PhotoStories : Oulu City Pictures : Oulu skyline

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Oulu skyline

Oulu is located in an area that has no hills or any other shapes in the land profile. This kind of flat landscape is very common for Pohjanmaa region — which is quite unfortunate fact for a landscape photographer.

I have always envied those photographers who live in areas of mountains and hills: how easy it must be to take landscape photos. Also cities of skyscrapers and other tall buildings enables compositions of stunning city landscapes, I guess.

Oulu is a though case to photograph as a whole. There are not even mounds of rocks nearby — except one tiny artificial hill in the south part of the city area (the hill is for downhill skiing purposes, and a tourist from Alps would laugh his head off). The only possibility to get decent scenery shots is to climb on top of some tall building, that is the best effort you can do around here (unless you can afford to rent a private plane).

One of the "tall" buildings near city center is a water tower located in Puolivälinkangas. The only trouble is that the tower is closed from the public, so you just cannot get there in a sunny day to see some stunning views over Oulu. Normally there are some couple of days in a year when the citizens are allowed to climb to the tower, but opening hours do not include morning or evening time. So, taking award winning photographs of sunset over the sea from the tower roof is rather impossible.

Last year (2002), during the open door days, the weather was everything but perfect. I'm also lacking of graduated neutral density (ND) filters, so in my photos the sky is overexposed of otherwise dull looking. The air was also quite moist causing fuzziness. However, I think I did get some photos that give a some kind of clue what the city is looking like from a distance.

The first thing you see is the group of tall, concrete buildings near city center. No, they are not office blocks, but apartment buildings of city residential areas. Even there are quite many of this kind of block houses (build in 70's), many citizen prefer living in one-floor town houses located little bit farther from the city.

The "downtown" located around the church tower seems to be rather flat. There are no tall offices in the city center and I think city administration do not allow to build anything too big. I don't know why the skyline of city center should be this straight — I guess couple of city scrapers would look quite stupid in the middle tens of much more smaller houses.

Anyway, Oulu is not any big metropolis, as you can see from the picture above.

The long costal line is very well visible from the tower. Seeing the west coast of Finland makes you realize that the city really is next to the sea. The sea is on west side from the tower, so it is just a shame that I cannot take photographs from the tower when there is a beautiful scenery of sun going down over the sea.

Another thing you realize is the great amount of trees and forest. Practically all other areas except the sea and city center display green as far as you can see. Some signs of urban life pop out from the forest here and there, for example University of Oulu and Pohjantie highway which snakes in between the trees. All of the 120,000 citizen of Oulu are spread out in a relative large area, so there are plenty of room for trees also.

So, would you consider yourself living in a city such as Oulu?

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