I’m not a Christmas person by any definition, but I know it’s important for my parents so I have a tradition of going to Finland every other Christmas. Since my parents live in a middle of a busy town, I knew beforehand that this would be no photography trip and thus travelled light with only the PowerShot S95. I have a big problem with photographing in urban areas, I’m not used to it and there are just way too many distractions for me to find any such clean compositions that I like.

What made the trip even more difficult for photography was the weather. It was really cold and a couple of days was wasted mostly indoors. I tried to defy the weather and made a long walk in -22 degrees centigrade but when it took hours for me to chase the chills out of my body afterwards, I decided to wait for milder weather, which finally arrived on Christmas day (the day before going home). -15 degrees felt balmy after the big freeze!

During my walks, I made an effort to find some spots of nature in the city. The resulting pictures are complete illusion, for example in the spruce picture I was standing with traffic lights behind my back and a busy thoroughfare on the other side of the small group of trees. But appearance is everything in photography so if it looks like wild untouched nature, then that’s what it is!