Monday, July 21

Irma has another appointment with Tero in Hämeenlinna, and we decide that we will have an outing. We head off into the continuing sun.

We park in a mall and Irma walks through it to get to the Oral clinic. I carry on walking around the mall, where all the shops seem like better versions of the branches in Helsinki. Suomalainen Kirjakauppa has a wide selection of maps, as opposed to the (literal) two in the branch in Itis.

We decide to have lunch in an Italian café in the mall, and I wander along to look at the pop–up gallery. It shows the finalists from the 2024 Finnish Nature Photography competition.

The notice announced that “The Finnish Nature Photographers Association organises an annual Nature Photo of the Year competition, the winning images of which form the Finnish Nature Photo of the Year exhibition. It is the best-known photography exhibition in the country, and for more than a year it tours around the country in several copies.

In 2024, the competition was held for the 44th time. All nature photographers are welcome to take part in this competition. The aim of the competition is to spotlight Finnish nature and the year’s best photographs of Finnish nature – in all its beauty and diversity.“

It seems to me that I can divine two parallel competitions. One favours photographs of nature in action, worked on in the digital darkroom. The other favours images of nature derived from photographs but so altered as to appear as paintings or collages.

I take a picture of one of my favourite Category 1 photographs, by Soile Kallio.