Finland is not known for its lovely summers and great weather. If you’re a tropical person, you have no business in this country, really. But it’s good for photography. There are four actual seasons here. Fall is by far the most colorful. Summer typically is actually quite boring, except if you’re a bug person and you like to “shoot” mosquitoes. Then you’re going to have a 3-month field day.
Anyway… summer here comes with a good amount of rain and a bit of sun every now and again. And that every now and again makes for a good opportunity, provided you’re in the right place at the right time. Fortune (coincidence?) wills that there were two days in a row that I was in the right place at the right time.
The first day I was at home (which is definitely the right place 😉 ). I’d been working on pictures for the whole afternoon and the whole afternoon the sky had been ominous and near-black. Rain had come down on and off and around 6pm the sky really ripped open (let out a fart, actually, too) and water came down like I’ve seen only a few times before. But as the saying goes “After rain comes sunshine”, it also did here. The sunshine actually came already during the rain, which made for this stunning urban scene:
D800, ISO100, 1/180 sec @ f/8, Nikkor 14-24mm
This image was stitched from three wide-angle images, so what you see is about… 140 degrees I’d say.
Funny detail in this image… Another saying / myth tells us there’s a pot of gold to be found at the end of the rainbow. The building on the left, where the rainbow crashes into… it’s the recycling center 😀
The next day I had agreed to go shoot with a friend of mine, if the weather was right. I drove to him, virtually in the middle of nowhere, straight after work. A really beautiful part of the larger capital Helsinki area. Also this day it had been raining on and off, and when I was almost at his place, I stopped on the side of the road to take this picture.
D800, ISO100, 1/180 sec @ f/13, Nikkor 50mm
This is also a stitch from three images. Very foreboding, and not promising many good things. We ended up just chatting the first hour (and a half) or so, but in the end it did clear up and we took off into the forest and country side to do some shooting (more of those in a next blog post).
Then in the evening when I left it started raining again and already when I left from my friend’s place I could see the rainbow already. I drove up the street to a little red shed where there was a small opening in the trees and I could oversee the whole field including rainbow, where I took this stunning view. It was truly awesome. I took a number of pictures (this is also a three-image wide-angle stitch) and then stood there just looking at it in silence. I don’t know if the image itself does it to you, but it was absolutely magnificent. You do sometimes see a rainbow in these parts of the world, but never so complete and never really this clear.
And that two days in a row!
D800, ISO100, 1/180 sec @ f/4, Nikkor 14-24mm
With this particular (second) rainbow I was also surprised that it stayed visible for such a long time. Usually when the rainbow appears it’s just when the rain stops and the sun breaks through and it’s maybe 5-10 minutes when you see it, but this one stayed on (not as complete, but still very clearly visible) for at least 45 minutes.
Which is why I still had more opportunities to shoot some. This was another one on my way home.
D800, ISO100, 1/125 sec @ f/2.8, Nikkor 70-200mm
