Rain and mist, a grey carpet covering the sky, not the slightest stream of light visible on the horizon, not a trace of the sun, simply a slowly increasing light evenly spread over the whole sky. The daybreak at 4.54 am, when the sun was supposed to rise in Helsinki, took place over a misty sea. According to forecasts there are no rose-colored sunrises to be expected these days. The recurring uniform grey, however, which seemed rather disappointing at first, turned out to contain a wealth of nuances and hues, ‘fifty shades of grey’ if seen by the naked eye, and many shades of blue, as seen by the camera.
 
The camera on my phone, which I use to take snapshots to add to this blog, and the video camera I use to document a few minutes of the sunrise, might of course look at the light and the colours differently. I use automatic functions on both of them. The two snapshots for today were taken before and after recording, with something like three minutes between them. In that time the rather turquoise shade (the image above) had transformed into a soft blue with the increasing light (the image below). That difference I would not notice while standing there on the ishore, and probably the slow change will be hard to notice on video as well.
 
The mist is fascinating, of course, because it transforms the landscape. Most of the thick mist or fog last night disappeared before morning, but some of it remained over the sea, hiding the details of the city on the horizon. There is nothing at middle distance in the view, except the small buoy perhaps, that would show the effect of the mist more clearly. The branches at close range would be visible even in rather heavy mist.
 
To my surprise the small aspen on the shore show no signs of leaves yet. The birches are already green, and a small rowan nearby has large leaves. The aspen are not dead, however, only more slow than the others. The tall aspen, too, are still bare. And when I think of it, last year, during the year of the snake, when I returned once a week to a the small swing attached to an aspen on the western shore the aspen had leaves rather late and all at once. Instead of the soft light green shimmer surrounding the birches the aspen burst into bloom, as it were, with huge yellowish brown buds. I am curious to see what happens with these small ones, and when.