A lone figure on a ridge, a forest road under the Milky Way, smooth water around dark rocks: Mikko Lagerstedt’s night photographs turn ordinary Finnish landscapes into quiet, dreamlike scenes. His series Edge made the self-taught photographer one of the best-known names in atmospheric landscape photography.
Mikko Lagerstedt, landscape photographer from Finland
Lagerstedt taught himself photography, starting in December 2008, while working as a graphic designer. Most of his pictures are made in Finland, many of them in the south of the country, and he has also travelled further north and around Northern Europe. His work has been featured by the BBC, The Telegraph, Business Insider, Nikon and Adobe, and selected prints hang in the collection of the Embassy of the United States in Helsinki. Brands including Samsung, Nikon, BenQ, Adobe, Nokia and Chevrolet have worked with him.
“I want to send the picture viewer a feeling of what I felt at the time I took the picture,” he has said.
Edge: stars, silhouettes and the Finnish night
Edge is his project of atmospheric photographs of the Finnish landscape. Many of the frames show starry skies over the horizon, often with a small self-portrait silhouette standing at the edge of the land. The figure gives the scene scale and a sense of solitude, and it puts the viewer in the photographer’s place.
Familiar places, changing light
Lagerstedt likes to return to places he already knows, waiting for the weather to transform them with fog, snow or low light. He keeps compositions simple, a road, a shoreline, a single figure, so that one shape can carry the frame. His editing is restrained: he adjusts colour, contrast and light, sometimes blends several exposures, and says he does not use AI-generated imagery.
The result is a recognisable look across very different scenes. A forest road leads the eye towards the Milky Way, while long exposures smooth the sea into a soft blue haze around rounded coastal rocks.
Night landscape tips inspired by Edge
- Use a tripod and a remote release or self-timer: star fields need exposures of many seconds.
- Find a strong foreground, such as a road, a rock or a tree line, to connect the sky to the land.
- Add a person for scale. A silhouette on a ridge or a shore instantly shows how big the sky is.
- Go back to the same place in fog, fresh snow or after rain; the weather changes the picture more than a new location.
- Get away from city lights on a clear, moonless night for the brightest Milky Way.
Dress for the cold on winter nights: standing still beside a tripod chills you much faster than walking.
For another northern photographer, explore Tiina Törmänen’s landscapes. For darkness and scale of a different kind, see Paul Zizka’s ice-climbing photographs. More of Lagerstedt’s work is on his own portfolio.
Related reading
- Ben Coffman on Photographing the Milky Way and the Landscapes Beneath It
- Night-Sky Landscapes: Stars, Silhouettes and Reflections
- Thierry Cohen’s Darkened Cities: Imagining Urban Skies Without Light Pollution
- Light Pillars over Winter Towns: Reflections in the Night Sky
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