East-Pasila, I’m really glad they gave this district to street artists. It has a good pedestrian infrastructure, but the gray houses look so depressing. Well, not anymore. Now it is home to different pieces of street art scattered all around the place.
In this post, I will walk you through the colorful labyrinths of Pasila. You will see the major pieces of street art and will have an idea of what to expect from the visit. As usual, the post is accompanied by HQ, full-screen images. In the end, I will give some information about the composition and gear used to take the photos.
Thoughts about East Pasila
Pasila is one of Helsinki’s major hubs and the second busiest train station. Its eastern district, Itä-Pasila, was constructed in the 70s and 80s. Not sure how people felt about it then, but now it feels like a depressive mix of gray, concrete houses and offices.
The pedestrian infrastructure was probably something innovative at the time it was made. But it isn’t what you would expect from a pedestrian area in the 2020s. It isn’t a public space, there are almost no cafeterias or places to get together. It seems it was designed just to get from point A to point B by walking.
I highly appreciate that Pasila became a home for street art, but I believe it has the potential to be more than that. It could take full advantage of pedestrian infrastructure and become a place where people like to meet spend time.
Walkthrough
I think Pasila has the biggest variety of street art in Finland, all gathered in one place. You can find everything from tiny amateur pieces to huge murals covering several floors. But overall, I think that Pasila’s specialty is medium ones at staircases, underpasses, and bridges.
I like these dystopian images:
It takes around 2 hours to get around and see everything. The exact map of street art is available here, you can also get a paper version at a tourist office. But honestly, I prefer to walk on my own and get myself lost.
How cool is that?
How was it shot
Here I will provide a few comments about gear and composition.
Gear
Almost the entire walk was shot on Canon EF 16-35mm F4 IS, attached to the Canon R6 with a standard Canon’s adapter. The 16-35mm is a very popular lens for landscape and architecture photography. Professional architecture photographers may prefer something wider, but for architecture, in travel context, the 16-35 fits very well.
Process
It was a very cloudy day, so most of the time, I shot in shutter priority, keeping it at around 1/10 of a second. Due to the max aperture of F4 and wide-angle, almost everything was in focus all the time, which was pretty much my intention. I wasn’t exploring this place alone and had no time to fine-tune any sort of manual settings.
Editing
During our walk, there weren’t any changes in light, so didn’t need to make any significant color correction to fit the series together. The most significant amount of time was spent aligning all the architectural lines, which is typical for this kind of photography. The profile correction in Lightroom fixes the distortion automatically quite well.
To make the series fit together even more I decided to make all images “flat”. Many photography guides talk a lot about how to show depth on a photograph, but no one talks about the opposite. I believe “flat” images can be as interesting if done well.
Further reading
Some time ago I had a big interview with a street artist. She very well explains the state of street art in Helsinki.
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More Pasila Pictures
Last bits of photos that didn’t make it to the main body of the post.
