 City
of northern Finland
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Oulu
is a city
located in northern Finland. If
you compare Oulu to the other cities in the world, it's quite small: our
population is some over one hundred thousand. Anyhow, Oulu is the sixth
biggest city in Finland and with it's neighbor towns it is one of the
few areas in North Finland whose population is growing.
Because Oulu is quite near to the Polar circle, there
are cold winters and sometimes chilly summers. On the other hand, the
temperature can reach sometimes over +30 degrees of Celsius, and there
are usually three to four warm months in a year. And of course, we have
nightless nights: in the middle of summer the sun does not go down at
all. This midsummer time means that many of the citizens leave the city
to go to their summer cottages and other summer places.
It's often quite windy here at Oulu because the Gulf
of Botnia is next to the town. Although citizens hate arctic wind coming
from sea especially at winter time, the sea is important thing to us.
Back to the 19th century, Oulu was very depend on the sea due to large
industry of wood tar production. Later big boats and ships of different
kinds sailed in and out carrying other stuff like oil, wood, and products
of paper industry.
 Nowadays
in addition to transport issues, sea has a task to offer variety of free
time activities and give us feeling of freedom, possibility for endless
daydreaming. There is some magic to stand on the beach watching ships
sailing on the horizon!
Oulu is famous of it's technical
information industry, for example making cellular phones and other
telecommunication products. We have also a university
of thirteen thousand students, other large schools, Medipolis for exploring
biotechnical world and so on. But before all, Oulu is a city for different
people and great places.
As in any city, there are also drawbacks; criminals,
spoiled scenes and badly treated historical buildings. For several years
ago there where mysterious fires burning several beautiful wooden houses
down, probably to get more space for ugly concrete block of flats. Luckily
nowadays leaders seems to value places little bit more than in history,
and there are improvements for example in market place near to harbor
area (Toriranta).
 Me
and my town
I've been living in Oulu since 1994, that year I arrived
to study at university. After a couple of years I started to "look"
buildings and places more carefully to find out how picturesque they were.
My friend went often out to shoot some photos around the city, and more
often I joined him. I took my old camera with me and shot also houses,
places and scenarios. In the spring of 1999 I finally bought a decent
set of photography equipment, and since that I've been hanging around
Oulu immortalizing old buildings and scenarios to the film.
Oulu is quite hard to photo by a hobbyist due to flat
scenery. Many of the building have to shot from ground level, and I'm
not very interested in ringing the doorbells of people living the opposite
those buildings. This is a major problem since I don't own any parallax
correction lenses, usually tall buildings seems to fall back in photos
taken with normal lenses. Summertime is also quite short, so there are
many dull and gray days in a year. On the other hand, there are some very
beautiful scenarios in as well summer as winter time.
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© Juha Lehtomäki. Copying
and using any photos & stories without a permission
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