. I had applied an exchange in Korea and new knew the alphabet and a couple of words. I rarely watch the youtube stuff people post on Facebook, but for that time I made an exception. A friend of mine from Denmark had shared it and a bit later one of my Finnish friends did the same. I recognized the writing to be Korean and became curious about what Korean thing would have spread around the Europe… So, I clicked on the link and was amazed, the coolest, most entertaining music video I had ever seen!

And a little bit later it was everywhere… Everyone knew the dance moves and “오빠는 강남 스타일”! ( I’m also practicing my korean writing here.) When I arrived to Korea, Gangnam Style wasn’t really popular anymore, it sometimes played at bars and clubs but didn’t really attract people on the dance floor. Yet, plenty of tourist stuff still sells with PSY…

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If I’m going to bring souvenirs for my friends, it’ll most likely be this. 1000 won for a pair of socks is super cheap compared to the prices in Finland. They’re also funny, useful and definitely Korean. Not really my style (I buy most of the things black), but still, good enough. Image

Two weeks ago PSY released a new single, Gentleman. And it is now everywhere here. On the following day he had a concert in Seoul, I WAS THERE. Really, a dream come true to see PSY on a live concert here, the show was awesome. Although I understood none of the things he said on the stage, but still, I was happy to pay for the ticket.

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Not only was the show as awesome as it was, but it was also a change to get some really cool pics. I gave a try for my fisheye lens as well…

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I can now say I’ve seen about 50 000 Koreans dancing Gangnam Style.