Landscapes of the Mind

What’s in a landscape? Is it a window out to the world, or a window out to a world? Artists look for patterns, angles, twists or filters in order to show a world in a certain way. For me an interesting landscape is like a family member whom you deeply love but sometimes you’d rather not look at in all its misery. Sometimes you happen to be there when the sun light hits the treetops in the perfect angle and you can just see it in your minds eye how to capture it.

I’ve been watching artist interviews this week in our national broadcasting company’s archives which they kindly offer for anyone to see online. The site is unfortunately only in Finnish, but there are some clips that are in English, like for example this marvelous Steve McCurry interview. In that interview he talks about knowing the surroundings first and feeling ‘home’ in the location before shooting it. I love they way he shows his respect to the people in the location and wants to understand their way of living and the reasons behind cultural phenomena. I suppose that is the way to make people find something to relate to in the photos. If the photographer who comes from totally different culture and surroundings finds a way to understand the subject, it will eventually translate also to the viewers. Some people say that they like the way my photos make them feel, e.g. calm or serene, and maybe then landscapes translate to landscapes of the mind. I hear many of my artist friends say that they need to have music on when they create, and that is true about me as well. Creating landscapes of the mind sometimes happens quite unexpectedly when you are by yourself deep in your own world, letting the flow of the moment and the feeling you get from the music take you to places. Sometimes the flow takes you to places where you didn’t expect to end up in and going with the flow in that moment becomes testing the boundaries, seeing if I could pull this off. Seeing how my landscape becomes also someone else’s landscape when I post it online, adds another wonderous layer to the experience of that moment which once was so intimate and has now become that to many others who do not share my past or my culture or my surroundings.

I also watched a documentary about a Finnish photographer Jorma Puranen who shoots the indigenous Sami people of the North. He studies the relationship between people and their environment. He has made transparent prints of Sami portraits and embedded them into various environments, in order to make us see that Sami people who have deep respect for nature, will reflect that respect for nature even in our industrialized cityscapes. Also Puranen says that if a landscape is skillfully captured, it will speak to people regardless of the boundaries of language or culture, and if the landscape reflects e.g. ecological values, it will be respected even more. Puranen also says that he does a lot of research for the photos and in a sense it is the same thing that McCurry said about getting to know your environment. First day photos in any location do tend to end up in the ‘touristy shots’ folder. All I ask from my photos is that they would have a story in them, enough emotion to make the viewer feel something, to believe that something could happen in that scene, to imagine that the scene is a true one, full of life and possibilities.

Artists have their own ways to see and present landscapes. Appreciation for the beauty of nature can be seen so strikingly for example in the paintings of Holly Friesen or Terrill Welch. Also some movie makers are very skillful in portraying landscapes, and particulary in the movies I see the connection with actual physical landscapes and the landscapes of the mind, like e.g. Aki Kaurismäki portrays the silent inner landscapes of Finnish mentality with his sparse physical environments. Last night I happened to see Mikko Niskanen‘s Under Your Skin (1966) on tv and even though I have seen it many times before this time I was mesmerized by the stunning beauty of the landscapes and the way those young people were portrayed in it, undoubtedly partly because I have been thinking about landscapes all week and I seem to have lost myself in the black and white world once again. But in the movie, even in their city clothes and young people’s ways of doing things the main characters seem to fit so perfectly in that beautiful nature scene (purchase the movie here, archive of screen shots here). The movie received a lot of awards here in Finland back in the late 60s and it has been one of the most popular Finnish movies of all time. I’m left dreaming of summer and admiring the beauty of summer light in that forest, which makes my heart skip a beat in hope of sunnier days.

The Mind Is Its Own Place

We are still in the middle of the influenza peak season and my family has really got its share this year. I thought we were on clear water already but no. My son was hospitalized because of pneumonia last Wednesday and they also took out his appendix due to severe stomach pain. I stayed in the hospital with him and we returned home yesterday. He is still very weak but recovering. I have also had a bad flu and I’m staying in safely tucked in the sofa.

We are having yet another blizzard and watching the whiteness out of my window makes me think of the time when we were on holiday in the eastern Finland and we stopped to eat in a hotel. It was an old manor house that was surrounded by snow and nearly empty because it wasn’t tourist season yet. And it was so quiet. All the restaurants in the hotel were closed but we were allowed to sit there in an empty and unlit dining hall and eat the food we had brought. Our kids were running up and down the corridors, their voices echoing from the walls. We were glad to be inside from the cold for awhile and ready to continue our adventure after our very extraordinary lunch. Thinking about that place now makes me wonder if it really existed or if I had dreamed it. Or maybe seen in a movie.

People have tried so hard to harness all the powers into their own use, to be able to control what happens next and to be able overcome obstacles. Still there will always be things that are out of our reach. We can’t make us not get sick. We can’t turn the blizzard off. At least for now. We adjust and try to be resourceful. If we can’t go anywhere physically, we can do it in our minds. A friend just told me about reading a book that took her into that world in such an intense way that she feels like she knows the people in the story personally. Or we can try to see the situation differently. Like my son did in the hospital. On Friday night he told me to ring the nurse to bring him hot chocolate, and he said that he doesn’t want to go home because it’s almost like staying in a nice hotel. I didn’t ring the nurse, after all I don’t think they have room service in hospitals, but next day when I told this story to the nurse, she laughed and said that last week one of their patients gave them four stars. It was the childrens’ ward so I’m sure they try to pitch in to make it a pleasant place so that the kids won’t be afraid if they have to come back. I have stayed in that hospital before when our younger son was born and it was really nice that time also. And to imagine that health care is free of charge here in Finland, well we do pay lots of taxes, but still. Hats off to Finnish health care system and the devoted hard-working people that work there!

Today I will embark on escapism by daydreaming of my future adventures. I have started already by spending the morning pinning my earlier trips on GoogleMaps. I got this idea from a blogger-trekker-friend Chris this morning when I was reading his blog. Lots of unpinned territories on my map, where to go next…? My mind is going to take me off this blizzard and this cold to faraway places now, have a wonderful weekend everyone!

The mind is its own place and in itself, can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven. – John Milton

p.s. Oh, and I have got more blogger awards, thanks so much Rebekah and Otto.

Unexpectedly Quiet

My boys have had influenza for two weeks so I haven’t been able to post photos or write. When something unexpected like this happens it seems that everything stops, and then you are always so surprised to notice that things have happened in the world while you were excluded from it. There have been students in my classroom every single lesson I missed and new decisions have been made at the staff meetings. People have posted lots of interesting photos in their streams and many interesting opinions have been exchanged. And then it takes a while to catch up, sometimes there isn’t time to do that and there you are just totally lost for awhile until things start rolling smoothly again.

It is Valentine’s Day today. Finns don’t really know how to celebrate it but they have wanted to include it in their calendars. It has become both a day for lovers and a day for friendship. When going through friendship quotes I found a wonderful page of Shakespeare Quotes. Such a wise man he was. I think this one is my favorite:  “A friend is one that knows you as you are, understands where you have been, accepts what you have become, and still, gently allows you to grow.”  I could imagine writing this on a card either for my husband or a friend. It is amazing how often you can hear people talk very disrespectfully to each other, both friends and spouses. To achieve the point in a relationship where you can gently allow each other grow is something to really hold on to. Maybe there isn’t really a big difference in the way good friends treat each other compared to the way a romantic relationship works, all centering around the words respect, understanding, support and growth. Hearing people talk disrespectfully to each other makes me wonder if they do that to everyone, or is it just certain people that they feel entitled to disrespect. Having said that I see the value in celebrating Friend’s Day as we call it here, maybe it will make us value friendship more and maybe it will make us think what really is important in relationships.

It must be one of our greatest fears that no one will ever love us just the way we are. Maybe we can try to cure that fear with another one of Shakespeare’s famous quotes: “Love all, trust a few, do wrong to none.” Happy Valentine’s Day!

Days Around Here

The people of Finland have now elected their 12th president and all is well in the republic. During the campaign the candidates were accused of being too friendly to each other and agreeing too much with each other on everything. Someone even made a study of the ways in which they started their sentences on TV debates and apparently the most common phrases used were ‘you have a very good point there’, ‘I agree with you very strongly on that one’ etc. I thought it was very enjoyable to see the two discussing important issues with such a determination to work on the same problems. Of course it was just for the campaign, they were trying very hard not to offend anyone in order not to lose any votes.

In the nordic cultures conversations are very much centered around conformity. Finns do that, Swedes do it even more, at least Finns like to joke about Swedes having endless meetings with endless talk, whereas Finns are more often seen as the silent types who keep repressing their feelings until they fall apart. Those are of course stereotypes, but maybe there is a seed of truth in those caricatures at least in certain personality types if not characteristics of the whole culture. Still, I think we all agree (see, again we all agree) that having meaningful conversations does not come easy. Either we agree on everything and try really hard not to say anything that the other person disagrees on, or we start arguing. I wish I had more time for endless talks. Seems like too often my days go into running around correcting all the mistakes and fixing all the misunderstandings that I’ve made during the previous days when I had to run around in order to manage to do everything I had to do that day. Why is it that we people misunderstand and judge each other so easily? I think the best conversations are the ones when ideas flow freely and there doesn’t seem to be any point or end at all, but they still seem to make us stronger and better human beings. In those conversations you feel you can freely voice any ideas whatsoever without the fear of being judged, labeled, controlled or boxed. You can even keep changing your opinion without anyone wondering about it. See, I don’t think there is anything perfect in this world, except maybe a lazy afternoon or a snowflake. We all have flaws even though we all are so desperately trying to find someone perfect to look up to and stand up for.

I saw many people blogging about what people regret before dying. People said that they wished that they hadn’t worked so much and they also wished that they would’ve been able to enjoy the moment. I see those things as points in a continuum, not two sides of the coin. Maybe if we worked a bit less and found it in ourselves to enjoy also those moments. Every now and then you can read in magazines about people who have jumped off the treadmill, but not everyone can do that, the society will always need its teachers and doctors and so on. Maybe giving yourself time is just about our attitude towards things – the ability to find it in yourselves to enjoy the moment, and not think about the next thing you have to do, and to be able to forgive each other the fact that we are not without faults.

Home Sweet Home

We are back home from our adventure to Eastern Finland. It was an exciting ride in the extreme cold weather but we managed. There has been a complete traffic chaos in southern Finland due to heavy snowfall, but as you can see we enjoyed driving in clear roads with a gorgeous sunset.

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Great Inspiration!

I woke up this morning to my five-year-old son asking me if he could open the blinds because the sunrise was so beautifully orange. And he continued  explaining that you so rarely see orange color because for example trees are green and no one ever paints their house orange. Some of you probably remember reading about my very talkative five-year-old in a recent post. I think that was one of the most wonderful wake-up calls I’ve experienced. He likes to get up early and sometimes it can get a bit too much because my other son likes to stay up in the evenings. You know how some people are morning people and some people are evening people. Especially now that we have our holiday week, it’s sometimes really annoying that he wants to get up at six every morning. Despite all this I was delighted  to hear that the color orange was the first thing on his mind this morning - and not the legos he so desperately wants for his upcoming birthday that he even sleeps with the lego catalogue on his pillow.

I see there is a Blogger Award thing going on, a sort of a chain letter for the blogger world. I was nominated for the Versatile Blogger Award by Rebekah Burgess. I’m grateful for her to mention me in her blog and I want to pay the good forward and mention some people here in my blog. I hope you will take the time to see their wonderful sites. Instead of writing a list here I hope you’ll look at my blogroll in the right margin and you’ll find my links there. I’ve updated the list today. I’ve been looking into a good time to mention some of my online friends in this blog and via this chain letter the opportunity presented itself and it felt like the right thing to do right now. I know I’m not doing this completely by the rules, but I don’t think it matters much. Some of these people I have known some years now and I consider them my friends. Some of them are new acquaintances whose sites I intend to follow in the future. When I started posting pictures on Flickr I soon found the work of Iain Sarjeant and he has been a great inspiration to me and with his support I got my first followers on Twitter. The people who I mention in my blogroll have helped me to grow as an artist and with the help of their feedback I have learned to look at my work objectively. I have learned that I grow from positive feedback and I think many people do. When I see that no one retweets, faves or plusses a photo I’ve posted, I will remove it and the ones that get stars and plusses will stay. In that respect social media has been a great learning platform for me in my journey to become a better photographer. The same applies to writing as well I suppose. If you’re looking into getting inspired, those links in the margin do that for me every day. I follow a lot of artists, painters and writers, I find that helps me in developing my visual eye and helps me to open up the creative outlet in me. There is a fantastic supportive art group on Twitter that have so kindly adopted me even though I don’t post any drawings or paintings. Those of you who are on Twitter and into art should follow the hashtag #FollowArt to meet them.

As a photographer I get a lot of inquiries about locations. If you are interested in seeing where I’ve taken the pictures I post, I usually add the location on my Flickr map every time I think it is relevant information. If you scroll the photos you will get more pink spots on the map, you can only see the location of the photos that are just in that specific place in the stream that’s shown on the map. I think it’s a great tool for looking at Flickr photos and seeing their location at the same time. I had a bit of trouble adding some locations there today since my Flickr is still on Indonesian. I’ve been too lazy to contact them about it and I feel that I’m learning quite a lot of Indonesian on the side: ‘Pilih foto dan video’. Today as I was going through the comments that I’ve got for my most recent posts I came across a post about the Mediterranean sea and how polluted it is. It reminded me of the feelings I had when I saw the trash dumped by a cruise whip floating in the shores of Croatia on a visit to Dubrovnik a few years back. Needles to say I was heartbroken for a long time and stunned by the reactions I got from the locals. Most of them pretended it hadn’t happened but when I confronted one of them about it, I got an unfair: ‘maybe it’s the ship that brought you here’ comment. That made me realize that people’s jobs are on the line if tourists stop coming and to sacrifice your own environment for that starts to eat you from the inside. The situation in the Mediterranean and the geographical reasons behind it are very similar to our beloved Baltic Sea. I wrote a post about that some time ago when I saw an article on the newspaper saying our sea is the most radioactive sea in the whole world, even after everything that happened in Fukushima. Fighting for a cleaner environment is such an important job and I have immense respect for people who care. At least for me nature is by far the most important source of inspiration and I cannot imagine happiness without it.

I was finally able to finish reading all your wonderful comments today and found many new inspiring sites to follow. It seems that there is a wonderful supportive community also on WordPress. And, in the end, maybe any place is what you make it.

Greetings from the Canyon Creek

Hi all you new followers! What a wonderful surprise it was to see that WordPress has promoted my blog on the Freshly Pressed. To be honest with you, I didn’t even know that could happen but now that it has happened I’m overwhelmed. I have 7 pages of notifications in my email and all the pillars on my stats (excluding today and yesterday) look so small that it’s a bit sad. Well I guess I have to start paying attention to what I write from now on. But seriously, thank you so much for the kind comments everyone, I have now more than a hundred new followers and I hope that I can provide you with interesting posts to read. (Yikes.)

Extremely cold weather continues here in Eastern Finland. The canyon creek seems to be open still at places and gorgeous body of fog keeps rising from the water all the way to the tree tops on the mountains. We have day light from 9 am to 6 pm now and it feels very bright after the dark season. It does, however, give enormous amounts of energy and I’ve heard my friends talk about it many times recently. If you go back to the post I wrote just a few weeks ago, you’ll see the difference in light. I never use artificial light sources in my photography so in each photo you can see the light that was naturally available at the time I took the photo.

We have another waterway on the other side that is not open at any place but instead has a road cleared on it. The ice is about 20 cm (8 inches) thick and during the winter time Finnish people drive their cars on the ice. There is about 50 cm (20 inches) snow around here and snow clearance vehicles plough the snow away from the routes which are marked on the maps. There are signs saying it can be dangerous to drive on the ice and it happens at your own risk and every winter there are people that go under and drown. Hypothermia happens very quickly at these temperatures. Still, I would say that walking, skiing, skating, ice-fishing and driving cars and especially snow mobiles on ice are among the most popular winter pastimes for Finns. For example, my sons learned to skate on a lake, not in a rink.

Oh and yes, that’s me in the picture. I was born in the family of the long-legged-ones. No, but seriously I took that photo at about 1.30 pm and the shadows were that long. I’m not into posting photos of myself, and very few portraits in general, the ones that I post have artistic value to me, but I’m making an exception here to thank you all for the kind words and the subscriptions. And this one was too funny not to post with the long legs and the groovy trouser legs.

It has now been dark for a few hours already. This day bathed in sunlight and made the biting cold air feel out of place. It’s the battle that is already lost, and knowing it makes us Finns smile.

About Seeing and Having Something to Say

For a non-native writer like me all positive feedback on blog writing feels like fireworks. I feel fortunate that I have such good friends around the world who follow my blog and leave comments on my posts. There are professional writers and native English-speakers who encourage me in my writing and it feels really wonderful to be noticed by people like them. Just recently I was asked to contribute to a blog called ‘Under A Grey Sky‘ and today my first contribution ‘January in Finland‘ has been published there. It’s well worth taking a look at the author list on the About page and reading also other posts on that blog. No grey skies at the moment here though, just for the last days of January we’ve been enjoying glorious sunny weather with fantastic wintry scenes. So, no complaints on my part!

Originally I started this blog so that I would have a place to show my photos but it has now become more and it makes me really happy because I like writing a lot and I feel the urge to write almost every day. Still, every time it blows me away to see that people show up to read what I’ve written even though I’m not a native English-speaker and definitely not a professional writer. I remember someone (Annie Greenwood?) once told me that writing is not about words, it’s about having something to say, and photography is not about taking photos, it is about seeing (did I get it right Annie?). I find so much to relate to in those phrases. The funny thing in my case is that I write in English, I could never do it in Finnish even though it is my mother tongue, it just does not provide me with tools to be creative, or to put it in another way English is the creative outlet for me, not Finnish. I’ve tried writing in Finnish but I can’t bend the language to fit my purposes so that it would give out the right impression, I quite often feel misunderstood in Finnish or I hear myself sounding too serious and I want there to be more lightness in my writing. I read a lot in Finnish, fiction and non-fiction, and there are many authors I admire and enjoy their writing, especially because I can’t do the same things with my mother tongue than they do.

Being fluent in many languages gives you the privilege of reading in the original language. I don’t know what it is like to read a Finnish novel in English, but I assume it is not the same thing as to read them in Finnish. When I was studying Nordic Languages at the university we had to read texts in Danish and Norwegian even though we hadn’t studied those languages because it was assumed that those languages are similar to Swedish, and they are. In fact it was a wonderful experience to read a book in Danish and realize that I can understand it. Take for example the book Frøken Smillas fornemmelse for sne by Peter Hoeg, in its original language the rhythm and the sounds of the language contribute to the story, and even though the people who translate books do a fantastic job, the original work of art is always the best one to read if you have a chance to do it and you understand the language.

Some weeks ago I participated in a televised Sports Gala and sat next to a gentleman from the US who had just flown in and it was his first visit to Finland. Finnish athletes and their support groups were awarded prizes and there was a fantastic show that was synchronized with a similar gala that was going on in Stockholm at the same time. Explaining to the gentleman next to me who everyone was and what the jokes were about was a fantastic experience for me too. It really make me realize once again how much each culture has embedded in it, and the cross references need a lot of explaining for a foreigner but that is really the only way to learn something about that culture. In that sense it is always a pleasure for me to open up some of our culture to a foreigner and I suppose that is one of the things I try to do in this blog as well.

I have a few more days left here in Nilsiä and I’m hoping to catch up on my reading and go for a few more adventures in the freezing but beautiful weather. Getting to know new landscapes is fascinating, having the opportunity to get inside them and learn to see how they change is luxury.

-26C (-15F)

I’m spending a few days in Eastern Finland. It’s very cold out here, this morning we had -33 degrees Celsius which is about -27 degrees in Fahrenheit, says the converter. I went out to take some winter photos in glorious sunshine and the temperature came up to -26 degrees Celsius (-15F) during the day. I had good gear and didn’t feel the cold at all. Some crazy people are skiing and snowboarding, I just might take out my snowshoes tomorrow…

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Life at the Birdfeeder II

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Life in the Absurd

Last year I wrote a post called ‘Life in the Abstract‘. Lately my life has been so absurd that this title came to mind.

I guess it all started when we moved into this house. When we came to look at the house for the first time I fell in love with it and told my husband that it is the perfect Moomin house for us. We joked about the house having so many hiding places that we would be looking for our children most of the time. Well, that has not happened but instead many other strange events have taken place ever since. One day the front door was wide open when we came from the store even though we both swear that we locked the door on our way out. Another time when our kids and their friends went into my son’s room and locked the door, they suddenly couldn’t get it open anymore and my husband had to climb the fire escape up and break the lock from the inside to get the kids out. Now that it has snowed I see that there are cat pawprints on our front porch going back and forth, I think she sleeps on the bench out there. And then the roof of the shed on the yard keeps collapsing under the weight of the snow no matter what we do about it. But still, no matter what pranks the house pulls on us, we still love it.

Then there is the five-year-old. Have you ever engaged in long conversations with a five-year-old? Ours is a talker and it starts at 6am every morning. I’m definitely not a talker at 6am and it is a challenge to keep up with him. Every day he asks how many days until his birthday and every morning he has a new request for a present. Then there are also the questions about retirement. What it is and when he can start it. I must have told him some morning that I wished I didn’t have to go to work and I think it all ended up in a sleepy and hurried explanation about what retirement is. Maybe it wasn’t all that comprehensive… All November and December he kept wondering about how it is possible for people to be nice for so many days in a row. We have a saying that if you want Santa to bring you presents you have to behave well. I had no other answer for him except to offer comfort in saying that I struggle with that too. The five-year-old is also very interested in bacteria nowadays and he keeps explaining me how they walk and run up and down his insides. There is also some miming involved.

And then there is my work. Just today in a fit of frustration (and in front of the whole class) I told a 14-year-old that he is not a very good liar, which is a major no-no when working with teenagers. Say something like that and they’ll all turn against you, but this time – just when I thought I was done for – they all started laughing (at him and him included) which encouraged me to explain to them that actually it is a very good personality trait. Those who are not good at lying tend to be the the ones people trust the most. Well, at least I had to say that as an educator and to my surprise they bought it. Hanging out with 550 teenagers daily definitely adds to the absurdity in my life.

And as you probably guessed then there is the Finnish weather. When you jump off a bus or your own porch and you end up in knee-deep featherlike snow wearing your workshoes (and by then wet socks), there is a moment when you are torn whether to laugh or cry. Or when the wind blows that snow sideways on your face and there is no way getting out of the parking lot because the snow is so deep you’ll only get stuck in it no matter how high-tec your tires are, and you are wondering whether you will be able to pick up your kids on time from the daycare because you’ll have to shovel all that snow first, and just then you happen to turn to the right direction where the sun peeks from behind those clouds for the first time in a week. And in the middle of all that the beauty of that afternoon suddenly takes your breath away.

January in Finland

It has been snowing since Wednesday. After a dark December we can now enjoy snowy January. I have been roaming the  coastline, but since there hasn’t been any direct sunlight, the photos remain quite dark even when shooting during daylight hours.

There is a deer feeder in the forest where I’ve been often lately and today I happened to see three deer running on a slope with snowy trees. It was such a delightful view. I hope to catch some photos of those three some time later. The forest is full of deer marks and it is so enjoyable to follow them. You can see how they’ve been running around enjoying the snow. The snow is about knee-deep at the moment, so with good gear walking in it is not a problem at all. I didn’t bring my snowshoes today but I still managed to walk in places where there weren’t any snowmobile tracks. It is a good work-out though, not to mention the snow-clearing job that was waiting for me in my home yard.

After seeing the deer I decided to go to the same direction they went, figuring they’d show me the best places, and they did. I found a wonderful spot right by the sea on a hill. I’m sure I will go back to that place many times. There were lots of birds in the reeds, I’d love to find out if they were bearded tits, they are not very common around these areas. Maybe I’ll see them also again some time later.

So, this is January in Finland. We’ve got the snow now, hoping we’ll also get some sunlight soon.

ps. We are electing a new president for the country today. It will be a very exciting night, although there will most probably be a second round in the voting. If you are into politics, you can find more info here, but just to give you an inside view: my sons just asked me yesterday whether the president always has to be female. We have had a woman president for 12 years, now the second popular candidate is a man who lives with a man and stands for the Green Party. Very interesting times it is!

My Best Shots 2011

Stockholm Sightseeing

Adrift

Another year has come to an end and it’s time to look back on the photos I’ve taken this year and to see which ones have been most liked. This year I’ve started to post also on Google+ but since they do not provide statistics the same way as Flickr does and since I’ve been posting there only since August, I am still relying mostly on Flickr faves on figuring out which photos are the ones that people like the most. ‘Stockholm Sightseeing’ has been one of the most popular of my images this year. I traveled to Stockholm on February and during that trip I managed to catch many icy shots that Flickr explored. Among the other favorites are images called ‘Adrift’ and ‘No Man’s Land’ taken on that same trip. It was very cold last February, with lots of snow and ice, but the light was really nice. I can still remember how my fingers froze when I was taking these photos, but the pictures sure are nice to look at now.

No Man's Land

Joy

Will You Miss Me

Curl Wire

I’ve always liked taking pictures of flowers, but I guess mine aren’t the traditional kind. A blooming hibiscus on the windowsill catching the afternoon glow through the window can really start my imagination and so does a forgotten little flower in the shadow of some huge weeds in a forgotten garden. That is how I found ‘Joy’ and ‘Will You Miss Me’. Another one of my endless sources of inspiration is willow herb. We have plenty of them growing around the country and I can’t get enough of watching how the dried plant curves so eloquently in the late autumn light. Both ‘Love’ and ‘Curlwire’ were also explored on Flickr, and so was ‘Will You Miss Me’.

Love

Windows to the Worlds

Milky Way

Among my other popular images this year are also ‘Windows to the Worlds’ which was taken inside, and that is quite unusual for me. There is an interesting shadow play going on there and the low key mood gives the photo its special character. As for the artistic merits that the painting has in the image, I cannot claim credit for. In fact, there was a time I hesitated whether I should upload the image at all since it does contain much of creativeness that I have nothing to do with. And then there is my ‘One World Waking Up‘ series, the most liked of which are the ‘Milky Way’ shot and the ‘Stardust’ image.

Stardust

By far the most favorite of all my images this year – and ever – has been ‘no swimming today’ which I shot last February in a nearby camping site when we were grilling sausages with my kids. We had just walked across the lake on the ice, I was wearing my snowshoes and my husband skied pulling the kids in a sled. Here‘s a ‘behind the scenes’ photo of that day. The photo has been viewed over a thousand times on Flickr and it has 65 faves. No doubt the title has been part of its success. Coming up with good titles is sometimes very difficult but that time I think I nailed it.

no swimming today

One of my personal favorites that did not make it to the top ten is ‘Tangled & Drained’. Once again my subject is Willow Herb, and I do enjoy it enormously how the photos are so different even though the subject is the same, if you compare ‘Tangled & Drained’ to ‘Love’ and ‘CurlWire’. I guess one of my personal challenges in fine art photography is to create different moods and stories with my photos, even if the subject remains the same.

Tangled & Drained

I had to make some of the images on this post very small to fit them all, but by clicking on the image you’ll get another window with a larger image. Here is a mosaic of my photos that you have liked the best in the year 2011. I’m most grateful for your support! Have a wonderful New Year and lots of success and happiness in the year 2012! Oh, and by the way, this is my 60th blog post – thanks for reading! Here’s my post from last year: My Best Shots 2010.

On Ownership

I have wanted to write about this for some time but I have put off doing it because this is a tough one to tackle. Today I’ve decided to give it a shot while I’m waiting for the sun to rise.

There are many approaches to ownership in art and in photography in particular. Some people share their images freely and don’t let themselves be bothered about other people using them, whereas others don’t even want to post their photos online in the fear of being ripped off or imitated. My personal view on this lies somewhere in the middle. I want to show my work online but I don’t want people to use them for their own purposes without asking me. However, it has taken me a long time to figure out where to stand on these issues. I’ve found myself going through many questions such as ‘Does posting images online ruin my chances of showing them in an exhibition?’, ‘Do I need to be sure that people don’t use my images for their own purposes?’, ‘If someone wants to buy any of my images, what is it that I am selling them – the ownership of that photo, a copy of that photo or the rights to that photo?’

I started posting my images on Flickr two years ago, since then I’ve gone through many ideas and through trial and error found my own way of relating to the questions above. I upload only small pictures with low resolution and I add my watermark on the photos. I know the watermark can be removed and the images reconstructed but I doubt if the quality is the same in large prints because that is what I sell. I’ve made the watermark translucent so that in my most recent images it is hardly noticeable. I’ve noticed some people don’t like watermarks and to be honest, they do bother me as well. Still, for me watermarking means claiming the ownership of the photo and letting everyone know that it belongs to me and no one else is allowed to use it. It is a bit like writing your name on your cup in a party to tell everyone else not to use it. The world today is flooded with images and many people have no idea whatsoever about copyright laws, not to mention decency to respect moral ownership. Moreover, finding our way to cope with social media makes many people confront these issues for the first time, not thinking about the consequences. And I find it unfair to assume that they do, unless I state it clearly in my image: this one belongs to me, not to you. And still if someone does not understand or does not want to understand, I have made sure it will not ruin my chances of showing my images in an exhibition or selling large unique prints to customers, because the images that are online are so small. And most importantly, that way I can get only the positive out of being visible in social media, not having to chase the bad guys.

Yesterday I friend asked me if there is a photo that I would not sell. I told her ‘no’. The images that I sell are large unique prints (80x50cm or larger) mounted on aluminum and signed. I sell a copy of the image, not the rights to the image, but the copy is a unique piece. I still have the ownership of the files and I can look at them anytime and post them online. In a sense then I guess I’m selling a promise, a promise of a unique art work. And in that sense I guess I should have answered my friend that ‘yes, the ones that I’ve already sold’. The idea of any of my photos can easily be imitated, but as anyone who has ever tried that knows, it does not work that way. The light is different in any given time and place, and the cameras can be adjusted in innumerable ways. Having just sold four pieces without any marketing makes me confident that the way I’ve figured it out might just work.

With all this said I have to conclude that selling really is not my main goal in photography. I have always liked to be out in the forest and take pictures, making art of what nature provides has evolved on its own and the need to sell prints has emerged from the outside. Navigating in the social media with all this is not always easy and finding my way of doing that has taken me a long time. I hope this post will help some of you in your own path finding.

THOUGHTS
Of ownership—as if one fit to own things
could not at pleasure enter upon all,
and incorporate them into himself or herself;
Of vista—suppose some sight in arriere
through the formative chaos,
presuming the growth, fulness, life,
now attain’d on the journey,
(But I see the road continued,
and the journey ever continued;)
Of what was once lacking on earth,
and in due time has become supplied
—and of what will yet be supplied,
Because all I see and know
I believe to have its main purport
in what will yet be supplied.
~ Walt Whitman ~

Happy Holidays!

Southern Finland is like a setting for a sci-fi film at the moment. It’s pitch dark and the rain does not seem to stop at all. I think I’ll travel north soon and try to find some snow. I have photo posts planned for a few days ahead but I will take a break from posting for some time around Christmas.

This year has been amazing. I had a chance to show my work in the design district in our capital city, two of my images made it to the semifinal in the Wildlife Photographer of the year competition, and I’ve been able to make quite a few large works of my images, and even sell some of them. I feel truly fortunate to have so many people follow my work daily, some 350 on Flickr, 1360 on Twitter, 5000 on Google+, 148 on Facebook and 40 here on WordPress. I’m most grateful for all of you – thank you so much for all the faves, +1′s, likes and retweets. It is a huge pleasure to have learned to know the works of so many talented artists on the social media that I follow daily. I have got many new and dear friends and due to your constant support I feel like I’ve grown as an artist myself. Thank you so much my dear friends – You inspire me! I hope you will have a chance to relax and enjoy the Christmas time!

Happy Holidays!

Happy, happy Christmas, that can win us back to the delusions of our childish days; that can recall to the old man the pleasures of his youth; that can transport the sailor and the traveller, thousands of miles away, back to his own fire-side and his quiet home!

~Charles Dickens, The Pickwick Papers, 1836

Sold!

I have just sold four works to Lithuania. They are all large prints (50cmx80cm) mounted on aluminum and signed unique pieces, as my works always are. Here is the ‘Four Seasons’ package that is going to its new home right after Christmas.

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On Meaning

“What is this?” “Where was this taken?” people sometimes ask when they look at my photos. And I feel torn. Should I tell them or not? If I do, will it ruin the experience for them or will it provide necessary additional information? Mostly I feel that I shouldn’t. When I was going through my photos for last summer’s exhibition, a good friend told me not to reveal too much of the photos. The theme was ‘moment before sunset’ and her point was that if there is someone admiring my sunset image and it brings good memories into her mind about something in her own life, she does not want to read in the description something about that sea being one of the most polluted seas in the world. In that case the purpose of the photos is to evoke feelings, not to convey information.

There is going to be next year’s Wildlife Photographer of the year deadline soon. I find myself pondering about the difference between photojournalism and fine art photography, trying to find my place in those genres. I guess I’m leaning quite heavily on the fine art side. Which makes me wonder how much the jury values fine art photos in comparison to the ones that portray the subject truthfully and in great detail. Be it as it may, I will pitch in and I will do my best in what I feel that my niche is  - creating feelings and engaging imagination. Just to give you an example, in my own work I don’t think that pictures need to be focused. Blurred images sometimes have much more feeling that the focused ones as the tones then become softer and dreamier. Both in my own work as well as in others’ I mostly enjoy the opportunity to imagine what the story in the picture might be and not knowing the answer I enjoy making up my own story as I look at it. Similarly, of the feedback that I get, I mostly enjoy the ones where people explain to me what they see in the image and what it means to them. And when there are many different stories for the same image, that is for me the most precious image of them all. That has happened for example with the portrait Shadowed Woman. People have very different interpretations of it. It seems that we want to reflect our own thoughts from the art work we see, and it is very little you need to do to change the image in order to change the story for the viewer, sometimes just cropping it differently makes the image convey a completely different story.

Our lives today are flooded with images. An image is such a powerful tool to convey both information and emotions that I see for example my students relying more and more on the nonverbal input when given material to study. Sometimes I find myself wondering if the importance of words is diminishing because sometimes people don’t seem to be bothered to read the text, they just look at the pictures. It’s really easy today to take a snapshot and upload it in the stream: ‘here’s my lunch’ ‘here’s my transport’ ‘there are the people I hang out with’ and ‘this is my house’. Text is being replaced by images and when people have something to say, they just post a picture rather than words and soon the stream is flooded with images. And when the pictures flood you, do you take the time to really see them or do they just run down the stream with the flow? How many of us see it as just a stream of information and do not take time to think about the story in the image? And those of us who do like to stay with the image a bit longer and get to know it better, can we find it in ourselves to appreciated simple things are do we just crave for more and more – flashier and more grandeur? As for myself, I’ve based on my work on the idea that I don’t do any post-processing and I don’t use any artificial light sources, and it does make it a bit difficult to compete with the retouched images as far as being flashy and grandeur is concerned. Wildlife Photographer of the year competition is the only competition I take part in, last year I made it to the semifinal. It is going to be exciting to see how I do this year. If there is anyone willing to help me decide which images to include, I will truly appreciate all the comments that you want to leave me in any of my sites. The  photos have to be nature photos and taken in Finland in the year 2011, all that information you can find for example in my Flickr stream. All the photos that haven’t been marked on the map have been taken in Finland.

For me photography does not mean comparing my images to those of others, I have a strong vision of what I want to do and I will continue doing that no matter how well I do in a competition. It does not seem to be a choice either, going out with my camera is a necessity for me and I enjoy it enormously. This last image I took today in the wetlands standing in the middle of a swamp. I managed to find a spot for both feet, quite far apart though, and had to come down for a semi-crouch to get the right angle. In the middle of finding the right time and angle, I realized that it would be fun to create a monet-like effect in the image by kicking the water in order to make waves. In contrary to the way I normally think about pictures and words, this time I’m truly happy there isn’t an image to tell you this story and how it ended, but I do hope these words tell you why I love photography.

On Beauty

How do we know what’s beautiful? How do we decide which images are valuable ? What is the ideal way we should do it? Social media provides endless streams of images to look at and to admire. On a #LeafOnThursday there are dozens, probably hundreds of leaves coming down the stream waiting to be plussed or faved or reshared. Which of those are the ones that will stay afloat? Which are the ones that we want to go back to and keep admiring even after the stream of leaves has changed into a stream of flowers for #FloralFriday? Or will any of them survive in this struggle to be noticed and remembered?

When I browse through photos online, or my own work after a shoot in the forest, I go with my gut feeling. I don’t think about the technical details, see if the focus is sharp or not, wonder if the white balance is on the spot or not, or even bother about the ‘faults’ caused by the lens, such as flares, vignettes or other distortions.For me the image is what it is with its faults and peculiarities. To make the distinction if it is a good image or not, is purely based on the feeling the image gives me – if it’s interesting or not, if it makes my heart turn or not or if it inspires me or makes me want to go back to it. Sometimes a good photo is the kind that has a great idea behind it, it has been composed well or there is a new surprising angle to an old subject. Sometimes a good photo is the kind that makes you feel in a certain way and in those photos it does not make any difference what the subject is in the photo – the same leaf or flower can make you feel happy or sad depending on the way it is presented. For me one thing is for sure, if I’ve seen a similar picture before the image is not interesting to me. There are quite a lot of pictures circulating that seem to have been taken in very similar conditions, seems like quite a few people want to take that best long exposure shot at the beach around sunset and why not, they are always very beautiful – but at some point there is the saturation point when they simply do not surprise you or turn your heart anymore. I suppose the same is true with autumn leaves and floral macros. When there is one image that is different from the most of them, it is the one that is the most beautiful one for me. I might even fall in love with a peculiar little ‘fault’ in it, which I do not see as a fault, but instead an interesting detail that makes the photo different than the others, a unique individual.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

~ Robert Frost ~

Aino’s Graduation Dec 6, 2011

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November Sunset

This week has been very rainy and very windy. And still no snow in sight. It’s amazing to think that November is almost over and we have plus degrees. It is the Baltic Sea that keeps our temperatures above zero, many places further south have colder days now than us. Just the other day I went for a walk with a friend in pitch dark pouring rain. There was also a thick fog and there was no way of seeing anything despite the torches we carried with us. Today there was a glimpse of sunlight and off I went to see the forest preparing for winter.

The forest I visited today has two very different kinds of wetlands. One is located on a cliff and looks almost like a pond, the other one is a very grassy patch down in a valley and it has a few small trees growing in the middle of it and lots of cranberries around it. The forest has many tall pine trees and lots of huge mossy rocks carried there by retrieving ice at the end of the Veiksel ice age some 13,000 years ago. There was no one except me and the woodpeckers. It was so quiet, it felt like the forest was holding its breath waiting for the winter to arrive.

Weather forecast says there is going to be a storm, so I guess we’re back to rain and darkness for some time. I took these three photos today, in pursuit of capturing some daylight before the storm.

Touch of Winter (Bling Bling)

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Life at the Birdfeeder

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One World Waking Up

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Fall Forest

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Coping with the Dark

It’s almost winter. Last autumn we had the first snow fall October 15 and that is today. This year there has been one frosty morning so far but no snow in sight. Autumn equinox occurred some weeks ago on September 23 and since that the night has been longer than the day. Coping with the dark has become one of the daily challenges for us Finns now once again.

I have had this blog now a bit over a year and I’m finding it a lot of fun going back to the posts I wrote a year ago. I remembered writing about autumn colors last year also, and you can find that post here That Lake. Then when I realized it was the time for autumn equinox I remembered writing about vernal equinox and you can find that post here Equal Night. Just the other day I was talking with students about living in Finland and about what would be interesting to other people to find out about us and I told them many people wonder how we survive in the cold and the dark. You can find their blog posts about living in Finland here.

Now it is time for us to enjoy Fall Break until Oct24. Old people call this break from school ‘potato harvesting week’ and I guess originally people needed to have their children at home at this time of the year to help to harvest crops before the snow came. Nowadays very few people grow their own potatoes even though there would be more than enough land to do so here in this country. I still refuse to buy a car and it is a challenge to get to a store to buy food so we do grow some of our potatoes and carrots and some other vegetables. Just the other day my seven year old son asked me how could people get to the stores if they didn’t have cars and I answered him, the stores would be closer if no one had a car. Of course that is not a realistic thought anymore, but I enjoyed giving him another perspective on things.

It has been a very busy autumn for me. My older son started school, in Finland kids start school at the age of seven. Then I also have my own classes to teach and in addition to all that, which would in itself make a very busy week, I was asked to give lectures to other teachers about social media use in language teaching. It was a lot of fun and also helped me a lot to form my ideology about teaching now and in the future. In both times I was teacher training I had the most wonderful audience who cooperated with me so well that I felt that also I was learning in that situation. My slides are in Finnish but in case someone is interested in checking out the links, you can them here. I’m not into making fancy slides, but I did need a list of what to talk about and a place to provide links for the listeners. I have been asked to train teachers in the future as well and I will gladly take up on the challenge.

So all in all I haven’t had much time for photography but now I think I will make this potato harvesting week my photography week and enjoy roaming in the woods and shooting the nature waiting for the first snow fall. Also I need to catch up on everyone’s posts on Twitter and Google+. I’m truly grateful for my online friends, thank you so much for stopping by to see my photos everyday. After a busy autumn, I might as well curl up on my sofa with some delicious red wine and chocolates and spend the dark season admiring art online. Like a good friend suggested, winter should be spent hibernating. But first out to the woods with the camera!

To See a World in a Grain of Sand (William Blake)

To see a world in a grain of sand,

And heaven in a wildflower,

Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,

And eternity in an hour.

-William Blake

Autumn Colors

This autumn is gorgeous with glorious colors and crispy cool breezes. I’ve been extremely busy with teaching and teacher training, but I’ve enjoyed doing all that because of the good feedback that I have got, and also because enjoying the autumn has given me lots of new energy.  Coming back to our new house after a full day and waking up early to start another busy day in this beautiful environment makes it easy to tackle new challenges. The mornings around here are so beautiful with the sun rising in the misty fields or from behind the tall pines in on the cliffs. Unfortunately there is never time for taking photos when I’m on my way to work and during the weekends I really appreciate the opportunity to sleep in. Every time there is a glorious mist on the field by the bus stop where I stand in the morning I wish I had the day off, but before I have a chance to finish off that thought I realize that I would still be sleeping if I didn’t have to go to work. But I have learned to let it pass. Sometimes it is enough just to enjoy what you see, not having to feel the need to capture it. And watching the humid air change its form in the sparking light gives me all the energy I need for that day.

Today I had a day off, I slept in and then took my boys to a hike in the forest. Two weeks ago I was hiking with my friends around the Lake Kukul about an hour’s drive east from here and we saw thousands of beautiful edible mushrooms all around the forest, so I thought maybe we could try to find some around here and cook them for dinner. Unfortunately we couldn’t find any edible ones anymore, I guess there had been others before us with the same thought… Nevertheless it was a great hike and I had a chance to take many photos. I bought a new camera last summer and I’ve really enjoyed these rare opportunities to explore the new scope of images I can create with it. You can find my Lake Kukul pictures in Flickr starting from ‘Two‘ and ending with the ‘the Three Who Left‘. Some of today’s pictures you can see on this page, but there are many more that I will be uploading next week.

We’ve been promised another warm week next week, so no frosty mornings in sight yet. But I don’t mind, there will be plenty of those later. It is going to be an exciting winter, with the new surroundings and the new camera, but also with some new career prospects that seem to be lurking behind my shoulder. I’ve been asked to do more teacher training and there have also been some enquiries about my creative work. Staying put is not my cup of tea, so I’m really excited to see where this all will take me. After all, there is always the option for me to click my heals and say ‘there’s no place like home’, if it all starts to feel too much.

One of World’s Rivers

Some time ago I was contacted by Lee Tracy who asked me if I were interested in taking part in the World Rivers Project. I was immediately interested in the project, and had in fact heard and seen pictures of it before. I had seen a beautiful river quite close to our house and decided right away that I had to include that river in the project. It is a very small river and not many people know about it, but it’s very beautiful and so are the wheat, oat and rye fields around it as well. A friend of mine knew a good place for taking photos, a beautiful rapid that is not too dangerous at this time of the year. So we took our little helpers with us today and drove out there to take some photos.

The idea in the World Rivers Project is to dip a white cloth in the river and include that cloth in a huge wall of other cloths dipped in various rivers in the world. The cloth that I decided to use is a thin gauze used for various purposes when taking care of babies. My son and his friend who were there to dip the cloth into the river for me have had their mouths dried with similar cloths, and people also use them as mosquito nets and sun curtains in the prams of babies. Some babies like to hold them when they sleep. I guess you can call gauzes like that the ‘all-purpose’ tool of baby care. I had one left in my closet and I thought it would be perfect for this purpose. Especially since the boys who were with me had just started first grade this week and it seemed like all of a sudden they had changed from little boys to little school boys. At the same time when I was taking part of this world wide project I could also do my own little ceremony which would hopefully help me see my son as a young boy rather than a small baby.

The issues around water are very familiar to me. We have plenty of it in Finland but when I was in India I heard people say that soon they will have to fight over it. Does the water that starts flowing in the state of Maharashtra belong to the state of Maharashtra or the state of Goa where it ends up flowing? The Indian state park guides told us that we who have plenty of water are rich and the water we have is more valuable than gold. We Finns are used to thinking that trees are our green gold, but we never knew how valuable water can be. Spending some time in India made us all ashamed of the way in which we shamelessly let the water run down the drains for too long or for no purpose. Seeing our beloved Baltic Sea get polluted to the state it is in now, makes this all seem more real, reminds us of the value of clean water, brings the catastrophes of the world to our door step.

Thank you Lee for letting me know of this great project, it is a great pleasure to do this and while doing it we also had a chance to spend a wonderful day by the river Mustijoki. Here‘s the official post and here’s Lee‘s site. I hope you will take time to look into her work as well.

Backwoods

I sprained my knee about a week and a half ago and haven’t been able to roam the backwoods like I normally do. My knee was better this morning so I decided to give it a go and left for an adventure. I haven’t been exploring this area much yet since we moved here two months ago. There is always so much to do when you move house, and I like spending time with my boys during summer, swimming and picking berries and going to amusement parks and so on. Now we’re back to our normal routine, going to work and making the most of weekends, and I really need my weekly hike in the woods.

The forest starts from our yard – it’s such a luxury to be able to get to wilderness right from your door. I discovered a beautiful wetland that will most definitely be one of my favorite motifs in the future. I just wish I wasn’t so sleepy in the morning, that place must be gorgeous in the morning mist. What amazes me always in the Finnish forests is that no matter how deep into the wilderness you go, you will most probably bump into another adventurer sooner or later. This time I crossed a path where two men were riding their bikes, and closer to the the houses there were some people picking lingonberries. 
It is heart-warming to see how many people still appreciate nature and like to spend time in the wild. In Finland anyone is welcome to pick any amount of berries or mushrooms in any forest and either eat them themselves (or put them into the freezer for winter use) or sell them to the stores or on a market. There are so many berries and mushrooms in our vast forests that there are always huge amounts of berries left in the forests that no one picks. The law is called ‘Everyman’s Right‘ and it makes some people go crazy for a while in the quest to become rich by selling a free product – until they notice how hard work it is to pick berries. There are so many forests in this country that there is no need to protect your own land ‘with a fence and a rifle’. My grandparents have actually made some money by picking berries and mushrooms, but that is only because they love to spend time in the forest and they are used to hard work.

Walking around on uneven ground all day was a bit worrisome with the knee that’s been keeping me awake many nights, but it turned out to be fine. The only problem at the moment are deer flies, and until the first frost comes there is nothing else to do than to wear a cap and have someone check your neck when you come back, after all I really wouldn’t want a whole family of those nesting in my hair. They are extremely disgusting, if you slap them they won’t die and if you try to wipe them off your shoulders they will stick to your hand, only one thing in mind – to climb up to your hair and lay their eggs there. But after the first frost comes they will be gone – really looking forward to that.

Has something changed? Still not sure.

When I was told by my friends that Google+ is a wonderful new social media especially for artists who want to share images and are worried about losing the control over the rights to their images. I wanted to try it out and I think that in the past couple of weeks I have learned the basics of it.

I relly like the way G+ looks. You can browse photos on black and it’s easy to click through an album. I love the stream/wall layout, where I can really see everyone’s images, not just the links which need to be clicked. I’m a huge Twitter fan but it’s just a lot of clicking sometimes. I really like the way in which people seem to find each other in G+ so easily, I’ve met dozens of interesting photographers so far, for example Kalle Björklid, Thomas Hawk and Thomas Leuthard just to mention a few. (Other amazing artists that I have met already before G+ you can find my blogroll on the right margin.) I do enjoy seeing their amazing images in large sizes in the stream, and I am at awe on how many interesting conversations get started below images or headlines posted in the stream.

There are also some features in G+ that I don’t like. Altering the caption of a photo after posting it is difficult and it won’t get updated in the stream. I would also like to have links in the photo captions, and my old links which I have attached to the pictures in Lightroom don’t work in G+. The name of the image should also be foregrounded more, in my opinion. As everyone can see, these are only small things that will probably be fixed soon. The main drawback of Google+ for me is that it does claim right to the images which are posted there. In that sense it does not differ from Facebook or any other social media.

I hope everyone will stay interested in my posts even though I’ve decided to post only small thumbnails to G+ with links to my Flickr page. There are two reasons for this. First of all, I have uploaded my pictures in Flickr for a year and a half now. I have no need for another place to keep my photos. The other reason is that I want to measure traffic and Flickr faves are the way for me to rank my photos. I would like to write a post like this every January, and to do that I need to have statistics like Flickr faves to know which of my images in that particular year have been the most popular. I know it is something that people continuously talk about whether to watermark photos or not, where to post and not to post and whether Facebook or Google want to rip you off or not. I’m not worried about those things, but I don’t see the need to post my stuff in many places. Even though the image that you see in G+ is just a small thumbnail. It’s about preferences, and this is what I’ve decided to do.

I’m sure Google will continue making improvements in G+, but so far it does not impress me enough to start uploading my images there. Maybe it will in the future. Meanwhile I will stick to my old Flickr – Twitter – Facebook routine and add a link also to Google+, but for storing images I have decided Flickr and my own site here will suffice. I’m still really excited about the G+, following so many new people and their wonderful works, learning to know many new people every day and seeing how this new social media develops. I guess staying put is not my cup of tea and seeing where the ball goes is, and I do expect there to be many improvements in G+.

I’m also working on a new website at the moment. I have rented a place for it and tried out a couple of things so far, but haven’t found the winner solution yet. If you have any suggestions for an application or software to use, I would very much appreciate the advice. Meanwhile, if you want to see the best of my images, you should rummage through this website, if you scroll down you’ll find all my pages and posts listed at the bottom of the page. Pages have slideshows and posts include images, slideshows, videos and my thoughts about photography, traveling, social media, nature and so on. On my Flickr page you can see all my daily posts in chronological order. I would really appreciate it if you faved the ones you really like and left me a note about your thoughts on this wordpress site somewhere.

I hope there aren’t too many typos or funny expressions here, after all English is not my mother tongue and I was in a hurry when writing this. I wanted to post this before the weekend so that I would have all the thoughts still fresh in my mind. I’m going to see the sea now folks, and I’m not taking my laptop with me. See you on Monday!

Living by the World’s Largest Deadzone

Recent news here in Finland have been about the rising amount of the poisonous blue algae in the Baltic Sea and the inland lakes. Our waters are so small around this area, even the sea, that they are easily affected by warm weather and pollution.

credit: SMHI

Last year National Geographic wrote that Baltic Sea has one of the world’s largest dead zones, meaning that there are no living organism in the bottom of the Baltic Sea. I remember reading about that in our biggest newspaper Helsingin Sanomat already a decade ago. Now they have found another type of poisonous algae in the Baltic that is radioactive and glows in the dark. The Baltic is in fact the most radioactive sea in the world, despite what happened in Fukushima. That’s of course due to the Tshernobyl accident and the fact that Pacific has such a huge body of water in which it all dissolves in time, whereas the Baltic is a closed area with a relatively small amount of water. I’m not a biologist but I suspect eutrophication, oil leaks and factories on the shores of the Baltic are mostly to blame for all the pollution. On top of it all there was the Tshernobyl accident 25 years ago. It will take another 100 years to get rid of the radioactive pollution in the water, the bottom of the sea will be cleared of it in 300 years.

Ten years ago when I read about the dead sea bottom in my beloved Baltic Sea I was heartbroken and frustrated. Now, I think there is even a tiny bit of hope. Some years ago John Nurminen foundation launched a wonderful ad campaign and have since made huge progress in the protection of the Baltic Sea. The chairman of the foundation Juha Nurminen is an underwater photographer and seems very devoted in saving the sea. The foundation has even been able to influence the wastewater treatment plants in St. Petersburg. “Enhanced phosphorus removal at the water utility’s three largest wastewater treatment plants reduces annual phosphorus load to the Baltic Sea by 1000 tonnes
- This is about 20% of the total phosphorus load discharged into the Gulf of Finland, and equals the total annual phosphorus load from Finland to the Gulf of Finland and the Archipelago Sea.” (read more)

We had a chance to rent a cottage by the sea for a week, and we’re going there next Friday. I’m not expecting swimming in the sea, but I’m hoping the state of it won’t be too depressing. I will definitely post pictures in two weeks time for you to see. Meanwhile, take a look at this heartbreaking video, and to let you who live in far away countries know: the mermaid at the end of the video is a famous statue in Denmark, it’s the symbol for their capital city Copenhagen.

Lazy Days

It has been wonderful eight weeks on vacation and I still have two more to go. I see my students writing on Facebook that they have nothing to do and it’s soooo booooring. Maybe they’ll be happy when the school starts in two weeks (yeah, sure, who am I kidding?)

For me vacation time is completely different from working time. In my job I have to follow a very tight schedule, being on time for break duty is very important and being on time for class as well, there have been cases where teachers have been sued by parents when they haven’t been on time and something has happened. It gets very stressful to follow such a tight schedule and it feels like nothing happens without a specific time set for it. During my holidays I make a point of not wearing a watch at all and hiding my calendar in the back of my desk drawer. During the last two years I’ve used an electronic calendar in my phone, and whenever I need to be somewhere, my iphone gives me a a go with a beep. When I still used a paper calender it often happened that I didn’t remember to check it often enough. Now I feel like a robot getting electric impulses to do things. On the other hand, it gives me the opportunity to focus on other things than my calendar. In some way I feel like it gives me more freedom to concentrate on the content of my work, on the interaction with students and other teachers and as a result maybe also on enjoying the ride.

In jobs like mine getting balance for the tight work schedule is very important. Spending timeless time, forgetting which day it is and not caring about what the time is seems like therapy for me, and makes me feel like a completely different person. Time is after all something that we people have invented and being so fussy about it is something that we have decided to do ourselves. Well, I have to admit that making everything work in a school of 800 students would not work without schedules and watches and rules. But being able to do that in the summer is heaven. Now that my sons are not toddlers anymore they can come up to me and tell me when they need something, when we’re hungry we’ll eat, when the sun shines we’ll swim, when we’re tired we’ll sleep. Teaching my sons to enjoy each moment as it is seems like an important thing to do for me, and summer is the best time to practice it.

Red Grass (video)

 

 

Competition News

Intersections

Early this year I sent some photos to the Finnish Wildlife Photographer of the Year competition. Last year’s winner photo was shot by Pekka Tuuri and here is a list of all the previous winners and links to their sites. As you can see the prize has been awarded every year since 1980 and every single time it has been given to a male photographer. There are seven categories: Plants, Birds, Landscapes, Mammals, Other fauna, Composition and Form, Nature and People. Here you can see all the group winners from last year. In addition to these seven categories, they will also award the the very prestigious Fotofinlandia. You can see the winners of Fotofinlandia and links to their sites on this page. Fotofinlandia winners are among the most famous photographers in Finland, e.g. Elina Brotherus who has even made a successful international career. Another one of my favorites is Hannes Heikura who has a wonderful exhibition at the moment in Helsinki.

Just last week I noticed that two of my photos have made it to the semifinal in the category Nature and People. There will be another judging and the results will be announced in November. This is the only competition I have taken part in and getting this recognition to be in the semifinal is a huge honor and more than I ever expected. I will post my lucky semifinalists on this page for you to see. I’m truly grateful for all the support I’ve got from my friends both online and offline. Thank you!

Small People

Botanical studies

Melampyrum Sylvaticum

Epilobium Angustifolium

Deschampsia flexuosa

Thank you!

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Ready for the Opening – Welcome!

Welcome to the Exhibition!

Invitation (translation below)

Welcome to the Exhibition ‘Moment before Sunset’

Opening July 12, at 5 pm

Galleria Ferin
address: Yrjönkatu 11, Helsinki
open: Mon-Fri 11 am – 6 pm, Sat-Sun noon – 4 pm

Time For Vacation

It’s time for vacation. I’m moving this weekend and after that I will be traveling for awhile and when I come back I will have to get ready for the exhibition. Whenever I have a chance I will pop in to see what’s going on online, but most of the time I will connect only from my phone. I will post the add for the exhibition as soon as I get it, but otherwise it might be a bit more quiet on my sites than usually.

I hope you will all have a beautiful and relaxing summer with lots of new experiences and rest. I am very grateful for all the support that I’ve got from my friends both online and offline. There are so many wonderful people in my life that I feel truly fortunate. I hope to read many new posts and captivating stories and see lots of summer pictures and wonderful new art creations when I return. And still, most of all, lets enjoy the summer!

 

I hear the evening cornbird calling.
Moonlight floods the fields of tasseled grain.
Wood smoke, drifting veils the distant valleys.
Summer evening’s joy is here for me.
I’m not happy yet no sorrow shakes me,
but the dark woods stillness I would welcome.
Rosy clouds through which the day is falling,
sleepy breezes from the blue gray mountains,
shadows on the water, meadow flowers…
out of these my heart’s own song I’ll make!
I will sing it, summer hay-sweet maiden,
sing to you my deep serenity,
my own faith that sounds a swelling music,
oak-leaf garland ever fresh and green.
I’ll no longer chase the will-o-wisp.
Happiness is here in my own keeping.
Day by day, life’s circle narrows, closes.
Time stands still now … weather cocks all sleeping.
Here before me lies a shadowy way
leading to a strange, unknown place.

- Eino Leino

Moment Before Sunset

There is an incomprehensible heat wave in Finland at the moment. It’s been only during the last few years that this has happened and people are still not prepared. There are hardly any houses with proper air-conditioning in this country, however, most people have started to purchase heat-pumps in their houses in the recent years.

When I was a kid we used to be able to swim in the sea only once or twice a year. By midsummer the ice had probably melted but still you’d have to be a very tough person to plunge in. I remember doing that once on a school trip in May, and the water was so cold I couldn’t breathe and I was sure I was going to die. I was quite a tomboy and I did it because I didn’t wat to lose face in front of the boys – at the age of 11 – but to tell you the truth it was sheer madness – something to remember for the rest of my life. In the mid 80s the summers were mild in Northern Finland. Now about a quarter of a century later Southern Finland has five months of house-sized snow piles and five months of heat wave. This year, during the first 10 days of June the day temperature has been around 100 degrees Fahrenheit, which is very unusual.

As a teacher May is always a very stressful and busy time, and so it was this year also. I had to put all my energy in marking and grading and unfortunately I missed a lot of great art posts during that time. I’ve been trying to catch up now that my ten-week vacation has finally started. First I thought I could just take it easy and sleep endlessly, but it was only the first day of my vacation when I got email from a gallerist in Helsinki asking me to participate in group show in July. I haven’t done any marketing, so it came totally out of the blue, she had found me on this site which is my profile in the site of the Nature Photographers of Finland. The gallery is located in the center of the design district in Helsinki and I was told I could bring nine middle sized (50x80cm) images, so naturally I really have to take this opportunity even though I wasn’t prepared for it financially. Making prints that size on aluminum is quite costly. I’ve decided now that I will make only one such print per image, so that the ones that I make will be unique works of art.

The exhibition is called Moment Before Sunset and the gallery is called Galleria Ferin You can find it in downtown Helsinki (Yrjönkatu 11). There will also be works by Kaija Elo (watercolors), Ulla Repo (paintings), Riitta Keski-Panula Larsson (paintings), Anja Oasmaa (watercolors), Leena Tähtinen (watercolors), Krista Partti (watercolors) Heli Vilmi (photography) and Soile Iivonen (sculptures). All women as you probably noticed if you know Finnish first names. I tried to find some link for each artist, hopefully you’ll see at least some of their works in the links. I hope you will be able to visit the exhibition, the gallery is open Mon-Fri 11 am – 6 pm, Sat-Sun noon – 4 pm from July 12 to July 31. Helsinki is a beautiful city to visit in July. As you can see in the map, it’s surrounded by sea and there are ferries going to the near-by islands all day long.

Oh, and by the way, I have also opened a posterous site to post others’ works as well. Hope you enjoy the pictures I share there. Happy weekend! I think I need to plunge into the sea very soon…

Last Light

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A Year in the Distant Past

Traveling is a tricky thing. Well, taking a plane somewhere is not, but how to experience being abroad is.

The best part for me in traveling is trying to imagine myself living in that country, being one of them, forgetting myself and my life for a while and pretending to be someone else, but also being me. I even try to learn to say some things in that language, and try to find places to stay which are as authentic as possible. I’ve been extremely lucky in getting into people’s homes as their guests and I will always be very grateful for those visits. Just last week when I visited Lithuania, I was invited to a home where the head of the household is a hunter. He made us dinner outside in the garden in a stone oven he had built himself. Then his hunter buddies came to pick him up and off they went in a huge truck with their rifles. The Hunter is also a blacksmith and has made incredible furniture out of iron. And, like so many Lithuanian families, also they had a stork nest right outside their upstairs balcony. There was incredible energy in that house, something so original, pure and honest that I felt I had experienced something I could never experience in a society like Finland where people are more concerned about which is the latest model of Nokia or if your neighbor has a bigger TV screen than you.

For everyone, traveling does not mean those same things. Often when traveling with young people, I see that some of them expect things to remain the same in the foreign country than they are at home. Not getting dinner at the same time as usual or not understanding the sense of humor in that new culture can be frustrating to some. For those people who travel without the willingness to understand the culture in the country they visit or make an effort to adjust to it, if for nothing else then at least for the sake of being polite, traveling is merely tourism and nothing more.  Seeing someone turn inward rather than outward when in a foreign culture makes you wonder why that person wanted to travel in the first place. With young people it is of course understandable and as they grow older they will probably also grow wiser. However, wanting your environment to reflect who you are and what your values are, might also be interpreted as low self-esteem with the thought that that person is holding on to familiar things because unfamiliar things are too scary or incomprehensible.

At the other extreme there are those people who are still looking. Looking for places and crowds, maybe in the end – looking for themselves. Sometimes it makes me wonder if they don’t feel at home anywhere because they don’t feel at home with themselves. To love others you have to love yourself. But when traveling, you still collect experiences and every once in awhile you might see a glimpse into your distant past and for a moment think ‘maybe that was me’ like in the Rilke poem below that inspired me to write this post today.

Rememberance

And you wait, keep waiting for that one thing
which would infinitely enrich your life:
the powerful, uniquely uncommon,
the awakening of dormant stones,
depths that would reveal you to yourself.

In the dusk you notice the book shelves
with their volumes in gold and in brown;
and you think of far lands you journeyed,
of pictures and of shimmering gowns
worn by women you conquered and lost.

And it comes to you all of a sudden:
That was it! And you arise, for you are
aware of a year in your distant past
with its fears and events and prayers.

                                                                  - Rainer Maria Rilke

Mother Goose

Greetings from Lithuania! Our trip was a huge success and it was just amazing to spend a week with such talented and bright young people from three European countries. I caught the flu and struggled a bit with keeping up with the others but it was all worth while. Whenever I have a chance to work in a project like this with young people all my worries about the future of this planet vanish. Seeing that we all share the same fears and hopes is such a relief. Lithuania is a gorgeous country and Lithuanians are so positive and determined that I’m sure they will make their country flourish sooner than we think.

When I arrived late last night my sons were there to hug me and and we cuddled all evening. Today I’ve been pampered all day since it happens to be so conveniently Mother’s Day today. For Mother’s Day treat I will share with you a conversation I had with my 5-year-old son some time ago:
my son: Mom, you’re like a goose and daddy is like an owl.
me: well, that’s interesting dear, but why do you say so?
my son: ’cause you’re so pretty mom.
me: oh thank you so much my love – but why do you say your dad is like an owl?
my son (after a pause): I didn’t say that, you heard me wrong. I said he’s like a hedgehog.
me: but why… (and he disappeared to another room)
The words owl and hedgehog are not similar in Finnish either. I suppose defining how an owl and a person are alike was too difficult for a five-year-old. However, this goes to show how delightful it is being a mom. Happy Mother’s Day!

ps. If you want to read about our Global Education project – go to our students web magazine MOI – some of the articles are still under construction but you’ll find a lot of information there.

Home

We sealed the deal on our new house today. It’s been really exciting couple of weeks selling our old house and examining the new one to see that anything hasn’t been built wrong there. Now we’re clear and just waiting for June to move in.

It was a fantastic experience to watch the inspector go through the house today. She was extremely thorough and even drilled a hole in the wall to make sure there wasn’t mold in there. With such a different profession I could never have imagined what needs to be done to check a house and what one needs to know. Half the time it felt like the people were talking a foreign language with their house building jargon. The owner of the house has built some of the house herself with her father who’s a carpenter so she seemed to know every little detail about the foundations of the house and to my relief she was very much into ecological ideology and talking to her today half the day convinced me that we’re about to buy a house that has been built with love.

When you’re house shopping it isn’t just about walls and windows. It’s very much about who you are and what you want from your life. We’ve been looking at houses for more than a decade and there have only been about a dozen that we could’ve imagined to live in. ‘This just isn’t me’ is the most common thought in my mind when I browse through house ads. It’s a bit like you go for a walk in an unfamiliar environment, look at the windows and think ‘I wonder what kind of people live in that house’. To find a home where you can imagine living for the rest of your life is a huge thing, at least for me. Or maybe I’m just exceptionally picky.

It feels like I’ve been holding my breath for the last couple of weeks and naturally it has also had an influence on my art work. I have taken only a few photos in the past few months. I’ve been uploading old pictures in Flickr and I do have an endless archive of them. It just feels like I’ve been tanged up in a knot with the house businesses and I’ve just been waiting to untangle. Today’s relief was the first step on that, and the biggest I’m sure. Can’t wait to see what the light is like in the new neighborhood in various times of the day and the year. Lots of new angles to shoot!

Dreaming of Summer

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Finland Thawing

Finally spring is here. After five months of snow we finally see some green grass and spring flowers popping up from the ground. I posted first snow pictures in Flickr October 15, but I think we got the permanent snow around November 15. And today the first spring flowers popped up after one week of above zero temperatures around the clock.

We are selling our house and we’re going to have lots of people over tomorrow to see it. For that reason we’ve been trying to fix the yard even though it’s not quite the right time just yet. There are still lots of snow patches around and you’re supposed to wait until the ground is dry before you rake it. We’ve had a bird feeder out under the kitchen window and the birds have made a terrible mess, you could hardly see the grass from the sunflower seedcases spread around after their feast. And the grass itself looks hideous when it’s revealed from under the snow after five months. That particular patch you can see from our kitchen window was free of snow this morning and I raked it and got a full wheelbarrow of sunflower seedcases and old grass.

It’s  amazing how everything survives under all that snow for five months. Yesterday there was a pile of snow, now there are strawberry leaves, small tulip and peony stems and flowering crocuses – and sap pouring down from the cherry tree. Soon it’ll be difficult to remember how it felt snowshoeing in the wintery forest. I couldn’t imagine living without the four seasons.

To a Friend Who Sent Me Some Roses

As late I rambled in the happy fields,
What time the skylark shakes the tremulous dew
From his lush clover covert; -when anew
Adventurous knights take up their dinted shields;

I saw the sweetest flower wild nature yields,
A fresh-blown musk-rose; ’twas the first that threw
Its sweets upon the summer: graceful it grew
As is the wand that Queen Titania wields.
And, as I feasted on its fragrancy,
I thought the garden-rose it far excelled;
But when, O Wells! thy roses came to me,
My sense with their deliciousness was spelled:
Soft voices had they, that with tender plea
Whispered of peace, and truth, and friendliness unquelled.

by John Keats

Pale Sun

Summer time has officially started in Finland now and it is still not dark at 8 pm. I went to the forest today looking for signs of spring, but except for the pale spring light there was none. There is still lots of snow and the creek is frozen. It’s been really windy lately and my only fun today was to watch the birchbark flutter in the wind. Photographing something moving so fast is a lot of fun and you never know what you’ve got before going through your pictures at home. This was also one of those moments when I was glad no one happened to come by to see me – kneeling in the snow shooting a birch trunk. That would probably have been difficult to explain. I’ve noticed that quite often I tend to drop down on my knees when I start shooting and that’s something you can see from my trouser legs which have lost color around the knees. I did the same when I was shooting the reeds in the autumn – for example Whispering Wind and Where to Start – and then there was a couple who came along the path from the forest and saw me kneeling in the middle of the path, probably singing terribly off-tune which I think I sometimes do when I have my ipod and I get really inspired by something I shoot. It was a very embarrassing moment, but also one of those moments when two worlds collide, the one where I was just before the encounter, and the one where everyone else was. The couple were amused and their dogs confused, but the moment was over soon. Another time I almost fell into the lake – I think it was when shooting ‘Dream‘ when there was another, quite a big dog suddenly next to me, licking my cheek and trying very hard to see what was so interesting in the frozen reeds. I try really hard to maintain the illusion that I’m all alone out there, but unfortunately I have to admit sometimes that it is not the case.

Yesterday WWF organized their fourth global Earth Hour. It has been estimated that over a billion people took part in it. We also turned off our lights, and it seemed that all our neighbors and friends did that as well. The decrease in electricity consumption that results from this one dark hour is not more than approximately 10 % or maybe even a bit less, but more than that I see this event as a symbol of concern and in a way also a symbol of commitment. It is wonderful to see how many people are concerned about the strain we put on nature, and it’s heart-warming to think that by turning off their lights for an hour they are showing that they are willing to do something about it. I wish decision makers would find efficient and suitable ways for people to participate, so that it wouldn’t be too big of a step for anyone to take.

We are facing the ugliest time of the year here in Finland. The ruthless spring light has no mercy when all the debris is revealed from under all that snow. And the snow turns to grey from all the dust and gravel the wind carries. Search for beauty becomes a challenge in the pale light of spring.

Photos in Da Vinci Dreams by Annie Q Syed

If you click on the images below you will find stories written by Annie Q Syed. She was inspired by these photos and created four wonderful stories under the title ‘Da Vinci Dreams‘. I’m truly grateful for the collaboration and very happy to see how my work can inspire other artists.

 

 

I Taught Myself to Live Simply

I taught myself to live simply and wisely,
to look at the sky and pray to God,
and to wander long before evening
to tire my superfluous worries.
When the burdocks rustle in the ravine
and the yellow-red rowanberry cluster droops
I compose happy verses
about life’s decay, decay and beauty.
I come back. The fluffy cat
licks my palm, purrs so sweetly
and the fire flares bright
on the saw-mill turret by the lake.
Only the cry of a stork landing on the roof
occasionally breaks the silence.
If you knock on my door
I may not even hear.

~Anna Akhmatova

Equal night

Today is the day of vernal equinox, the day is equally long as the night. After the long darkness it’s heavenly to see the sun early in the morning when the trees are glimmering in the morning frost. The sun rises around here at 6.20am and sets at 6.40pm at this time of the year, but most importantly after today each day will be longer until the end of June when the night is only five hours long.

It is still snowing almost every day, although most of it is sleet. There is an old saying in the Finnish language that the new snow will melt the old, but at this point it sounds a bit corny after being surrounded by huge piles of snow for almost five months. There must be some truth to it though since so far it has always melted by May although it still snows quite often in late April.

Today I’m hugely inspired by a poem called Invitation by Oriah. I first saw it in Annie’s Still Sundays and was instantly fascinated by it. Both of these women are amazingly talented writers and I often find myself in awe at their ability to describe so accurately the things I also feel and have thought of many times without knowing how to put them into words. In the wake of all that overwhelming creative energy I put up this set of photos that I shot about a month ago.

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Dreamscapes (video)

Clouds

I’d have to be really quick
to describe clouds -
a split second’s enough
for them to start being something else.

Their trademark:
they don’t repeat a single
shape, shade, pose, arrangement.

Unburdened by memory of any kind,
they float easily over the facts.

What on earth could they bear witness to?
They scatter whenever something happens.

Compared to clouds,
life rests on solid ground,
practically permanent, almost eternal.

Next to clouds
even a stone seems like a brother,
someone you can trust,
while they’re just distant, flighty cousins.

Let people exist if they want,
and then die, one after another:
clouds simply don’t care
what they’re up to
down there.

And so their haughty fleet
cruises smoothly over your whole life
and mine, still incomplete.

They aren’t obliged to vanish when we’re gone.
They don’t have to be seen while sailing on.

- Wislawa Szymborska -

Translated by Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh

Circus Animals

 

Bears are tapping their paws to the beat,
a lion jumps through a flaming hoop,
a monkey in a yellow tunic rides a bicycle,
the whip cracks and the music sounds,
the whip cracks and animals roll their eyes,
an elephant carries around a pitcher on his head,
dogs are dancing with carefully measured steps.

I’m very much ashamed, I – a human.

A horrible time was had that day:
boisterous applause was not lacking,
though an arm longer by the length of a whip
cast a sharp shadow on the sand.

- Wislawa Szymborska -

Translated from the Polish by Walter Whipple

Unfolding (video)

A few weeks ago, when I was uploading a bunch of black and white tulips, I realized that I could try making another video out of them. I tried to look for a suitable music for it but nothing seemed to fit. My Twitter friend Ora suggested that I should look up an artist called Forgotten Backyard and she sent me a link to their site. It’s a wonderful site, well worth a peek. As it turned out, I was allowed to use their music, a piece called ‘Farewell’. Here’s the new video, hope you’ll enjoy it.

The Venice of the North

Just the other day I was talking with my Twitter friend Annie about Stockholm. It’s an amazingly beautiful city that I visit every now and then. I love to go there any time of the year because it is always gorgeous and there’s always a lot of fun things to do. I’ve visited Stockholm twice during this winter, in October and in February – and enjoyed both visits enormously, and I bet those months weren’t even the right ones for getting the best experience in the Venice of the North.

The landscapes outside Stockholm are breathtaking, the Stockholm archipelago must be one of the most beautiful places in the world. My dream is to buy an island somewhere in between Finland and Sweden and build a house on a cliff so that I could admire the stunning arctic sunrises and sunsets all around the year. I remember watching a documentary about a gardner living in one of those islands, his biggest challenge was to save enough rain water because you can’t use salt water on plants. He had managed to get along with the harsh nature and had a stunning garden with amazing variety of different plants. He lived on the island only during summer, in a cottage that didn’t have running water or electricity. It would be a fantastic getaway especially if you lived in a busy city center the rest of the year and had a stressful job.

Most of the tourists go to Old Town in Stockholm but I would say that the nicest area to visit is Södermalm. If you look at a map of Stockholm you can see that it is an island, and the town center has in fact a lot of waterways, bays and bridges like the Venice of the North naturally would. Södermalm is known for its relaxed atmosphere, it has lots of nice cafés, art events, street artists and second hand shops. I enjoy just walking around it soaking up the atmosphere and admiring the views. One of my favorite places to visit in Stockholm is Fotografiska museet, which you can also find in Södermalm. We went there just last October and and there was one photographer that made a huge impression on me, he’s a Dutch photographer called Pieter Ten Hoopen living in Stockholm, you can follow him on Twitter @PietertenHoopen If you browse through Pieter’s photos you’ll get another, quite wonderful view to the life in the Venice of the North.

For us photographers it is still always about light. Stockholm has gorgeous light. Those pink sunsets are something I haven’t seen anywhere else. Just last October I witnessed that through a hotel window, the sky turning into different tones of pink above the old black city roofs that are also so characteristic of Stockholm. One of those moments when you can so easily hear soft jazz music in the background and you feel totally relaxed and careless. One way to get access to these amazing views without traveling is to watch Swedish movies, for example Stockholm Boogie, or Vuxna Människor. In general I find the Swedish cinematography well worth exploring.

I wouldn’t mind living in Sweden, and at times I have actively applied for jobs there. However, I do love Helsinki also as much as I love Stockholm. The two capital cities are very different from each other but they both make you want to stay longer. And I think that I have to write a post about Helsinki some time soon…

Adventure Is a State of Mind

People always say that they learn new things from my blog posts, I guess being a teacher is something so deeply rooted in me that I keep doing it in my free time as well. But also the need to learn is what drives me to find out more about things. In my opinion that is what being an adventurer is all about. Going off to an adventure can be that you fly off to an Amazonian jungle, but it can also be in your immediate surroundings if you keep your eyes and ears open – and most of all if your are curious and open for new experiences.

When I was exploring the beautiful Finnish archipelago today I met a local manor owner who was walking his dog on the sea. The ice on the sea is so thick at this time of the year that you can even drive a car on it. Walking, skiing and snowmobile riding on the ice are very popular pastimes among the locals as you can imagine. The man had a very cute and playful young German shepherd and while I was playing with the dog he told me stories about the manor houses that we could see all around us. One of the manor estates in the area is on the market at the moment for 3.5 million euros. It has belonged to the same family for centuries, but now it will be sold for someone outside the family. Another manor house accross the bay was destroyed in a fire and couldn’t be restored because of the lacking insurance. Now there is another house where it used to be, but the same family still live there. Nowadays, most of these old estates are protected, so that you are not allowed to alter the buildings even if you own them.

One thing that I found myself constantly admiring was how rural the landscape can be even though you’re just a 20 minute drive from the capital city. Horses were grazing around in the snow and I had to stop and wait on the road while the cows were let to cross the road from their shed to the pasture. I also had a pleasure of getting to know a cute pony called Cherry.

So my walk in the archipelago today turned out to be quite an adventure. When I came back home it felt like I had been in a totally different place and brought back lots of new experiences and thoughts. That is what I call adventure.

Baltic Sea at this time of the year

The Baltic Sea is known for its hard and violent winters. The areas around it have snow coverage for about 3 to 4 months of the year and the temperatures remain around or below zero for the same time. This year it’s been even longer. Even though Baltic Sea cannot be compared to the big oceans in its vastness, it still has a such a huge body of water that only about 45% of it freezes during the winter. The thickness of the ice varies from 70 cm (30 inches) in the coastal regions to 40 cm (15 inches) out on the open sea.

Even though there is so much ice on the sea, the water temperature stays around freezing point throughout the winter, at the moment the sea water is only about -2 degrees Celsius outside Helsinki where these pictures were taken the day before yesterday. It is curious that you can see free flowing water when the air temperature was -22 C (-7F) but in these important routes there is boat traffic all the time that keeps the sea open. And when it does freeze over despite all the traffic, there are huge ice breakers that reopen the routes for commercial traffic. Boat traffic to Sweden and Estonia is very lively and there are many huge cruise boats going back and forth every day. Being on the boat can get a bit claustrophobic around this time of the year when going to the deck is out of the question – except for quick photo-ops like mine. I remember one boat trip from Germany to Finland in the 1990s in the middle of the winter, it took days and it was impossible to sleep because of the noise that the ice made when it hit the side of the boat.

Being on the boat always brings two things to my mind. One is the worry of our beautiful sea and its well-being. There is much talk of the bottom of the sea being completely oxygen deprived and dead. Finns blame the factories in St. Petersburg, but we’re most probably as guilty as everyone else around us. Recent study says that there are recent fossil studies that show Baltic Sea being oxygen deprived already thousands of years ago. All this talk reminds me of the Global Warming talk, media discussions going from ‘yes it’s getting worse and fast’ to ‘it’s just another phase and it’s going to get better again’. I can’t help worrying and it makes me very sad to hear how people neglect and abuse our beautiful sea. There is a wonderful Baltic Sea Portal on the internet where you can learn more about the sea. Another thing I always remember on a boat is M/S Estonia. It sank in an area between Finland and Sweden in September 1994 in a raging autumn storm. 850 people of the 1000 who were on the boat were killed, about 500 of them have never been found. The boat still lies at the bottom of the sea 59° 23′ N 21° 42′ E. You can read more about its sad history here.

In the northern Finland where I lived as a child the distance to Sweden over Gulf of Bothnia is about 200 km and it is frozen every winter. When I was a child my parents used to point to the sea and tell me that there’s Sweden across the sea. I remember how that appealed to my imagination and I even thought that I saw a glimpse of the neighboring country in the horizon. Later when we started skiing on the ice with the school  I realized that there is always another island behind the one you see.

Ever-Returning Spring

When lilacs last in the dooryard bloom’d,
And the great star early droop’d
in the western sky in the night,
I mourn’d, and yet shall mourn
with ever-returning spring.

Ever-returning spring,
trinity sure to me you bring,
Lilac blooming perennial
and drooping star in the west,
And thought of him I love.

Walt Whitman

I Dream’d

I dream’d in a dream I saw
a city invincible to the attacks
of the whole of the rest of the earth,
I dream’d that was the new city of Friends,
Nothing was greater there
than the quality of robust love,
it led the rest,
It was seen every hour
in the actions of the men of that city,
And in all their looks and words.

— Walt Whitman

Frozen Time (video)

My dear Twitter friend Ora Kolmanovsky from Israel has wonderful video art on her homepage. Some time ago I told her that I particularly admire her video rADo. She told me that I should try my wings on making videos as well, so I did. I put together some frosty pics and asked another Twitter friend Giancarlo Drago if I could use one of his sound clouds for music, and he loved the idea. So here it is, let me know what you think. Thank you so much for encourgement Ora!

Homebound

This February seems like March here in Finland. Temperatures rise above freezing and sunlight gets brighter day by day. The piles of snow still reach up to the windowsills but it’s wet snow and it won’t take long before it’s gone. Well… long is a relative term, in this case meaning one or two months. It is amazing how spring light has it’s own unique quality, there’s nothing quite like it and it’s unbelievable how much energy you can get from it.

Due to my leg operation I will be homebound for two weeks going through archives and  watching from my window how the spring arrives and the snow melts. Hopefully someone will bring me tulips to photograph, maybe I’ll let them dry out like I did last spring and see what comes out of that. Or maybe I’ll find something new to do this time. I don’t know if it’s the spring light or the unexpected recognition from other artists that I’ve received lately that does this for me, but I have tons of ideas for new pictures and I can’t wait to get out of bed. I’m extremely grateful to Drew who included me to the 21 artists to watch in 2011 list and wrote such a wonderful description about my work. I think it’s so great that there are people who want to encourage and support artists, at least for me it gives an enormous amount of energy, confidence and determination in what I do.

Not getting out to the forest is going to be a struggle for me. It is out there where I unwind and reload, it is a place where all the nonsignificant details of modern life cease to exist and everything seems so uncomplicated. Out there one can get rid of the noise that can make one numb for the beauty in life. Taking my time to heal can be difficult but knowing that the forest will still be there after two weeks and knowing that it will probably be filled with glorious spring light will make it all a bit easier for me.

Life in the Abstract

Every once in a while I get lost in the abstract world. This happens in particular after a long period of street shots and landscapes. I feel it’s somehow inevitable and necessary, to do something else for awhile. After doing a certain amount of landscapes it seems that they start to lose their meaning and become just landscapes after another. I feel like my vision gets blurred and like a rainy windshield it needs a wipe and that wipe is a set of really absurd abstracts.

Last weekend when snow shoeing I came across a huge wall of icicles hanging out from a very tall cliff. It was a delightful view and I spent the afternoon studying the icicles from different angles. Unfortunately there wasn’t any direct sun light because the place was surrounded by tall pines but there was a subtle light reflecting from the snow. I was fascinated by the various ice formations and got lost in the abstract patterns they created.

I still have a few more images on this set and this world of ice I intend to enjoy this week – imagining myself microscopically small exploring the frosty surfaces and unexpected walls and turns. And after this absurd set of abstracts my windshield probably needs a good wipe all over again – and that time maybe I’ll turn to portraits, or who knows maybe it’ll start snowing again.

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Winter fun!

This winter has been perfect. We have had lots of snow and it has been cold enough all the time for the snow to stay on the ground and make it easy to walk in the forest and enjoy being outdoors. One of the worst things about winter is the wet snow that weighs a lot and makes your shoes and mittens soaking wet. Luckily we haven’t had that at all so far.

I have been show shoeing a lot and enjoying it enormously. Not only is it a good workout but it also makes it so much easier to get around. It is also a good way to remember how to laugh at yourself when you fall on your bottom and can’t get up when your behind is buried in deep snow and you have your hands and feet sticking up from the pit. I also tend to get amused looks when I come out from the forest all covered in snow with lots of pine and spruce needles stuck on my scarf and beanie. I haven’t been brave enough to look at myself in the mirror looking like that, but I do feel like a big foot or a forest goblin.

Living in a rural area and not having any amusement parks or movie theaters near by makes it necessary for people to come up with their own fun. I happened to walk to a place in the forest today where some kids had made their own downhill skiing slope on a clearing where the trees had been cut down because of the power lines. Not even the creek flowing under the slope had prevented the kids from skiing down the slope and reaching the slope in the first place. I could see from the tracks that they had walked a long way in deep snow to go around the creek and every time they had come down the slope they had to remove their skis and carry them up again. But I suppose that it had been so much fun that it was worth it. There was even a small bump on the slope where they had been able to do ski jumping.

It seems that this winter just goes on and on. As long as the weather is like this, I don’t mind it at all.

Latitude 63 Degrees North

63°N III

During the holidays I visited my 95-year-old grandfather in the northern Finland, by the 63rd northern latitude. That particular area in Finland is known for its open landscapes and endless fields. During winter there is daylight only for a couple of hours around midday and the temperature sinks to -20° degrees Celsius or sometimes even lower than that.

My grandfather was born in 1915, he fought as a scout in the war against Russia during the second world war and he had to leave for war when he was only 24 years old.

3 & 93

In Finland young men don’t have a choice when they are drafted – they have to go or otherwise they will be jailed. The war in 1939 was initiated by Russia and it lasted for five years. My grandfather survived with a minor injury to his hearing, which he has always jokingly explained only have helped in his life as a father of five girls. There are stories about him saving his best friend’s life in the war but he has never talked about it himself. Even though we didn’t win the war, we were allowed to have our independence although heavily indebted to  Russia. Later years of his life my grandfather dedicated to taking care of his wife with Alzheimer’s Disease. So, all in all my he is a wonderful role model for anyone to look up to.

Across the Fields II

I took a whole series of pictures up in the north in very familiar childhood landscapes. When I was a child I used to spend my summers with my grandfather and my grandmother, during Christmas all my cousins and aunts came to their house to spend the holidays and we visited quite often during weekends also. For some reason I have never photographed that area before, maybe it has been too familiar for me to see it as a photographer. Now that I did, I can truly see the beauty in the open landscape and the nordic winter light. I suppose you don’t really appreciate those kinds of things when you are a child. Although the landscapes are very familiar, all I can really remember from my childhood visits to my grandparents’ place is the humming of the telephone wires and the smell of the oat fields.

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Just me, the bunnies and the foxes – and all that snow

Day is getting longer here in the north. Rays of sun almost reached my favorite creek today, with some luck I might get sunny creek pictures in a week or two. There is wonderful frost on the reeds and branches but without any sunlight they just aren’t as pretty. I’m really looking forward to the upcoming weeks with wonderful winter landscapes with warmer tones of light.

Santa brought me a pair of snow shoes and they are absolutely wonderful in these forests. There is so much snow that without them you couldn’t go anywhere. With a lot of patience you could follow paths if you knew where they were. Snow on the paths is a bit harder because it has been walked on, but since we get so much new snow all the time, it’s hard to tell where the paths are. And even if you stayed on the path your foot would still get sucked into the snow every now and then.

If you leave the path you’ll be sucked in knee deep. In some parts the wind has thrown the snow into bigger heaps and in those parts it’s thigh deep. We had a few warmer days this week and now it is back to -12C, so the snow has a harder cover now and snowshoeing is a lot of fun. When I went to the forest last weekend it was too soft and the snow shoes kept sinking into the snow. Now I can go anywhere I want and it feels like the first walk in the forest in the spring when all the snow has melted. It’s a wonderful sense of freedom to go anywhere you like. With snow shoes you can walk on wetland and other such terrain where you can’t go during snowless season, so in fact you have even more freedom to go wherever you like than during summer. I found many fox tracks and followed them. Actually there weren’t any other tracks besides fox tracks, bunny tracks and mine. It was a wonderful feeling of freedom – just me, the bunnies and the foxes and all that snow.

In the Finnish language we have hundreds of words for snow, describing the different kinds of snow in different weather conditions. There is the soft powdery snow and then there is the wet sleet and the hard snow when it’s really cold. All these different kinds of snow have their own names in our language. All these different kinds of snow are also one of the most difficult things to photograph. During winter there is too little light but then when the sun is shining it easily gets too bright on the white snow. And when is the snow really white? Or do I even want it to be white in the pictures because in real life it never is? In sun light it’s golden and during the later hours of the day it’s blue. And how could I manage to portray the huge amount of it? No matter how many pictures I take in the forest it just looks like there is a normal thin layer of snow on the ground and whenever I set my foot on it, I find myself thigh deep in it. In the end I don’t really mind these challenges, that’s what makes photography interesting after all – leaving me something to wonder about next winter also.

My Best Shots 2010

I purchased my Flickr account Jan 2, 2010. It has now been the first whole year for me of posting a picture in Flickr every day. It’s nice to look back and see which ones of my pictures have been the most popular. Before I started showing my pictures in public I didn’t even know they were any good, so it’s been a wonderful surprise to see that other people also like them.

Arctic Sun, Strings of Pearls, After the Storm, Rainy Day and Honey Suckle are images that were all shot in my back yard. Our house is on a high cliff and that is why we get beautiful exceptional light every now and then, especially after rain or in the evening. I shot Arctic Sun after a long walk in the forest where there was no light at all because the sun was so low just to notice that there was the most beautiful sun set right in our back yard. That piece of ice in the picture was stuck on a cherry tree brach and it made the perfect contrast to the warm color from the sun.

Strings of Pearls is a vine against the evening sky and the same vine you can also see in After the Storm and Rainy Day.Those are all pictures that have come straight from the camera and have amazed me with the colors and details. Honeysuckle is also one of the vines that grows in my back yard. The black and white picture of one of its blossoms was taken in an early summer morning when the first rays of the sun touch only the tips of its petals. Honeysuckle has a very strong, sweet smell and for me that picture always bring that smell into mind.

Two of the most surprising pictures to be in the top ten for me are Stripes and Bluekeh. I shot Stripes in my trip to Denmark where my students and I visited Danfoss world, which is a science park for kids and young people. The Stripes are benches in an auditorium and they caught my attention because of the light that came from the side window. In Bluekeh you can see self-picked blueberries that I took out of the freezer to give to the kids with their porridge. Bluekeh is the only image in this top ten that I have altered, the original color of the berries was much redder and didn’t look that appealing.

The rest of the images in my top ten are pictures that define most of the art that I do. Winter pictures from the countryside near my grandfather’s house in 63°N and in 63°N II, leaf details in Autumn Lights and snow crystals in Winter Night’s Dream are often seen in my work. The black and white landscape with my favorite creek in Bleak Creek II is also something that I like to shoot quite often.

The most popular shot by far in 2010 was my self portrait. It has been viewed 719 times in Flickr alone and 41 people have marked it as their favorite.Also, as is the case with many good shots, it came about accidentally. I had been at the beach all day with my kids, and was enjoying sitting inside in the shade and looking at the evening sky when I realized that I was all striped from the blinds in the window and started snapping pictures of myself just by holding the camera in front of me. In this particular picture I’ve closed my eyes just for awhile to help them relax because the bright light was making my eyes water. I didn’t think much of it until I came home from that trip and uploaded the pictures into my computer and realized that it did actually look kind of interesting and decided to upload it into Flickr. That ended up being a very busy day so I didn’t have a chance to follow up on how it’s doing, and I was really surprised when I opened my computer in the evening and saw that it was on the front page in Flickr.

I also have my own personal favorites among last year shots. Whispering Wind, Slipping Away and Shadowed Woman are images that I came out exactly the way I wanted without luck, gimmicks or post processing. They are also images that I liked already when I shot them and I have continued liking them all these months. Shooting them has given me a great sense of achieving something that I didn’t quite know existed, so that after hearing the click from the shutter and looking at the screen, I could feel the blood escaping my limbs and I could only sigh ‘wow’. These are the pictures that make me happy about what I do regardless of the feedback I get from others. However, I do need the feedback and enjoy it enormously, without it I wouldn’t know what to do with most of my pictures, so thank you very much for all of you who have taken the time to look at my image and comment on them. To view a mosaic of the top ten images click here.

Merry Christmas!

My Christmas holiday starts tomorrow and I will be traveling most of the time. Hope you’ll come back to see my travel photos in January.

It’s time to thank you all for showing interest in my work. I started posting my pictures in the internet exactly one year ago and I could never imagine I would get such wonderful friends here from all over the world. 246 people follow my work in Flickr with about 300 picture views every day. People who have visited my Flickr page come from 47 different countries in the world. In Twitter I have 409 followers and almost every week I’m in top 5 in the Finnish Follow Friday list. This blog is a new challenge for me, and at first I felt very uneasy writing in English, after all it is a foreign language to me. Thank you so much for encouraging me to write. Yesterday was an all time record in my blog visits, there were about 90 page views and so far over 90 people have read my latest blog post ‘About Light and What It Is Like Being Without It’.

Sharing my work with you has been very enjoyable and encouraging. It makes me feel very privileged and humble that so many people enjoy viewing my images. I am very happy and extremely grateful for your interest in my work. Hope to talk to you all soon!

Enjoy your holiday!

Hyvää Joulua! God Jul! Merry Christmas!

About Light And What It Is Like Being Without It

It is the darkest time of the year. Winter Solstice occurs day after tomorrow. In southern Finland where I live it means that sun comes up at around 9.30 and it sets at about 3. About an eight-hour drive up north, in the area where I lived most of my childhood and teenage years, sun comes up at around 10.30 and sets at about two. Another eight-hour drive up north from there the sun doesn’t come up at all for 51 days starting November 26. The moon and northern lights provide some bluish light during that time, so it’s not completely dark.

In the areas where we have daylight only a few hours a day, most of the days the sun is hiding behind clouds or trees. When it comes up in the horizon, it lingers so low and its ray is so weak that you need to be in a very open place to see it. When you get a chance to witness it, it is really beautiful and certainly worth capturing. As a photographer I think about light a lot – how warm or cold it seems to be, what angle it comes from and how strong is its reflection. Sometimes it seems that objects themselves are sources of light when they reflect rays of light so strongly. What amazes me the most is the warm colors of the sun light in an environment that is otherwise so cold. You cannot feel the warmth though, except maybe imagine it when you look at the photos.

Taking photos in winter is very challenging due to the scarcity of light. You have to be very quick to catch the moment, and leaving the house is generally not quick during winter because you have to put on many layers of clothing. Winter light gives a certain kind of muted, soft, natural and monochromatic tone to the pictures. Sometimes it’s difficult to know if the picture was taken in color or in black and white. I don’t alter the tones in my pictures afterwards, so what you see in the pictures is exactly the same tonal landscape that I captured when I was there.

When it snows so much than it has snowed now during the last two years, you end up hearing lots of ‘whitemare’ stories. Driving and biking become impossible, not to mention parking. You have to clear out the snow from the driveway every day, there are lots of accidents and our daily lives become very difficult in every way. Here in the north where we have very little light snow is such an important source of light for us that we are more than happy to accept all the inconveniences that it causes us. Sometimes we get snow so late that we have to put up with rain and mud for a month or two, and that can be very depressing when there is so little light. Having snow already in November is something that all Finns are hoping for and during the last two years we have been very lucky.

That Lake

I travel a lot. My Flickr Map says I’ve visited 15 states and I’m not sure if that’s all. Still my favorite place in the world is just two miles from my house. It’s That Lake that you can see in most of my pictures. I can reach it in just ten minute’s walk through the forest and most of that walk is by a wonderful creek with interesting light and reflections, old trees and beautiful plants.

That Lake is a very healthy lake. It has very clear water and it never gets algae even though almost all natural waters in Finland get blue algae in the late summer months, even the sea. My biologist friends say it’s due to the acid-alkali-balance in the water. Where does that right balance come from then? Well, they tell me that it’s because the lake is in the middle of a forest, there are no fertilized fields next to it, and the cliffs surrounding it also contribute to that. And I’ve heard that the lake is really deep, and it’s not hard to believe it when you see the high cliffs surrounding it, you can just imagine them reaching down with similar grandeur. It would be wonderful to dive down to see that some day. So far I’ve never seen divers at the lake, only skiers, skaters, Scouts, ice fishermen, trekkers, campers and swimmers. By the way my two sons learned to skate on that ice and that year the ice was so smooth that it was even better to skate on the lake than the artificial ice they made with hoses and tractors on the school yard.

In the upper picture you can see That Lake on a very foggy April morning. I was just about to leave to Denmark with a group of students and all the details of the trip were causing me a lot of stress. Sitting by that wonderful view made me forget all the paper work for a while. The air was so humid that day that you can even see little droplets on the branches even though it wasn’t raining. This lower picture I took in October, six months later, from the exact same spot. When I walked there through the forest I had this shot in my mind all along. I am happy that the light happened to be in my favor that day. Sometimes I wonder if there is going to be a day when I feel like I’ve taken all the possible photos of That Lake and there is nothing more to photograph. It’s very hard to believe, because it seems that I can take a photo of the exact same spot every day and each of those photos will turn out very differently. These two certainly did.

Midsummer Day at the Beach

My son Veikko was very much afraid of water when he was a baby. His father and I always wondered when people said “Oh, bathing babies is easy, they all love water.” That wasn’t the case with Veikko. Maybe that is why this picture means so much to me. It was my son’s first summer and at that time he started to like water. At that time (summer 2005) I only had a film camera, Canon T60 and shooting with it required a lot of patience. You could only see the images after developing the film and sometimes it was all rubbish and sometimes there were treasures. This is one of the treasures. I love the way you can see the drops in the air and the way my husband squints his eye when he gets water in it. But the best part is the little kiddo, how he finally realizes that playing in water can be fun.

Today we went to the same beach. It happens to be midsummer day, which is a huge thing in Finland. Everybody is off work enjoying the best part of the summer. I have now two sons and they were having so much fun at the beach that we had hard time trying to convince them to leave. Both my sons are very energetic and self-confident, and that is something you can see in the picture.

All my pictures have been shot in natural light and I don’t alter the original images afterwards. I enjoy enormously studying the differences in light and shadow and these two pictures are good examples of that. I think black and white gives extra emphasis on textures, mood and light. At the beach today there were some trees casting shadows on the boys. Just when I took this one, there was a gust of wind that made the sun came out from between the trees and it lit Veikko’s face. Wonderful spell of luck, or what do you think?

Barn that is no longer a barn

This image is called “where the field ends and the forest starts”. I shot it in the forest last winter when it was very cold and there was lots of snow. All the old snow records were broken when it just kept on snowing day after day and the temperature persisted on staying far below zero so that none of it ever melted either.

Today I went for a walk in the woods and thought I’d shoot that barn from inside. When I last visited that place there was so much snow that I couldn’t come any nearer the building than in the first image. Now that the snow has melted long time ago, I thought I’d take a peak inside. But this is what I found – just a pile of rubbish left over from tearing the place down.

So there is now one less building in the world. I’m so happy I took some time last winter to photograph it, even though I had my shoes full of snow and my fingers were turning blue in the cold wind. Too bad I didn’t have the perseverance in me to find a way through the snow to look inside. Well, maybe someone else did.