My work in the Hungarian plains continues (see more here), in search of Great bustards and other iconic wild denizens of the place. The following set of images was made in October last year, and really embodies the local photography conditions: a great variety of lights, early morning fog, hares and roe deers in abundance, shy bustards, loud corvids. Follow the guide ;-)

​The Whooper swan (Cygnus cygnus) is an icon of Finnish wildlife. Now widespread throughout the country, it almost went extinct in the 1950s before a conservation campaign saved it. It's the national bird of Finland, and a crowd's favourite on my birding tours around Helsinki.

​Note: the tool I present you here should not be necessary with PureRaw 2 and subsequent releases.

In this article, I present to you a tool I discovered that helped me use Dxo PureRaw in my photography editing workflow.

Dxo PureRaw is a one-click raw file processing application, which mainly seems to focus on noise removal and sharpening. I was quite impressed by the noise management function: on a Canon 7D2 raw file taken at high ISO, noise magically disappeared. Even better, when subsequently raising shadows in Lightroom, no extra noise seemed to appear! I wasn’t completely convinced by the sharpening, I found my subjects to look a bit weird when seen up-close, but overall I found PureRaw to be beneficial to my photography, at least in some scenarios.
I won’t dwell more on the software’s functionalities, there are plenty of resources on the internet for that. What I want to show you is how to include PureRaw in your workflow if you like to do image culling and selection in Lightroom.

The problem occurs after you have selected the images you want to process. If you use a Mac, it’s fine, you can drag and drop the thumbnails from Lightroom to PureRaw, process them there, and then export back to Lightroom. However, that doesn’t work on Windows.

Enters the LRPureRAW plugin.

In early October, Vivien and I embarked on quite the rail journey. I'll tell you why we went to London in the next newsletter, but I also wanted to write a travel log, because it was quite epic, with some highs and lows, and a lot of learning that could be useful for those interested in long-distance train travel in Europe.

The main reason we chose train over plane was CO2 emissions. We already fly a lot to Central Europe to visit our family, so we wanted to do this one better. We also don't like the stress and constraints of plane travel, the airlines' greed and cynicism, and actually quite enjoy being on a train. Finally, we were hoping to do a bit of sightseeing on the way.
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We bought an Interrail pass for our trip, and while understanding it and setting it up could be the topic of an entire article, in the end it worked fairly well and saved us a lot of money. It's worth noting that we needed a lot of research and comparing to reach that conclusion! Yeah, if you have to remember one thing from this article, it's that nothing is easy with train travel (and the second thing: everything is better in Finland).

Trip 1: overnight ferry Helsinki-Stockholm

We travelled with Viking Line, leaving around 17.00 and arriving around 10.00. The Interrail app couldn't register this trip, but we showed passport, Interrail pass and our reservation at check-in, and all was well. In hindsight, we shouldn't have used Interrail for this leg, because the amount we saved on the ferry ticket with Interrail was lower than the price of an extra Interrail ticket. We checked a lot of things before the trip, and yet it's obvious we still missed a lot!
We had booked a sauna-spa session onboard, and went right after departure, at the opening. That was a good call, it was empty at that time!
We took a salad with us for dinner, and had breakfast at the buffet restaurant.

​​Spring is an interesting notion in Finland. For me, when days start getting longer, and sunnier, and the first migratory birds show up, then it's spring. Sure, there might still be ice and snow around, but there are signs of greater things to come.

Much of the Finnish culture and language has been shaped by nature and the rythm of seasons, so it's no surprise there's a bunch of sayings related to the arrival of birds. Here's one I learnt this year:

Kuu kiurusta kesään,
puoli kuuta peipposesta,
västäräkistä vähäsen,
pääskysestä ei päivääkään.

One month from the skylark to summer
Half a month from the chaffinch
A little from the wagtail
Not even a day from the swallow

For a long time, Saimaa ringed seals (norppa, in Finnish) were considered as enemies by the many people who fished in Lake Saimaa. Until 1948, a bounty was paid for every seal that was killed, and it's only in 1955 that they became protected by the law.
Old habits are hard to shake. In general, people support nature protection, but things become complicated when it impacts the way they want or are used to live their life. Environmental education is key, and that's what associations like Suomen Luonnonsuojeluliitto (The Finnish Association for Nature Conservation, SLL) are working on. They visit schools, fairs, organise museum exhibitions... the idea is to bring people onboard, to turn opponents into advocates and further the cause of the seal.

​My photo story on Saimaa ringed seal conservation is, well, exactly that: it's not only about the seals, but about the conservation program as a whole, and all the matters related to it. Here are a few events I attended in the past year.

The Saimaa ringed seal (Pusa hispida saimensis), an endangered pinniped endemic to eastern Finland, changes its fur every year. For that, it needs to spend a lot of time outside the water, to dry and shed its fur. This happens after babies are weaned. Thus, May is the best period to find a seal basking on a rock.
This is of course of great interest for the scientists and conservationists who study the seals. They scour the lake, in its multitude of channels and islands, and take careful note of all the seals they spot. Importantly, they take pictures of the seals and add them to their database. That's because each seal sports a unique fur pattern, made of pale rings on a dark canvas, and it can be identified thanks to it.

You will probably not be surprised to hear that Finnish weather is wild... but did you know that, in Helsinki, we had 20 cm of fresh snow on April 23rd this year?

Every spring, we are fooled by one Fool's Spring (well, at least one), when it feels like we're turning the tide and cold/snowy/icy days are behind us. After it comes a Takatalvi, a returning winter. This cycle repeats for a while, until summer actually arrives, often in an abrupt manner (today is May 31 and we have 28ºC outside).
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So much snow on April 23rd is quite rare, but you get the idea. After a long winter, people are longing for warm days... but they are usually further ahead than we hope.

​However, I must say I enjoyed the last takatalvi episode. Maybe I was the only one, but I had a blast! You see, winter in Finland is a quiet time for nature: all water birds have left because their hideouts are frozen, all insect eaters are gone because insects have died... there's activity around bird feeders, snowy landscapes are magnificent, but it gets a bit boring.
However, when the last snow came this past April, there were lots of birds in the neighbourhood! They surely wondered what was happening to them, but I enjoyed photographing them in such unusual surroundings.

​The Saimaa ringed seal, norppa in Finnish, is a subspecies of Ringed seal endemic to Lake Saimaa, in eastern Finland. Once widespread, then on the brink of extinction, it has become a tiny bit more common thanks to years of hard work: conservation started at the turn of the 1970s and 1980s, and the population has grown especially in the last ten years thanks to wider restrictions on gillnet fishing. Now, a conservation program called Our Saimaa seal LIFE, funded by the European Union and coordinated by Metsähallitus, the Finnish government agency for conservation and forestry, is developing new methods for conservation in a warming climate.