Nuuksio National Park, Finland

I recently had the time and opportunity to spend a day exploring Nuuksio National Park, a few miles from Helsinki in Finland. As you'd expect for Finland in December, it was cold and snowy and covered by a flat grey sky that sucks up what meagre light there is during a winter day at 60degrees north. It was also beautiful.

The heavy snow and low temperatures over the previous few day had frozen everything and created a still, pristine, monochrome wilderness. And the blanket of snow muffled any sound, so the silence deep in the woods was almost absolute. 

It was while I trudging along being the only sound in the forest that I very nearly walked into a snow flake. Just the one, hanging there at eye level. It would be very difficult, without images, to explain how the extreme cold and weather had managed to create these tiny, perfect, delicate sculptures in the middle of some very snowy dark woods. But I hope these images go some way to help. 

I was traveling light and only had my G9, but the Macro mode, exposure lock and exposure compensation all combined to help me get decent hand-held macro images in less than ideal conditions. These were then cropped and processed in Lightroom 4.3 (the only frustrating part of this process, but more about that in another post)

The G9's panorama mode came in useful too when trying to capture the vast expanses of frozen lakes and the densely packed firs and birches in the forest.

There are a few more images in the album here but, for me, the snowflakes were the highlight of the trip though so I'm currently figuring out how to get back there with a 5DmkII and a 1:1 macro lens...