I decided to drop by Lake Mytäjäinen this morning. What you're looking at is used as a winter swimming place, too. The water temperature is currently only about 5-10 C. When I walked past the building where there were dressing rooms, I noticed there were some old women. When I was standing on right side of the building, I decided to shoot the buildings on the opposite shore. One of the old women had plunged into the lake and her head was visible in the lower right of the frame. She shouted to me that she didn't want to be photographed. When I told her that she wasn't really in the picture, she told me not to lie and to remove the picture. Of course, I did that because I don't photograph people who don't want to be photographed.
Now, the swimming place is a public place and it is completely legal to take photographs in it. Also, it is fully legal to take photos with people in public places. However, one should not take let alone publish pictures which might show them in a bad light or embarrass them in any way. I agree that photographing someone in swimwear might actually fulfill that criterion especially if they themselves imply that by asking not to be photographed. But I think having a swimmer's head in the frame when everything else is fully submerged in water particularly at a distance when their face is turned away is completely fine. However, I never keep any photos of anybody let alone publish them if they have expressed a wish not to be photographed.
Where I'm I going with this? I don't particularly like being called a liar with the implication that I'm some sort of a perv who goes out to to shoot pictures of old hags in their swimwear. Proceeded to tell her pretty much I just wrote in the previous paragraph. The woman turned her back on me and went into the building.
What I find wrong with Lahti is that in my experience a larger subset of the population is lacking in basic manners than in any other place I've ever lived in. I've had a few particularly bad experiences involving people that I'd have expected to know better. In one case, met two older guys by Lake Vesijärvi when I was shooting there. We had an interesting and friendly discussion. They were retired headmasters of certain local schools. When I told the younger one of the two that my wife teaches some classes in one the schools he asked what her name was. When I told him her name and that what she taught, the man guessed my wife was Russian, turned and looked slightly away from me expressing his prejudicial notion that she couldn't have been a qualified teacher - without bothering to ask me! In fact, my wife has lived here for decades and has received practically all her higher education in Tampere. I had been polite in the way I addressed these chaps (the older one of whom did or said nothing bad).
Fuck rude old people! Nobody deserves any respect because of their age. The whole notion has been completely outdated for a long time now. The reality is that old people tend to have all manner of stupid ideas the world has progressed beyond a long time ago. Most old people are quite useless in the modern world. On balance, there is nothing that comes with advanced age that we should particularly respect. Each individual deserves to be judged on their own merits.
Another incident of people of Lahti demonstrating their total lack of manners involved a gymnastics teacher of my daughter's. This woman's overall communication style was rather unpolished. She was quite harsh with the kids, too. But the worst thing was what she did on the day when my daughter's group had a public performance. The kids had to be brought to the venue in the morning but were not to leave the back stage room before their performance was over. The parents were not allowed to go to the room. Us parents had not been instructed to bring our kids a meal with us because she had neglected to send an email. What we did was go back stage and bring our daughter food anyway. A few stern words over this and the way she had treated the kids set her straight. But I think that because we scared her more than anything else. That's actually how you effectively deal with assholes here: respond in kind.
There are actually some statistics to back up the idea that this city has a larger than average number of jerks. In 2013, Regional State Administrative Agencies did a survey on how commonplace bullying in schools is in different regions of Finland. There are 19 regions. Three came on top: Päijänne Tavastia (this region), Kymenlaakso (the capital of which is Kotka) and Satakunta. In these regions, it is 50% more likely for a pupil in middle school to have experienced bullying in the previous week than in the whole country on average. What the three have in common is being in the rust belt and without major university campuses. What happens is that the kids who do best in school move to the fast growing cities with universities and knowledge economies. All these regions have cultures dominated by factory workers. Heavy industries aren't exactly breeding grounds for refined manners and social niceties. What's good about the local culture is many people being a bit naive in the sense that they tend to blurt out what's on their minds without concealing their thoughts even if that would work to their advantage. Partly because Lahti is the newest of all cities in its size category, there probably is less corruption here, too, than particularly in medieval cities like Turku that have long been politically dominated by the same few parties.
I was more interested in these buildings than skin that may once have challenged gravity but had long since suffered a miserable rout.
A young bird as opposed to and old and wrinkly one.