(Photo: Tiina Törmänen)

Photos: Tiina Törmänen

In this humbling self-portrait by award-winning Finnish photographer Tiina Tormanen, a starry cosmos illuminates a quiet winter evening in the Lapland region of Finland.

Although Tormanen began her journey in the late '90s making documentary and street-style images, it wasn't until 2010 — the year she bought her first DSLR and took a job at a ski resort in Lapland for the winter season — that she found her true calling: landscape photography.

"In that time I kind of reconnected with the nature, I saw it different than before," she writes. "I started to film the nature around me and I surprised myself. Nature and the beauty of life itself have been my inspirations ever since."

Her breathtaking portfolio, which can be viewed in full on her website, features frost-covered trees, vivid aurora borealis, stark white plains of snow and many other surreal hallmarks of Arctic landscapes.

"I think we are living in an amazing world, and there are so many times people just forget," Tormanen explains in an interview with Artnois. "Far too many [of us] are busy — too busy to think about life itself, and the media around us pull out a lot of misery and war on so many levels. I want to remind them of another part of the reality, of the one that matters."

Continue below to see more of Tormanen's photography, and and you can keep up with all her latest work on Tumblr and Instagram.