Spo's photos with the keyword: Suomi

Had the ancient shepherds had means to travel fast, they would have noticed that rainbow is not anchored to the ground but moves with the viewer. They would have understood that the arc is in the eye of the beholder, that each of us has their own, personal rainbow. Had that happened, would they ever have dared to tell a story, where rainbow is the sign of god's covenant with people? Oh modern man, shackled by science and knowledge!

One small step for mankind, one giant leap for a man.

And they went, and they melted.

Only 30 years ago the plains were full of barns. Not so anymore.

Just a snapshot of another boring landscape again. Incidentally downtown Helsinki is seven kilometers in the direction of the tracks. Yes, Helsinki, the capital of Finland, the most urban hipsterious city in the world!

Instead of quoting a famous philosopher or more Nirvana here, I'll just say that I am likely to shoot my first moustache in this one. I was 17 or so. Lighting is a total accident, literally: municipal electric supply was flimsy in those days, and lights flickered every night. I have lost the negative so I scanned it from a proof I made back then. As a result there is plenty of blind black in the dark end. But it was winter and dark anyway, so it kind of fits, I guess.

She came from our building, someone I had never seen, pushed her huge bags into her tiny car and drove away. Last thing she did she slowed down under my balcony, looked out of her car window at something above my floor, and there were tears in her eyes. Or perhaps it was just the light. Shot through black curtain, and not an especially thin one either, with a 85mm lens practically touching it. Focus is in the cars, and with f/1.2 the lens has no way of focusing to the curtain, not by a mile, but still the structure of the fabric is visible.

The point near the zenith where aurora were coming from. Aurora move fast, so in order to avoid the normal blurry look and to keep the stripes visible – as well as the noise! – I used ISO 10 000. The bright stars at the top belong to the Big Dipper, whereas the grey thing at the very bottom is ice.

As photogenic as haypoles were, they are history. This I took in the end of the 70's; we had spent the night in the tent nearby but had gotten so cold before the dawn that we'd had to take a hike. Here the sun had just risen and can be vaguely seen behind the closest stack. In a thick fog in a place like this it can get so amazingly quiet at night before birds wake up that an urban dweller may go nuts out there! The fog sucks all reverberations and echos whatsoever from the ether and you can only hear your own breathing, blood circulating and brain buzzing – and the worst of all, your thoughts, if any. :-)

Air vents on BA flight from London to Helsinki had frozen shut during the flight, and my ears had almost killed me. At his point in the apron bus I could hear nothing but loud snapping in my head, so there wasn't much left for me to do but to take pictures. Year was about 1991, and I will remember the flight forever. Canon F-1 with a 20 mm lens.

Story goes that a father planted this pine-tree for his new-born child so that, in due course, it would provide planks for his/her coffin. The story does not tell why the tree was never cut down; most likely the baby died young. Infant mortality was very high in the area in those times, because the whole families, including mothers and older kids worked in the fields all day long, and infants were left home alone with their rudimentary "automated" feeding devices - that is, milk-filled cattle horns that were left hanging upside down at their reach. Those "baby bottles" were astute sources of infections. The habit of leaving children by themselves may not have been the best nourishment for their emotional developement either, and might well have contributed to the social troubles in the area those days, most notably the rise of the so called Bads , who caused havoc in the area for hundred years. The advent of the Bads is usually explained by socioeconomic reasons, like by the local inheritance rule, where one descendant got it all and forced other siblings to buy their share of the patrimony from the heir and fund the purchase by selling lumber or distilling pine tar for shipbuilding. This worked fine as long as lumber for those pursuits existed; when the forests dwindled down, non-heirs were left on empty, got frustrated – and turned into Bads. That ended when the "excess" population prone to bad habits emigrated to America – which, in turn, may explain why the US... oh well, let's not get into that! From America as well as from Russia we got this new, weird idea , which led us to our one and only civil war. The idea was called socialism . It took us 80 000 White soldiers to put an end to it, while Americans got away with one McCarthy. (Americans called it communism, but it was only because to them all Europeans are socialists, and you have to tell those two apart somehow, don't you?) In Russia the funny idea that all men are – were – equal lasted longer and provided them enough time to round it out more elegantly, without war. But let's not get into that either! Today, all that is just annoying, distant history, and all men are happily unequal again, more and more so every day – some, like immigrants, even more unequal than others. And no, we won't get into that either, because there is nothing left there to get into: our present state of affairs is the final Arcadia, Lintukoto, Paradise, Narnia, Summerland, Xanadu, Heaven, you name it – or the Tree of Life if you will; end of all roads, singularity without alternatives. . . . Sorry about all that; it must have been the limbs of the tree that carried me away – too far away someone might say – and out on a limb at that. Someone else might call it irony. Anyway, the tree in the picture goes by the name Coffin Tree in the local map, so the story might as well be true. The first story, that is.