Father Christmas came to visit our house in 1994 – but he didn’t get a very warm welcome from me.
Santa’s cool welcome
17 Sunday Dec 2017
Posted in Christmas, Finland, Uncategorized
Author Archives: Tim Bird
When Santa’s presence made me mad
17 Sunday Dec 2017
Posted in Christmas, Finland, Uncategorized
Tags
Arctic Circle, Christmas, christmas in finland, christmas in helsinki, finland, helsinki, Rovaniemi, santa claus, Santapark
Christmas 1994, the first in our house, and the first with two little Finnish stepdaughters who still viewed their new foreign stepfather with more than a little suspicion. What better way to break the ice than buy myself a red gown and some cotton wool and dress up as Santa? Pity my wife didn’t tell me she had ordered a similarly attired visitor who rang the door bell before I had time to change into my festive kit. The little girls were happy, but I am annually reminded that, if looks could have killed, the Father Christmas who delivered the presents in our lounge that day wouldn’t be delivering presents anywhere else ever again. Thanks, Santa, for stealing my thunder.
Nothing else this time, just a taste of Christmas in Finland:
Father Christmas’ one true home is in Lapland on the Arctic Circle near the Finnish city of Rovaniemi. The ferocity with which Finns defend their faith in this truth is almost scary. Woe betide anyone who dares to suggest that the old fella comes from Norway or Sweden or Greenland.
Christmas porridge in Helsinki’s Senate Square. Find an almond in your porridge and you’ll soon find a spouse, if you haven’t already got one. Really.
Woolen socks and mittens at the Three Smiths Square Christmas market in Helsinki.
‘Elves’ choir lets off steam on the steps of the Lutheran Cathedral in Helsinki.
Women’s Christmas Market, Vanha Satama, Helsinki.
Helsinki’s Esplanade Park in snow and Christmas lights.
Above: Christmas in Helsinki, quickly.
Have a good one, everyone.
Finland at 100
05 Tuesday Dec 2017
Posted in Uncategorized
A personal recognition of Finland’s big day, December 6, when it celebrates 100 years of Independence. via Celebrating a century of Finland
Celebrating a century of Finland
05 Tuesday Dec 2017
Posted in celebration, Finland, Independence
Tags
celebrations, centenary, centennial, December 6, finland, Finnish Independence, flagwaving, helsinki, Independence Day, sauna, tradition
December 6 is Independence Day in Finland and this time around it marks a century of independence, snatched from Russia in 1917 while that country was distracted with the small matter of a revolution. Usually the occasion is marked with a sedate and rather tedious queue of dignitaries at the President’s Palace in Helsinki and the lighting of candles in windows. I’m hoping that this time things might get a little wilder, in view of the significance of the event.
This is what Finns do when they win the Ice Hockey World Championships.
It dawned on me today that I have been living in Finland for more than a third of its independent existence, having arrived laden down with luggage, a wide-eyed and innocent 26-year-old, on the Viking Line ship from Stockholm in late August 1982.
Fitting, then, that I’m writing this on the Viking Line ship from Tallinn, not quite so wide-eyed or innocent. Narrow-eyed, in fact, after a trip through the Baltics that included one or two samples of various national beverages.
Guaranteed to break the ice: the state-of-the-art Polaris icebreaker went into service in 2017, adorned with the Finland 100 logo.
Like all expats, and in spite of having lived here for my entire adult life (which didn’t really start until about 1990 and which some might say has still to get going) I moan about Finland. I moan about the price of beer. I moan about how Finns, in spite of the price of beer and other drinks, go out of their way to get legless. I moan about the endless roadworks and construction sites, about how nobody says ‘thanks’ when I hold the door open for them. I moan about the length of the winter and how the guys with the snow ploughs pile up the snow in front of my gate. Probably unfair these days, since the guys with the ploughs are quite likely to be Estonian. About how the neighbours pile on the peer pressure by cutting their hedges immaculately while I let mine grow ragged. Nothing to do with the fact that they are Finnish, of course, and more to do with the fact that I am lazy.
The Finnish winter – beautiful, but on the long side. A view from Lapland.
Since I have also spent a large part of my professional life singing Finland’s praises in books and articles and radio interviews, I feel entitled to have a go at it sometimes. Of course, if this Brexit nonsense goes through I might have to think about being a Finn myself before too long. In which case, I suppose I’ll have to review my moaning strategy.
A typically healthy blue-and-white Finnish complexion.
But this week Finns are rightly taking the opportunity to celebrate all the good things about their country, and I have to own up to the fact that Finland has been pretty good to me when all is said and done. It lets me speak English most of the time for one thing. So I’m adding my voice to the chorus of congratulatory celebrations.
The Finnish sauna. Had to be mentioned.
This is a country that still has a fantastic health service which has come to the rescue of myself, my family and my friends on many occasions, at little cost, for example. It seems like a much more confident and outward-looking country than it was when I first came here. Not always as perfect as it would like to think, in spite of all those world surveys that say it’s best at everything. But pretty good when you compare it to various other countries. And anyway, any country that really was perfect would have to be pretty boring.
So happy birthday, Finland, and thanks for all the opportunities you’ve put my way. And talking of opportunities, before the next century is up, just try to get the hang of the difference between opportunity and possibility.
New Year’s Eve at midnight, December 31, 2016 – celebrations marked the beginning of the centenary year
Onneksi olkoon, Suomi, ja kippis!
The beauty of the book
26 Sunday Nov 2017
Posted in Uncategorized
Beautifully conceived and designed books make great Christmas presents! And I have an idea for one that’s just a little too big for your Christmas stocking… via Singing the praises of the beautiful book
Singing the praises of the beautiful book
26 Sunday Nov 2017
Posted in books, bookshops, helsinki, Uncategorized
Tags
awards, Baltic, book, design, graphic design, helsinki, islands, photography, suomenlinna, travel photography, UNESCO World Heritage
It’s probably hopelessly old fashioned of me but I love books and bookshops. Books in covers, made of paper, lovingly conceived, designed, produced and edited. I feel protected, safe and at home walled-in by them in a bookshop. Especially proper bookshops, where the books are piled high in apparent disorder but whose shopkeepers know exactly where to find the book you might be looking for.
I took to reading novels and guidebooks with Kindle on my iPad for a while, and I’m not saying that’s a bad thing. The most important thing is that people write and people read, and to some extent the format is irrelevant as long as that continues. I would say that the digital format is less conducive to concentration, however. And rumours of the death of the book are premature.
In any case, to my mind the physical, tactile, artifact book is in the top tier of creative production. Books are to keep or, at worst, to resell. Unlike newspapers and magazines, books are rarely thrown out for recycling. Opening a box of new books fresh from the printers (as long as the printers have done their job properly) and inhaling that fresh print aroma is one of the great joys of life.
So I was thrilled this week to learn that my latest book, Suomenlinna – Islands of Light, is being entered in the Most Beautiful Books of the Year awards in Finland by the publisher, Docendo. This is the kind of book that wouldn’t work well on an iPad. It’s a book for browsing at leisure in a way you couldn’t really do on a digital screen. Bear in mind too that Finland was rated as the World’s Most Literate Nation in 2016, so it should know a thing or two about what makes a good book.
The honorary awards (no cash or other prizes are handed out) are judged by the Finnish Book Art Committee, whose aim is…
…to draw attention to the book as an artistic whole. When choosing the Most Beautiful Books of the Year the Committee tries to find works in which form and content support each other as well as possible. The starting point for evaluating works is the overall graphic design, beginning with the typography and ending with the finished printed product. As well as classical printing skills, the Committee values fresh and new creative solutions.
The beauty of book, which is a collection of photographs of Helsinki’s most atmospheric and historic quarter, its UNESCO World Heritage-listed sea fortress, is largely thanks to its designer, my friend Ea Söderberg. She also designed my eBook, Motion Pictures – a travel photographer’s companion. OK, so I’ll snatch some of the credit for the contents. Especially since I’ve spent countless hours out there in all weather. But I can’t design books. That is a different talent with which Ea is blessed. The shots here are from the book.
Obviously I’m not going to wind up without urging you to consider Islands of Light for your Christmas shopping list. Not as a stocking filler, unless you want big book-shaped stockings, but as a full-blown gesture-of-love top-class gift! You can order it online at this link or contact me directly if you have any trouble getting your hands on a copy! And wish me luck in those awards.
Sending some Northern Light your way
19 Sunday Nov 2017
Posted in Uncategorized
In my latest blog, I’m offering you some samples of the most extraordinary natural phenomenon you are ever likely to see: the Northern Lights or aurora borealis. If you have never seen the aurora, you’ll wish you had!
The Northern Lights are in my mind
19 Sunday Nov 2017
Posted in Arctic travel, aurora borealis, lapland, northern lights, Uncategorized
Tags
arctic, Arctic Circle, astronomy, aurora borealis, finland, helsinki, Lapland, northern lights, sky, travel photography
It’s a glum wet day in Helsinki and I intend to brighten up your virtual inner sky by sharing some photos of the Northern Lights, or aurora borealis. The techies among you will know that this wondrously surreal phenomenon – for my money the most profoundly moving, beautiful and enchanting on or around the planet – is the result of collisions between charged particles released from the sun with gaseous particles in the Earth’s atmosphere. I don’t really care what causes them, but I thought I’d better let you know that. While you’re watching them, you won’t care either, you’ll just gawp in wonder. You’ll feel like laughing. It’s too ridiculously amazing to be true.
Minus 25, but worth crawling out of my lakeside glass igloo in Finnish Lapland just after midnight. Wrap up warm if you intend to indulge in this kind of madness: jumping around just isn’t enough.
I first heard about the Northern Lights in a song by the 1970s band Renaissance. “The Northern Lights are in my mind, they guide me back to you,” their beautiful woman singer sang, to an irresistibly catchy tune. I had no idea what she was on about then. I thought she might be singing about the nighttime attractions of Blackpool or some other northern English city. Now I know what they were on about, I wonder why there aren’t more songs about it.
This was one result of a spectacular night that I spent entirely alone at the Joulukka Christmas theme lodge near the Arctic Circle in Lapland. It was September, so the lake wasn’t yet frozen. It is often assumed that the aurora can only be seen on cold winter nights, but autumn and spring are also good times.
The first time I actually witnessed this awesome – and I really do mean awesome – natural phenomenon was on a frozen lake in Finnish Lapland in about 1984, when I jumped around in the company of two other more-than-slightly intoxicated Englishmen, like children on a sugar rush at a magic show, shouting and pointing at the sky in mesmerized disbelief, wondering if our drinks had been spiked.
Appearances of the Northern Lights in Helsinki in southern Finland, which is on the same latitude as Lerwick in Shetland, are not quite as unusual as people think, but sightings this spectacular, with this corona effect, are rare. I shot this from the top of my road in March 2015. I’m not sure I’ll ever see it this powerful again in Helsinki.
You can’t just see the Northern Lights and tick them off your list. Once you’ve seen them, you have to see them again. And again. It becomes an obsession. I’ve got three Apps on my phone and another one on my iPad telling me when a ‘performance’ might be possible. I’ve flown to Lapland and travelled to remote locations to freeze under starlit skies with the sole intention of watching the aurora. I wander around bumping into trees by the river near my Helsinki home, staring at the sky, in the often vain hope of photographing, or just catching a glimpse of the curtains of colour being shifted around the sky by some giant unseen hand.
Not my best aurora shot but one that illustrates that you can see the Northern Lights as far south as Helsinki – and even in August. This is on the edge of Helsinki’s Central Park and the artificial light is from Helsinki Airport.
So that’s another confession off my chest. If you’d like to share my obsession, assuming you don’t already, you need to be a long way north, the sky needs to be clear, and it helps to get away from urban light pollution. And although it’s great fun to photograph them, try to remember not to get too obsessed with photographing them. Submit to the spectacle. Be transfixed!
In the Norwegian mountains. My host was a fish factory manager who offered to take me for a drive into the mountains in case we could see the aurora. We waited in this spot for two hours until just after midnight to get this show. Some people in ‘aurora countries’ are inexplicably blase about the phenomenon. This fellow shared my excitement, even though he’d probably seen it a thousand times.
The Alaska Geophysical Institute has quite a good site here, with regional maps giving predictive information: http://www.gi.alaska.edu/AuroraForecast But unlike some of the tourists who flock to northern Finland with a sighting at the top of their list, don’t assume that you can flick a switch on any given winter’s evening to make the aurora appear.
Another rare Helsinki sighting, from the island of Harakka. I was shooting the frozen Baltic in the afternoon and started getting aurora alerts on my phone. I hung around until after dark and this was my reward.
Oh and that song by Renaissance – you’ll find it here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vvFPlWh1yQY
Facing up to Facebook
12 Sunday Nov 2017
Posted in Uncategorized
Social Media presents a dilemma to creative professionals. You can’t live with it, you can’t live without it. – via My name is Tim, I’m a Facebook-aholic
My name is Tim, I’m a Facebook-aholic
12 Sunday Nov 2017
Posted in addiction, social media, travel photography, Uncategorized
I gave up smoking in the early 90s. I decided that changes of scene and routine would be the best circumstances in which to make the break, and my companion, now my wife, also reckoned this would be a good plan. So we decided that a trip to Singapore and Bali would be a good time to kick the habit. We had been upgraded to Business Class (those were the days) so we sat in the Lounge at Helsinki Airport waiting for our flight to Singapore to start boarding. We had bought one last ceremonious pack of cigarettes (yes, kids, you could smoke in airport lounges in those days) and sat puffing away over our gins and tonics.
An Indian pilgrim at a festival in Allahabad lights up for the first smoke of the day. But has he checked his Facebook yet?
The time to board arrived. There were maybe a dozen cigarettes left in the packet. Solemnly, we crumpled up the pack, making its contents unsmokeable, and gathered our bags to make our way to the plane. This was the allotted time at which we had decided to quit. Then came the announcement: a delay of 40 minutes. Damn. We could have smoked at least four more cigarettes each in that time.
Temple offerings in Ubud, Bali. Notice the cigarette in one of the baskets. Even the Gods like a ciggy.
I haven’t smoked another cigarette since. It was actually quite easy. I had tried many times before, aware that I was getting a reputation for smoking that special brand known as OP’s – Other People’s. This time I realized that I really wanted to give up and it wasn’t difficult. Sometimes I still lift a cigarette to my nose and inhale the scent of dry tobacco, finding it strangely pleasant. But I’m never tempted to light it. Sometimes I dream that I’m smoking too, but I never wake up reaching for a packet at my bedside.
‘Giving up’ probably wouldn’t have been in the vocabulary of these smokers in Hanoi, Vietnam.
So I don’t think I have an addictive personality. I can go a whole week without a drink. Like most people of my age and circumstances, I dabbled with drugs in my youth, but I never tipped into the abyss, although I might have looked into it a couple of times. Until now tobacco was the most addictive drug I’ve ever sampled, and I managed to kick that instantly. But now I find myself facing a much deadlier addictive beast: Social Media.
If you share my addiction you’ll understand. The urge to look at my phone in the morning – before I have my breakfast, before I shower – to gorge on the Facebook ‘likes’ being offered to me, or to feel a deadly slump at their absence, must be familiar to many of you. Likewise the thrill at that throbbing red heart in my Instagram account.
Delegates at a Helsinki start-up conference try to look important while actually liking silly videos on Facebook.
Largely, I blame Brexit and Trump. Both of them make me so angry that I need a way of venting my fury and receiving confirmation that my fury is shared. But I also blame my work, not because of the pressure it incurs, but because Social Media (or ‘Some’ as it’s now being called – oh dear) is the canal de choix for anyone involved in media production, especially if you’re freelance. A large part of my work is as a travel writer and photographer. So I get to boast about all the cool places I’m lucky enough to visit. It’s actually desirable for me to do this, so that people know that I ‘walk the talk’ in terms of travel. You’re not much of a travel writer/photographer if you never go anywhere, are you?
The conventional wisdom is that a presence on Social Media, whether Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, Sprinkle or LumpedUp – OK, I invented the last two – is essential if you want to build and maintain the kind of visibility that converts to financial income. You don’t even exist without a presence on SM. Only a few brave souls are prepared to challenge this idea.
Russian vodka in a St Petersburg store. If you had to give up Social Media or Social Drinking, which would you choose?
The knowledge that I am addicted means that I have a love-hate relationship with Social Media, especially with Facebook. It doesn’t stop me living an active and interesting life (and lets me brag about its best moments), but it’s like speaking in a parallel voice that I don’t always recognize. I find myself getting sucked into outraged political arguments with people I haven’t even met, for example, afterwards suffering from the kind of guilt that you feel after a night in a pub making a lot of noise and with the vague sense that you misbehaved in some way. Or am I the only one who knows what that’s like?
A casino in Las Vegas. Those cynical designers of Facebook aimed to replicate the addiction of gambling. I wouldn’t bet against it.
Meanwhile, my dependence continues. And I am relying on yours to spread the word. So please feel more than free to share, tweet, re-tweet, post, re-post and like this blog to your (and my) heart’s content.
If you follow this blog you won’t have to keep looking at Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/timbirdphoto) to see when I’ve published a new one. And like a barman at happy hour, let me tempt you to visit my Instagram account at @tim_bird_photo
Six Images (and then some) 