Planning a trip which is mainly intended as a photographic adventure requires a certain amount of planning and a certain amount of imagination. Unfortunately when the guidebooks seed the brain incorrectly, ideas can sprout that lead to long car journeys to nowhere. A few phrases I read about Yyteri, the 'Finnish Riviera", had me all excited but, as they say up north, I 'followed a muck cart and thought it was a wedding'...

Still, it behoves each of us to try to make a wedding where we find only a muck cart. Here's my unconvincing attempt.

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Note the two differing colour balances in shots taken minutes apart. The first was 'as shot' which is with the D800 A2 (keep it warm) setting and the second was manually done by me. Both could look right but together they look rather odd.

I stayed in what might be the worst hotel in my experience here: the yyterinkylpylahotelli. I won't go into the horrors other than today that they built it out of some super heat collecting metal and then put rooms in the roof with tiny, tiny windows (meshed due to the golfball sized biting bugs) and no air con. After a few hours of near-death sweating I asked for a new room and thankfully got one a couple floors down - still too hot to sleep but not an immediate health risk. And when changing rooms at 3am, it's never good to find security guards in the corridors dealing with other inmates who are so drunk that they're considered a danger.

Oh, and when you check out, they give you a tube of mustard. Go figure.

The only interesting shot I got of the hotel. Taken with the 85mm 1.8G at F1.8 and showing what nice gentle bokeh the lens has wide open.

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