A catchment on the table – portraits for a science magazine
I photographed the portraits of geographer Satu Räsänen for Tiedetoimittaja, the magazine of the Finnish Association of Science Editors and Journalists. The assignment came from the association, which had just given Räsänen its 2026 science communication award and needed images for the feature about it.
Räsänen coordinates a project at the Finnish Forest Centre that works to improve the state of the Kiiminkijoki catchment, and she has toured the area’s secondary schools explaining how human activity changes rivers and lakes. We chose Koitelinkoski in Oulu as the location, a stretch of the very river the feature is about.
We started indoors, at the scale model. Räsänen has built a portable model of the Kiiminkijoki catchment, its painted channels running through peatland and a peat production area, with small houses, an excavator and cattle on its surface. I shot it two ways: the whole model across the table, so the idea of a catchment reads at a glance, and tighter, with a hand pointing at one of the houses.
The second indoor picture came in the corridor. Pale wooden cabinets and the corridor’s vanishing point gave a background that says workplace without anything in it pulling focus, and a soft depth of field kept the eye on her face. The mustard cardigan came back later in her outdoor coat, and it tied two very different settings into the same feature.
Outside, the river was mostly frozen, but the rapids kept dark pools open, and frost had settled on the trees along both banks. I photographed Räsänen first on the bridge, its railing mesh hung with padlocks, then on the more open bank. The low midday sun came from the side and separated the yellow coat from the snow without a flash.
The pictures ran as the illustration for the award feature, both in the printed Tiedetoimittaja and on the association’s website. Online the scale model became the lead image and the corridor portrait sits inside the text, so the same feature shows the reader both the tool of the work and the person behind it.
Read the whole feature: tiedetoimittajat.fi