Metro Melancholy

After visiting a number of exciting destinations during the last months, and having a couple of tough recent trips from weather point of view, the last week has been one of little energy.

The weather here in Finland has not been very inspiring, and the days were in danger of starting to just drift by, so I forced myself out to have a look at some parts of the newly opened Länsimetro - a 14km extension of the Helsinki area underground.

City photography is somewhat different to my usual subject area, and I had trouble summoning the requisite enthusiasm for the task, stopping for coffee, then pizza, then coffee again in the 800m walk between parking my car and entering the metro, but eventually I got to the job in hand, travelling from Helsinki central station to have a look at the new stations at Lauttasaari and Koivusaari.

Arrivals to and departures from the platforms at Lauttasaari over 6.5 minutes... a very long exposure dissolved most of the people.

At Lauttasaari, there were still a noticeable amount of passengers, a few tens of people with each arriving train, but at Koivusaari I almost had the place to myself - the shiny new station, was rather lacking customers. This made my ongoing mission to have no people visible in my pictures rather easier to achieve than I expected.

A distinctive orange train arrives at a deserted Koivusaari station

The platforms themselves were interesting, sharing some common design elements, but also differing from each other, for instance in the lighting design. At Lauttasaari there was a myriad of small lights, almost like stars in the sky, while at Koivusaari there were very large cylindrical light fixtures as well as a number of smaller lights.

Koivusaari lighting - abstract

The final excitement for this journey was to experience Finland's longest escalator (the way to and from the platform at Koivusaari). I tested it out, in both directions, and found it to be just like a normal escalator, but a bit longer. The lack of passengers at Koivusaari allowed me to capture the record breaking people conveyor without any humans getting in the way.

not just any escalator, this one is the longest escalator in Finland.

Just a short shooting trip this time, so just a short blog post to go with it. Next I am hoping for good light and cooperative wildlife at the weekend as I try to find and photograph bird species 163 of the year (164, 165, 166,... would also be welcome)... and then I need to decide where to go next.

The southern Finland weather is killing my mood, autumn is dead but winter has not yet properly arrived, so either I need to go north to get real winter, south to get a last taste of autumn or west to visit my homeland.

​Andy