I chose to photograph both the Esso Oil Refinery and the Npower Station because I find it quite juxtaposing that these two very large, industrial workplaces are situated in the New Forest. The New Forest became a national park in 1999 and inhabits a large range of wildlife with some of the most sought after landscape scenery in the whole of Britain. I thought that with these photos, it might stir up an environmental debate with the viewer regarding industry and nature. I hoped that the photos would pose questions such as ‘How are they affecting each other’, ‘can we have one without the other’ or maybe ‘how necessary are they both for society’. For the last decade, environmental awareness has become a lot greater, but it has mostly been of the mind set that industry is bad and is ruining nature. I think that the necessity for industry should be brought into the debate a little bit more.

 

However, as soon as I started to analyse my work, I realised that I fell into the trap of manipulating my image towards a certain agenda, when I didn’t mean to. Although I understand this to be an effective and useful technique for Documentary Practitioners, I hadn’t intended on doing it for my photos. I think that the influence of common conventions for this subject had swayed me towards doing this. I manipulated my photos during the post-production of these images.

 

I took the photos on the RAW setting of my DSLR camera. With these photos I used the P mode of my camera, as I wanted to get clear, high quality photographs. I used this mode because as a novice, I needed a little bit of help from my camera whilst I was finding my way around the technology and settings.

 

For the photo of Esso Refinery, my exposure had a setting of 1/125 shutter speed, f/5.6 aperture and ISO 100. I had a kind of ‘Ken Burns effect’ though as I cropped and zoomed in on my image to make the oil refinery seem a lot larger and make it fill the picture from one side of the frame to the other. I manipulated the picture to make the foreground of the fields and trees look lifeless and dull, whilst the refinery has a bit more light and detail to it. I did this by adjusting the ‘Basic’ settings in the RAW file editor of Photoshop.

 

For the photo of Npower Station, my exposure had a setting of 1/100 shutter speed, f/6.3 aperture and ISO 100. Unlike the photo of Esso Refinery, this image is pretty much the full photo as it was taken. It hasn’t been zoomed in at all, but it has been slightly cropped to remove a bit of road from view at the very bottom. I aimed for the same effect though by making the bushes darker and duller in contrast to the bigger and brighter Npower station. I also did this in the ‘Basic’ settings of the RAW editor.

 

I framed both the pictures in basically the same way. The ‘Horizon Line’ is also my main ‘Point of location’ as the viewers’ eyes are instantly drawn to the scale of the chimneys dominating the rest of the scenery. The foreground is out of focus compared to the background in these pictures as it gives the effect again of the refinery and power station dominating the scenery around it. This effect is also enhanced as they are both at a relatively low angle below the subject and this shows the ‘proportions of shapes.