Finnish photographer Tiina Törmänen has spent more than 25 years photographing the far north: snow-loaded trees, northern lights over frozen forest, tiny human figures under enormous skies and the soft pink light of the Arctic winter. This selection of her landscapes shows why the north is one of the world’s great places for night and winter photography.
Tiina Törmänen, a Finnish landscape photographer
On her own website Törmänen describes a path from film and the darkroom to digital photography, and work that ranges “from underwater worlds to Arctic highlands”. Her subjects include misty fells, solitary trees, northern lights, rare “pearl” (nacreous) clouds, swans wintering in Lapland and water lilies shot from beneath the surface of a northern lake. She also writes about developing a photographic eye and style, and leads small-group winter photography tours in Lapland.
Finnish Lapland: the setting
Lapland is Finland’s largest and northernmost region, about 100,000 km² with only around 176,000 people, roughly 3% of the country’s population. The regional capital is Rovaniemi, and because the Arctic Circle crosses the region, winters bring the polar night, known in Finnish as kaamos, when the sun stays low or below the horizon, and summers bring the midnight sun. Winter lasts around seven months, mid-winter temperatures can fall to about −40 °C, and the highest fell, Halti, rises to 1,324 m on the Norwegian border.
The far north is also part of Sápmi, the Sámi homeland, which extends across national borders. In Finland’s northernmost municipalities Northern Sámi, Inari Sámi and Skolt Sámi are spoken.
The science behind the northern lights
Auroras form when charged particles from the Sun, carried by the solar wind, pour into Earth’s upper atmosphere near the poles and collide with oxygen and nitrogen, which then give off light. They are seen most often in an oval band around 67° north, which runs right across Lapland, and geomagnetic storms push that band further south.
- Green, the most common colour, comes from oxygen at around 557.7 nm.
- Red is also oxygen, emitted at 630 nm high in the atmosphere where collisions are rare.
- Blue and purple come from nitrogen low in the aurora, most often during intense activity.
- Pink and yellow are mixtures of red with blue or green.
Our eyes are most sensitive to green and weak at deep red, which is why faint red auroras are easier to catch with a camera on a long exposure than by eye.
Tips for winter and northern-lights photography
- Use a tripod and manual focus set on a distant light or star.
- Add a figure for scale, as Törmänen does: a small silhouette makes trees and sky feel vast.
- Don’t ignore twilight. The low sun of the Arctic winter paints the snow pink and blue for hours.
- Keep batteries warm in an inside pocket; cold drains them fast.
For more northern skies, see Joni Niemelä’s night-sky photographs, Mikko Lagerstedt’s atmospheric landscapes and Mikołaj Gospodarek’s black-and-white Alps.
Related reading
- Daniel Zvereff’s Arctic Aerochrome Photographs
- How Arctic Temperatures Are Spreading Across North America
- Svalbard Global Seed Vault: What the Arctic Backup Actually Does
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