Six hours of daylight

For two weeks I have eaten my sandwich at the desk before eleven, so that the lunch hour can be spent outside. Lunch is early in Finland anyway, but this is early even here, and a colleague has started asking if I am feeling all right. The Bessa goes into my bag in the morning with the meter already set to 1600. Around noon I walk down to the water and back. Most weekdays that is all the daylight I see.

Today the sun came up at 09:18 and it sets at 15:12. A little under six hours, and on the solstice next Sunday it will be a few minutes less. In the centre the sun never really clears the buildings. On the few clear days the top floors get a band of yellow and the street stays blue below it. Down at the harbour the light comes in so flat across the water that people on the quay throw summer-evening shadows at half past twelve. Back home in Tampere the day is almost half an hour shorter again.

I keep calling this kaamos, like everyone I know, but it is the wrong word. Kaamos is the polar night, when the sun does not rise at all, and in Finland that only happens in the far north of Lapland. In Utsjoki the sun stays under the horizon from late November until the middle of January. Even there it is not black at noon, I have read, but a few hours of blue twilight. In Helsinki the sun does come up. It just does not do much. Everyone still says kaamos.

There is even kaamosmasennus, kaamos depression. People say it in the office kitchen, mostly as a joke.

The film is HP5, pushed two stops. Pushing is really just underexposing and developing longer, and the shadows do not come back. Everything I found afterwards says Rodinal is a poor choice for this. By then the first pushed roll was already drying in the bathroom. The negatives are dense where there was light and nearly clear where there was not, with grain I can see on the screen without zooming in. Two of them I like more than any of the careful autumn frames: a shop window on Aleksanterinkatu, lit like evening at one in the afternoon, and a woman waiting for the tram with a Christmas tree under her arm.

In November I was out with the new tripod for the blue hour. Now it falls between about ten to four and half past, while I am still at work, so the tripod stands in the hall next to the boots. I have thought about using it for the candle arches in the windows across the courtyard, but I have not yet.

It is just after three as I write this, and there are two more rolls to develop tonight.