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Summer tales

Some of my friends asked me why there are so few photographs of summer time Oulu in PhotoStories. After all, Oulu is a summer city showing it's most beautiful face in July. I agree that the Nordic summer is something special and the city do awake to a flourishing life during warm summer days. The trees go to green, people go out to the beaches and so on. But somehow the summer and the city have been though combination for me. I do photograph a lot during my summer vacation, but for a reason or another I have faced nothing but disappointing results. It seems to be hard to express summer time citylife feelings through photographs... people are hanging around the streets enjoying here-so-rare sunshine and cold drinks. Perhaps the reason for my lousy touch is incompetence in human photography -- or -- maybe I just prefer spending summer days without the camera... :-) Well, I gave an another try last summer (2001), maybe I got few photographs from Oulu city center. The summer itself was very warm and dry, I'd say it was one of the best summers I have experienced here in Oulu. Of course I was out of the city in many days , but surprisingly many weekends I wandered around the city streets.

You know this old "effect": if you have been walking the same route every morning for many, many years, you think that you know every building, tree and thing along the route, right? But if you some day stop and try to look to another direction, for example up, you'll see a detail which you have never noticed. Not even if the detail is some great statue standing in the edge of the roof. I have to try to remember that point every time when I go to seek out buildings and citylife. There is always something new to see and to photograph if you just remember to keep your eyes open. Because it's quite dark in these latitudes in any other season than in summer, that's the time when I'm seeking new details, buildings and other interesting stuff from the city. This summer I also remembered that it's though job to photograph buildings in narrow streets, because buildings tend to "fall" in pictures because of lack of special equipment.

I also noticed that many people don't like being photographed. Even when warm sun is shining and everybody are happy, some people feel very threatened when they are pointed by a camera lens. I understand this, I feel uncomfortable myself in the front of a lens, but hallo, do we need to go nuts!? The man in the photo in right was very angry when I took the photo -- he yelled me and threaten to break my camera, even I tried to explain that I will certainly not publish the photograph without his permission. I obviously did not get the permission to publish this photo in Internet, but because he liked to make his point by yelling loudly after me several minutes, I publish him anyway -- without a recognizable face. :-) Well, luckily there are also less frantic citizens out there, like this happy looking lady in the left photo. She was sitting on the stairway of the museum located in Pikisaari with her papers when I snapped the photo. If any, this photographs gives me the feeling of the summer even there is currently freezing winter outside of walls! The background building is very nice looking old wooden house, like many other buildings in Pikisaari thanks to the long seaborne trade history of tar industry.

Well, the summer is short here, sad but true. And that's the reason why people feel so strongly about summer here in north. These two, three give us the power to survive the long, cold and dark winters. There is not too much time to load your batteries with sunshine and warmness. Like every previous year, it was again a little bit shock to notice that sun disappeared behind the horizon more and more early in evenings. Trees got some brown shade, people disappeared from street cafes, and so on. But still, I would never dream to lose our four different seasons. After a while there are drifts of white snow everywhere, and people are struggling in snowstorms. Boy, that is life! Do you prefer summer over winter? Back to the Oulu City Pictures...

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