Plan
Shoot Five
In my fifth shoot, I plan to take photographs of the Teesside industry and incorporate this into the genre of night photography, I plan to photograph the Transporter Bridge when it has lighting on a night, I am also going to take photographs of the factories and power station when they are lit up on a night, I think that the lighting will make the images interesting and unique from the rest of my shoots. Also, I am going to add the idea of reflections into this shoot by using a broken, cracked mirror to show the landmarks in the images. I will reflect the lights and buildings through the smashed mirror to add to the images and make them different and more interesting than just taking images of the factory lights and the Transporter bridge.
Overview
These are the original images from my fifth shoot, in which I used a Nikon D3100 camera. I was inspired by Ian Macdonald to take these images, as his theme of photography is the Teesside industry in which is close enough to capture my own images. By taking images of the industry, this shows how man is destroying the environment linking in with my theme. When taking the photographs, i tried a variation of different techniques including altering my aperture to get the best lighting possible in the image. For some of the images, I used a tripod to make sure that the lights in the images were focused and so that the horizons would have been straight. Furthermore, I have varied the composition between the images so that a lot of the images in the shoot are different. However, this shoot did not go as well as I had planned because my initial idea of the shoot was to go to the transporter bridge an take photographs of it when it was lit up in the dark, but the lights on the bridge where not on and the mirror I took to use as a reflect was too small to capture the images I wanted. Instead I took images of the industry, which has given me the idea of doing a similar shoot but with a smashed mirror that would reflect the industry.
This image had a successful outcome because of the contrast between the background and the foreground, as the background contains the idea of man, as it shows the industry in the area, whereas the foreground shows a more focused plant, which is a silhouette, and this shows the nature. The image shows how the industry is effecting the environment around it as the plant looks like it is dying. Furthermore, I have used symmetrical composition in this image, to improve the composition further after I had taken the image, I used Photoshop to straighten the horizon, this makes the image, more successful and means that the image is one third land and two thirds sky. I have also experimented in this image by using night photography and experimenting with the different apertures to capture the lights in the background.
By researching Ian MacDonald’s work, it has inspired me to take an image like this because in a lot of this work, the industry is in the background, with some sort of destroyed nature in front. This is what i have done with this image. As the entire image is in focus, I have not used depth of field and there was a low aperture used. The way that the lighting is in the middle of the image is quite interesting as it lights up the sky in the image, and I have also captured the light to show how it gradually stops at the top of the image. Furthermore, the lighting, which lights up the foreground, is also quite interesting as it gives the image shadows and mystery. The lighting in this night image contrasts between the lighting in daytime images as the lighting during the day is mostly natural whereas this shoot illustrates how man lights up the world at night.
I was inspired by Macdonald to take this image, as when I was researching his work, I came across an image he took of the Transporter bridge in Middlesbrough, I had the idea of doing the same thing but taking the image on the night time when the monument was lit up, however when i got there to take the shoot, the lights were not on the bridge and so the image did not turn out as expected. However, the image has been successful as there is still a good composition (symmetrical), even though the lights were not on the bridge, the lighting in the background reflects off the water, which gives the image elements of reflection, even though the reflection is not from the bridge. This also creates a contrast between the background and foreground, as the foreground is dark whereas the background is lit up. The image links in with the idea of Man vs. Nature as by taking a photograph of the transporter bridge, I have illustrated to the viewer that there are man made structures everywhere that destroys nature. Also, the transporter bridge is a symbol of the North East, which is well known for its industrial past.
