last year, some days before christmas, we attended a concert by swallow the sun in leipzig, germany, with support by insomnium and omnium gatherum. it was the last concert of the new moon tour. (no vampire shit, though ;-) ) you might know that swallow the sun is one of my favorite bands. they played in a small youth club, conne island, which wasn’t the easiest to find. but eventually, we found it. fortunately, nobody complained that i took my favorite toy with me; so this time, i managed to make some good photos.
i think that this concert was the best one i attended in 2009. ok, i have to admit there haven’t been many concerts in 2009 anyway. but nonetheless, this one was very good. the bands played great music and obviously had fun. (and: they played the giant, one of my favorite songs, in the encore!) unfortunately, the audience didn’t manage to sing “we want more” in finnish, so most sang a few times “zugabe” and then stopped doing anything at all, resulting in an awkward half-silence. but the band fortunately still came back.
now have fun watching some of the photos. if you want to know more about the concert, read someone else’s report ;-)

omnium gatherum.

insomnium.

during the concert of insomnium, members of the other bands showed up on the stage, and equiped insomnium‘s singer niilo with a funny hat and a sign saying “korpiklaani”. he eventually removed the hat by banging his head:

swallow the sun.

during swallow the sun‘s performance, members of the other bands had fun installing a pink dildo first at the keyboard and then, later, at the singer’s microphone:

as opposed to the korpiklaani “hat”, the dildo stayed there for the rest of the concert.

last weekend, it was rather cold outside, and pretty white. i did a walk to the nose hill park, enjoying the beautiful snowscape as well as the icy wind. here are some impressions.

on one of the last days, we did a small trip to calgary’s nose hill park, where i have been before as well. here are a few impressions:

one of the most beautiful parts of our trip was the drive south the icefields parkway, connecting jasper to lake louise. here are a few impressions from our stops. we wanted to drive up mount edith cavell as well, but the road was closed.

astoria river bridge and athabasca river.

a beautiful lake and the athabasca falls.

mountains, and the columbia icefield.

our car, and the upper waterfowl lake.

the bow lake and the crowfoot glacier.

lake louise.

after two days in vancouver, we rented a car and drove up to the beautiful town of jasper. from there, we visited, among others, patricia lake, pyramid lake and maligne lake, whose photos can be found below as well as a photo taken at a rest stop somewhere north of kamloops.

after yellowknife, we flew to vancouver. things you can see in the photos are the steam clock, vancouver city, stanley park, a spider, views from the capilano bridge and its park, and a sunset at the pacific ocean’s beach.

on our last night in yellowknife, we had the luck to see an aurora borealis. experiencing an aurora is something hard to describe. the following photos and videos just give a small glimpse of its wafting beauty.

for the more technically interested people, the camera settings i used for most photos are a shutter speed of 8 seconds, aperture of f/4.0 and iso sensitivity of 800. this was the first time where i was really happy that i have a remote for my camera’s shutter and a tripod. below you can view some videos, taken with these settings (hence, between two frames there are around 8 seconds delay). there are six frames per second, whence the videos are around 48 times faster as the real aurora was. each video comes as a flash player together with an avi download (the avi files contain essentially a sequence of jpeg files, so no fancy codec is required).

download this movie.

download this movie.

download this movie.

download this movie.

download this movie.

download this movie.

another day, we did a trip to the great slave lake, a huge lake (its area takes 7% of germany’s area, or two thirds of switzerland’s area).

we started our canada tour by flying up to yellowknife, the capital of canadas northwest territories. it’s a town having around 20.000 inhabitants, but it is probably the most touristic place in the northwest of canada, and there are a lot of (non-expensive) flights going there. and, one reason why we went there, it’s quite likely that you can see northern lights. besides that, the area is also very different from southern canada.
on our first day there, it was sunny and we did a hike on the trail around frame lake. this resulted in many beautiful views and photos, some of whose can be seen here:

next, we did a trip to calgary’s zoo.

the zoo contains a dinosaur part, which i didn’t really commented on last time. it features a landscape which is supposed to look like back then, and a few dinosaur models. some of these models look really unrealistic, or more funny. the following photos also feature some of those: