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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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!