Moving from Finland to UK and London in particular was one of the biggest changes in my life. Comparable events probably include my initial move from a small town in Russia to Finland when I was 15, and then much later my move to Helsinki. London is practically a separate country living by its own laws. You can tell that rest of UK is very different. London is a huge beast, which requires certain ways of taming. Its rewards are huge, but so are expenses. I guess my general feeling at this point, 2 years after moving here, is that life in megapolis is something that everyone should try at some point in life. You might stick around for little or long, but the amount of experience you gain is hard to get any other way.

Here are various notes and feelings on spending 2 years here. My general point of reference is life in Finland and Helsinki, since that is what we left behind.

It’s important to get out of town once in a while. London can be almost limitless in terms of activities and entertainment, but it also affects your head. At some point you’ll notice that you become more of an asshole than a caring human being. Especially to strangers. To prevent this, get out of town at least once a month.

You might notice that travelling to another country can be faster and more convenient than getting around British island. We’re living in Bethnal Green and are lucky enough to have direct bus to Stansted airport, which is a main hub for Ryanair. It is also faster and much more comfortable to get to Stansted on a bus than to Heathrow on a tube. Another time-space paradox of London.

Scotland is awesome, but for the same price of time and money you could (potentially) get to Iceland.

Wales is somewhere far far away.

Life / work balance is important. Work never ends, projects are never truly finished and things can forever be improved. There are always tools to learn and talks to listen (or given). Depending on your situation, you can be happy or less happy doing your work. Even when you have chosen a profession that you love, some projects can suck all the fun out of it. As a consequence, you start hating what you do. But even if your job brings you endless amount of happiness, you might spend way too much time doing it and as consequence your personal relations will suffer.

So, in one word - balance. Super important, hard to master, needs to be constantly practiced.

Read more books. Spend time with friends. Occasionally do nothing for a day or few.

Do exotic things that you like. In a past year I’ve discovered a local darkroom for analog photo printing, and a virtual reality meetup. Both places are full of people that are happy to share their experiences. Both things would not be possible in many other locations around the world. Thanks to its enormity, London can provide ways of satisfying most niche interests on a very high quality level. Not only you get to find courses, workshops or talks on great topics, but they also will be presented by the very best professionals.

If you love cinema and analog photography, London is the place to be.

Both Amazon and Ebay are very accessible here. If you’re into vintage film cameras or sewing machines, Ebay is amazing source for getting everything you want, for a very affordable price. There are lots of sellers in UK that would only deliver within the UK. On a flip side you’ll loose count to the lucky finds, and will get a large basket to basically pile it up with treasures.

Finding a new larger place to live will become a never stopping obsession.

While local dropzone is open around the year, weather in December is not good for skydiving. My dropzone near the village of Headcorn, Kent is open almost every day until Christmas, and then every weekend until March I believe, after which it is again open every day. However, winter in Britain is generally wet, windy and cloudy. It is not as dark and cold as it used to be in Finland, but the runways are made of grass here and they been regularly shut down because of wet weather. This was not the case some few (tens of) years ago, according to the locals. Occasionally you stumble on pictures of Bethnal Green from December 1960 covered in snow. Things used to be different around here some 50 years ago.

I really miss proper forest and Finnish sauna. On forest - there are some amazing parks around London featuring wildlife and tall trees. I’m sure we’ll probably find eventually a national park at a reasonable distance from the town. But no luck so far. On sauna - I found one this year. Our company was celebrating anniversary and hired a whole island with amenities for a weekend. It included proper Finnish sauna module, with hot stones and steam. Weirdly it didn’t included shower. But there was open air pool next to it. Most of my colleagues in London never experienced sauna before, and are baffled by my stories about it.

It might as well be that closest proper forest is Black Forest in Germany. It takes only 1 hour to get to Frankfurt Hahn from Stansted, and another hour of driving to get to the Black Forest area.

Recently it’s been a huge challenge to concentrate and invest into things. In my experience biggest pay off happens when you manage to invest for a long period of time into a single thing, whatever this thing may be. London will try to distract you in a million different ways. Another trick it’ll try to do is to get you consume stuff instead of producing your own. There is enormous amount of quality things to consume here.

It’s important not to be a dick. Somehow living in a large crowded place where many are rude and pushy makes you think that being a little bit of a dick is somehow ok. It’s not really. More importantly, if you help other people with their luggage on the steep stairs of the tube station (while guiding them to the left hand side of the stairs), they might think that all local people are like this here. It’s super easy to create an impression that everyone is a dick, but same is also true for the opposite.

There is city farm right behind MI6 head quarters. They have alpacas. You can hand feed them. From now on, all James Bond films will never feel the same to you.

It’s been another year now, and a new chapter of one second a day film project is finished. Check it out here. Mainly London, but also bits of California, Corfu, Germany, Barcelona and various spots in England.

Title picture for this post is made by capturing a snapshot of the video every second and transforming it into a vertical strip of colours. Horizontal strip effectively represents the whole year, with vertical strips being days of that year.

I guess my biggest inspiration for the last year was Casey Neistat’s daily vlog project. Stuff he is doing on a daily basis (without getting much sleep in between) is fascinating. I’m not really in a position to start proper daily vlogging, but I’d certainly be making advances in that direction. Even one second of video a day requires some efforts, disciplines you to look for shots.

Interestingly, live photos feature on the new iOS can be a great help (or cheat). It’ll film 1.5 seconds of footage on 15fps framerate in parallel to every single picture you take. Quality is not super great but could be enough to get your project going.

Thanks to elves on this Christmas, I’m bumping now resolution of the video to 4K (which is ridiculous and awesome at the same time). Year 2016, here we come.

Last week me and Stanisla spent 3 beautiful days in Barcelona. Sunny weather, blue sky, amazing vegetarian food and 3D film festival.

London Timescapes was selected for the competition, which was awesome on itself. Festival was held over the course of 3 days, we arrived on the very last day when they had screenings of the winning entries and awards. To a huge surprise they announced my film as a winner in a short 3D documentary category. After that London Timescapes got screened on a largest screen ever. Honestly, I never expected it to be projected on a such scale. If I’d knew of such possibility, I’d probably put a bit less of stereoscopic depth into it. You know, stereoscopic films are very sensitive to the size of the screen.

Very last screening of the festival was “Barcelona, LA ROSA DE FOC” - feature length documentary about the city. Hugely ambitious project that took over 3 years to complete, shot in native 3D with lots of CGI added in post. Whole film is basically a camera flying from one scene to another with no traditional cuts. Sound was mastered in Dolby Atmos. It looks and sounds stunning on a big screen. Funny thing is that it’s not really available anywhere to see. I hope they’ll find proper distribution soon.

London Timescapes is an award winning film now, and it is also very first film award for myself. You can watch it in glorious HD on Vimeo - there is fresh new build available now, with updated music by Dominik Piatek. I’d love to distribute 3D version of the film more, but it is not easy. Ping me if you’re in London and want to see it in stereo. Or if you’d like a private link to the stereoscopic side-by-side version.

If you are a happy owner of Google Cardboard, or even Oculus Rift kit, there is also a VR special edition of the film. It’s not like you’ll be able to look around, but you’ll get a native stereoscopic experience with proper aspect ratio optimised for viewing with VR headsets.

What’s next? The plan is to get 2 more SLR cameras and create a 360 degree rig. With 4 or 5 cameras I should be able to film proper spherical timelapses for VR. Let’s see how this goes. 3D Film Fest had dedicated category to VR films already this year, hopefully I’ll be able to submit something for 2016 programme.

There is this moment in your UK employed life when your employer announces that from now on you are eligible for something called Cycle Scheme. It is something that promises you (hefty) discount for a new bike. “How wonderful!” you think at this point and immediately start looking into it.

I’ve started now seriously thinking about owning a bike. Something foldable but relatively speedy and nice to use. City bikes are brilliant to some extent, but there are occasional moments of frustration when all docking stations in the City are full. This is when I remembered that our employer is indeed enrolled into Cycle Scheme some year back.

Took me a few moments to figure out the whole thing. It is not super simple as their site promises - there are a few catches that you should be aware of.

Catch #1: It is not a discount for a bike. It is basically a (legitimate) tax evasion scheme. It works in a way that 100% of full bike price is split in 12 and deducted each month from your salary for a year. Before taxes. This is where you save. Bigger your tax, more you save by reducing your incomes before taxes. This is not a bad thing - there aren’t many ways of legitimately reducing your income before taxes, and my financial adviser recommended grasping every single one of them.

Catch #2: Max price for a bike is £1000. You have to fit full bike with (optional) accessories into this sum. This means there is certain limit to how much you can cut from your taxes.

Catch #3: You don’t own bike for the next 4 years. For the first year it is your company that owns the bike and rent it back to you, while deducting full price of the bike from your salary every month. After the first year, assuming you want to keep the bike, you have to pay extra - 7% of the original price over £500, or 3% if less than #500 - to the Cycle Scheme company. This company is interesting on itself - they use tax exemption rule to promote Cycle Scheme, while helping other companies with the paper work. It looks like Cycle Scheme Ltd is for-profit company that uses UK bureaucracy as an excuse to promote their services.

Catch #4: If you are planning on changing your employer during first year, outstanding price of the bike will be deducted from your final pay. Same happens if you get fired. You will likely loose your bike too, since you don’t own it. At this point you just paid full price for something you still don’t own.

Catch #5: After first year and for the next 3 years it is Cycle Scheme Ltd that owns the bike and rents it back to you. After you deposit a refundable 3-7% extra of the original bike price. It is only refundable in a way that if you decide to give up your bike during this period, it will be refunded. If you still want to keep your bike, Cycle Scheme will transfer the ownership to you after that extended period of 3 years is over. This is when you realise why you had to pay that extra 7% of the price - this is how much your bike is worth now, after 4 years since you bought it.

Obviously, if you decide to leave the country during these 4 years, bike stays in UK.

So, who might benefit from this scheme? If you don’t plan to leave your employer during next year, and leaving UK during next 4 years, and you really really want brand new bike, and it cost under £1000, and you are paying lots of taxes - Cycle Scheme might be good choice. You’d save about £400 off the list price, and you get a zero interest credit for a year - in other words you don’t need to scrape full price of the bike out of your savings.

On the other hand, if you happen to have private health insurance - check for the benefits they offer. Most likely than not they can match Cycle Scheme savings in the form of cash back or plain discount.

Barcelona

London Timescapes short film is selected to participate in 3D Film Music festival in Barcelona. This is second time when I’m participating in this festival, and first time when I’ll be able to be there in person. No doubt Barcelona will be great in any time of year. The plan is to attend second day of the festival and spend the rest of the weekend shooting film and eating tapas.

Meanwhile 2D version of this film hit 2000 views on Vimeo, which is a huge deal for me.

Fallout 4

This highly anticipated game was finally released. To my surprise it refused to launch. Turned out that if PC is your platform, then NVidia GTX550 is the minimum supported graphics card. Mine GTX 295 was out of the game unfortunately. I was thinking about upgrading it anyway, since latest Oculus VR drivers were requiring something modern and powerful. GeForce site recommends GTX970 as the minimum configuration for VR.

Two days later I got upgraded to GTX980, and Fallout 4 launcher decided that this time it can run on ultra settings. It looks indeed very pretty. Funnily enough last time I upgraded my PC rig was in 2010 to get Fallout 3 to run. Graphics and gameplay are bumped up quite a bit, with many usability issues now gone. In a way it is simplified for a Twitter generation, with max 4 options of dialog and most of the character settings now turned into perks. It sort of makes sense. Classic Fallout games are still there, still available and playable. But for modern generations Fallout 4 delivers very well in terms of more action and less boilerplate.

Mamiya RB67

I always was curious about 70mm film format, and now I have camera to shoot on it. Mamiya RB67 is big, heavy, full metal block that supposedly can shoot amazing pictures. This remains to be seen. Film type is called 120, which is a bit confusing. It’s not 120mm wide, but more like 69mm. It is indeed medium format, not to be confused with 35mm film or large format, which operates on sheet film of 4x5 inch size (and larger). One roll of 120 film can shoot up to 10 pictures.

Mamiya camera is amazing because you can disassemble it into blocks and assemble again with different blocks. Film magazine is fully detachable and nothing stops you from having multiple magazines. You can easily have WB and colour films in 2 magazines, and switch when needed. It also rotates independently from camera body between portrait and landscape modes.

My plan for now is to shoot couple of rolls and then develop them at home. Fingers crossed.

GraphQL

We’ve officially started using GraphQL at my current project. Not only it helps us to consolidate our comm logic to external services, but also is a great learning experience. Big plan is to use GraphQL server side and Redux client/server side.

I’m also preparing a talk on practical GraphQL in large scale applications. Maybe also on small scale. Plan is to tell few real life stories, do an intro into history of GraphQL, touch on Relay, maybe show our blog engine using Relay. I’ll probably do a small app with help of Reindex beta. Talk itself is happening on 3rd of December in Brighton, and I’ll be rehearsing it one week earlier at Red Badger HQ in form of our lunch-n-learn session. Should be fun.