Helsinki

Doctor’s Hat (week 39/08)

Posted in Helsinki on Oct 1st, 2008 No Comments »

On Friday, I attended session, where friend defended her PhD theses. During last three years, I’ve attended two other similar kind of events (so one per year). It seems that your lens needs to be in 100-200mm range (these are held in lecture halls) and for f/2.8 you might need ISO1600 or ISO3200 or flash. Since you only need to get photographs about defendent, opponent and moderator, you might as well use external flash for those few shots, because you probably won’t be only one with flash.
To get into actual photograph, it is called ‘tohtorin hattu’ in finnish and its direct translation would be doctor’s hat (PhD’s to be more precise). Person behind the desk is moderator, opponent is on camera left and defendant is on camera right. Men are supposed to have tail-coat and women usually have black suit or something similar.
After this session is over, people get some coffee, cake, etc. and start to get ready for evening session called karonkka, which is dinner party that is held for opponent’s honor (and paid by defendant). At minimum, there will be opponent, moderator, defendant and his/her mentor, but they can be quite large dinner parties, where you have something like 70 guests. There are also lot of speeches, because first the defendant will thank opponent, moderator and all the other people, who have played important role in project and then all the people, who were named in a speech will give their speech and so on.