Having got a bit out of the habit of using the film camera that I carry everywhere I go, I was determined to get through a whole roll of film in Finland. I managed something in the late 20s out of my 36 exposures and used the last 8 in London last weekend but when the pictures came back, I was surprised that there were only 19 pictures – that’s 17 missing! Fair enough, the first couple are usually ruined by the process of loading the film and there are always one or two minimum that come out badly but to only get 52% of the pictures back was a surprise. It took another couple of days for the negatives to come in the post but there’s a huge gap of absolutely nothing between the Finland photos and the London ones. Did something suddenly go wrong? Or did the lab mess up? So the result is just eleven photos from Finland and none at all from my day in Turku, where I swear I took some.
I spent quite a while standing in the park watching this process. They’re clearing snow off the top of a building on a snowy day, which felt like an endless thankless task. It was entertaining because the man at the bottom in the yellow jacket was also controlling traffic – one blow of the whistle for “stop” as pedestrians walked by and two blows to start again once it was clear.
I love Kappeli, the glass pavilion restaurant in Esplanade Park but I’ve never been in it. On this snowy morning, it looked particularly magical.
I stood on the edge of the harbour, which was just a mass of barely disturbed ice. There’s a little pilot boat or a harbour icebreaker or something whirling from the cross-Baltic ferry visible here to the other cross-Baltic ferry not visible out of frame on the left of the picture.
I had a roll of black & white film when I was in Iceland last winter and when I got these pictures back, I thought they were in monochrome too, even though I know it’s UltraMax 400, which is absolutely colour. But I think I actually like the hint of fairly well desaturated colour coming through in these. For the record, the London photos are a lot brighter.
I have almost this exact photo in summer so I wanted a winter version. You can really see how frozen the harbour is all the way out here – it’s just solid ice with just the mushy fairway that the ferry’s running in.
You wouldn’t guess from this beautiful bucolic fairytale of a scene that this is a working military installation. Of course, it’s also a UNESCO World Heritage site and very popular place for tourists to stroll.
The southernmost island of the Suomenlinna archipelago is a kind of Hobbiton of rounded grass-topped military buildings, turned into a field of marshmallows. This is from the wall that runs around the edge of it and snow-covered cannons.
In the summer, this little bay is quite popular for swimming. Nearly three years ago, when this was turquoise and the sky was blue and the scene wasn’t at all monochrome, I sat and sketched it. Now it’s entirely frozen and a surprising number of people have decided to stroll on it.
I think this is the same bay from a different angle. You can see how the ice is a lot more fragile-looking and churned up near the solid land – this is the bit I’d really not want to walk on. The white stuff is probably thicker and stronger.
If you follow the Blue Route down from the jetty on Suomenlinna to the southern end, you’ll find something called the King’s Gate, which was the ceremonial gateway for the official visit of the king during the construction of the fortress. This is the view from outside the gate, looking over at an island sprouting out from the side of the main island.
The cafe! By now, I was frozen half to death and very glad to take shelter with a cup of hot chocolate in the cafe!
As a bonus, this is what the sheet of negatives looks like: see that massive gap? I could have had at least another ten pictures of Finland being snowy and beautiful if something mysterious hadn’t gone wrong.
I Am A Polar Bear 