Performing Landscape in Kilpisjärvi – 2.
posted by annette on 3 April 2014

The weather really changes quickly. This morning there was a constant snowfall and it looked like it would never end. I imagined us sitting here inside, with the snow slowly covering the windows, time passing. And suddenly, before noon, the sky cleared. A colleague having coffee in the kitchen explained that you have to go with the weather here: If it is bad, you wait, if it is good, you go out at once. And so I went out in order to practice walking with snowshoes. A friendly biologist, who had an interesting talk about the flora and fauna in this area at the nearby visitors' center the first night I was here, explained to me how the shoes should be fastened and used properly, and yes, it was a lot easier that way. I took a small walk on the ice, about one hour, and realized that it might be possible to walk there without snowshoes as well. At lunch time the good weather was gone, the heavy snowfall was back for more than an hour, and I decided I would simply have to try whether my camera could take the snow or not. By the time I was down on the ice the snowfall was over, and I made my first attempts at 2 pm with clearing skies. I chose the iconic Malla fell as my main character and placed my tripod near a wooden construction at the shore. Then I walked a few meters out on the ice to have a human figure in the image, and made some marks in the snow to find the same spot again. In the by now bright sunshine it was hard to see if the horizon was horizontal, so I made two attempts and went inside to see what they looked like. I left the tripod there and decided to return after one hour to see how the weather had changed. One hour turned to two, so my next image was at 4 pm, the following at 6 pm and the last one for today at 8 pm, a blue moment. The changes in the light are fascinating even without the abrupt weather changes, because they completely transform the image, partly because I use automatic focus and white balance. I cannot show still images from the video here; for that I would need another kind of computer, but I took some snapshots with my phone, so you can get an idea: