As a girl, she would collect flowers and insects, pick berries and go fishing during the summers and holidays when her family stayed at a cottage near a forest.
But her family was not interested in art, museums or culture, so her first real exposure to imagery came via foreign music magazines and MTV, which arrived in Finland when she was 13.
[1] Attending Turku University of Applied Sciences (1994 to 1997) provided Kannisto with an opportunity to travel with scientists to the Amazon rainforests where she began photographing some of the images in her first book, Fieldwork.
[3] Kannisto made her first visit with scientists to the Amazon rainforest during her photographic studies at Turku University of Applied Sciences.
Ultimately, she made eight trips to rainforests and traveled to Brazil, Costa Rica and French Guiana, remaining for two to three months at a time while staying in scientific field stations and photographing near the scientists.
[1] Using laboratory stands, clamps and other technical items, she mounted branches to serve as perches for the birds, snakes and other animals that she photographed in the miniature studio.
The series' nine pages, including two, facing fold-out leaves, present individual, stop-action photographs of a hummingbird captured in flight.
(These small rings of plastic with their individual numbers allow the researchers Kannisto has been working with in the rainforests and in Europe to track the birds’ migratory patterns.