Aerial photos of towns and cities in new volume

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By Antti Lehmusvirta
     
      Take a flight over Finland. Look at familiar landscapes and stop and inspect interesting sites.
      Together with the Finnish municipalities, Tarja Mäkinen has collected Finland's towns and cities into a three-volume series entitled Suomen kunnat ja kaupungit lintuperspektiivistä ("A Bird's Eye View of the Cities and Municipalities of Finland").
     
In 2009, municipal reforms and a series of mergers will reduce the number of individual municipalities in the country quite appreciably. A good many names will vanish from the map.
      The books thus offer information that in future may be hard to obtain. The works are illustrated liberally with bird's eye views taken by Hannu Vallas, Finland's best-known aerial photographer.
     
The aerial photographs provide an excellent image-bank of the Finnish landscape and the built environment, and the series of books offers a wealth of concrete examples for geography teachers or urban planners.
      There are rocky granite islets, wooded headlands, lakes, islands, islands with lakes in them, and even northern tundra scenery - all part of the variegated Finnish landscape.
     
The sometimes unforgiving eye in the sky also shows up different solutions for zoning and building.
      In Kerimäki, for instance, the world's largest wooden church (capacity 5,000, and no, it was not a builder's mistake) stands out boldly in the centre of the small municipality, and the aerial snapshot of Leppävaara shows a work in very rapid progress as Espoo heads towards a population of a quarter of a million.
      "The book can be flicked through with friends and for instance one can look for one's own house seen from the air. I'm sure it will bring a lot of memories to the surface", says Mäkinen.
      Hannu Vallas has spent 5,500 hours with his camera in the air since the 1960s, and has taken some 600,000 aerial photographs.
     
     
Suomen kunnat ja kaupungit lintuperspektiivistä ("A Bird's Eye View of the Cities and Municipalities of Finland"), edited by Tarja Mäkinen and with photos by Hannu Vallas, is published in hardback by Perhemediat Oy, and should be available from May 2008. The three volumes, amounting to more than 1,000 pages, are divided on a regional basis, with Volume I containing Southern Finland and the Åland Islands, Volume II Western Finland, and Volume III the Eastern and Northern regions of the country and Finnish Lapland. The full set costs EUR 246.00.
     
     
Helsingin Sanomat / First published in print 23.5.2008


Links:
  Perhemediat (in Finnish)
  Lentokuva Vallas Oy (in Finnish)
  Find your house from the air - a searchable database of around 250,000 aerial photos by Hannu Vallas (in Finnish)

ANTTI LEHMUSVIRTA / Helsingin Sanomat
antti.lehmusvirta@hs.fi