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.

Canyon Creek II

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.