Vancouver Olympics, day 5: Greetings to Tampere

Today is the opening day of the games. I finally feel I am getting my bearings so to speak and I’m ready for the days ahead. I shot some ski jumping today, the quali­fying round of the normal hill and not very much anything else. Pissing rain for the most part — but for a moment (a very brief one), there was actually some sunshine. Despite the festi­vities going on as I am writing this, the whole day got an very sad feel to it as a young georgian athlete was killed during the luge practise.

Aamulehti is doing a good job with their special Vancouver pages. The twitter feed works, and they have publised very nicely the two multi­medias I had constructed in advance: Janne Ahonen analyzing his jump and the anatomy of the moguls tricks. Both took quite a while to do, but I think they were worth the effort.

I also started to collect some of my images into an image-gallery and I was happy to notice that Aamulehti had mentioned that one too on their website. I try to update that gallery as the games move on.

So a big hand to Tampere — thank you, good work.

But Tampere (a town in mid-Finland, in case you do not know) deserves a special mention for something totally different today as well. As some of you do know, I occasio­nally teach multi­media in the Tampere University. Last fall I was guiding a bunch of aspiring photo­graphers, trying to teach them the basics of linear storytelling.

Today I noticed that their final works were published on the University website. I watched and listened to each one of them — and I can only say that I am proud to have had the honor of teaching these youngsters (and I hope they don’t mind me calling them so). Each one of these audios­li­deshows is a concise, well presented entity and during the last week (they were working under a strict deadline) they had all managed to take it still one step further. To quote (again) Steve Jobs: “To keep looking and not settle”. They had gotten the message.

I will not rank these works in any order — they are all worth a peek. There is even one in English, describing the work of a missionary in Finland. Other stories include a different view into the monetary system of our society, a poignant potrait of a musician who due to an illness has been denied the world she has always lived in, an almost humorous tale of a taxidermist and how he got to start his career (spoken with a lovely Tampere-dialect…), etc. — trust me, they are all worth exploring.

I don’t know who learned during that workshop more — the teacher or the students. I can only speak for myself, but I know I learned an enormous amount. So — to my students, some 8000 miles away from Vancouver: thank you for sharing the experience. You did a good job.