Kärpät the champions, again

Well, well. I wasn't too confident earlier about Kärpät's chances of winning the championship, but it's occasionally nice to be wrong. In fact, not only did Kärpät win it, they did it in some style. 10 games in the playoffs, 10 wins. And even though some matches looked even judging by the score, Kärpät was clearly the better side.

It will interesting to see what the team will look like next season as rumours are taking most of the star players elsewhere. Mika Pyörälä, first line left winger has already signed a contract with Timrå of the Swedish Elitserien and it is almost certain the playoffs' MVP Janne Pesonen will go to Anaheim. It is also quite possible that team captain Jari Viuhkola goes to Chicago and Viktor Ujcik moves back to Czech. Rumours are also abound that Kalle Sahlstedt might quit icehockey for good as his sone has been diagnosed with cancer and the very skillful Juha-Matti Aaltonen might also be headed for the NHL, to St Louis Blues. New crowd favourite Ross Lupaschuk's situation is also interesting, some sources claim he has already signed a contract with HIFK Helsinki, that is unless he moves to the NHL as he was excellent, especially during the playoffs.

So the CEO Juha Junno and the rest of the background staff need to work hard building a good team for next season as at least some of these rumours are bound to be true.

But for now it's just time to enjoy.

I had my camera with me on Thursday and managed some pictures. I actually took a lot of them but the lights etc. made it hard to get decent pictures. With shutter speeds of more than 1/100th of a second moving things get blurry. And the camera had trouble focusing on some shots. But thankfully with the so-called shotgun style (shoot loads) some pictures came out ok, at least after some post-processing. I had to do at least some minor adjustments to pretty much every image, at least adjusting the brightness with the Curves tool because the camera left most pictures quite dark.

I have to give the thumbs up for JAlbum once again. It has improved a lot since I last downloaded a version and has some new excellent skins, like the one I used (Chameleon). It doesn't get any easier than this. Some of the default settings are stupid, like the one where JAlbum wants to readjust my pictures and with the settings it uses (jpg compression rate etc) they end up looking quite horrible. So it's best to tell it to use the original pictures if you have already done the post-processing.