(and a couple of other images in the book by Ormerod that are not found on the internet)
and by other images by Lange, Winogrand and Frank
I love the lead in lines of the road in some of them and the expanse of almost nothingness that features in each photo.
When i received this brief i knew EXACTLY what i was going to photograph it, and my inital reaction did not change at all.
My first photograph was taken at the old Padiham Power Station, of the wasteland in front of the main building that use to house the power station towers. The location is surrounded by countryside but the expanse in front of the building is just wasteland as far as the eye can see. But wasteland is not very interesting to photograph, so i tried to take it from a different perspective.
Contact Sheets
I decided to try and photograph the wasteland through the huge and empty windows on the 2nd floor of the abandoned building. I attempted to use a flash (which is not one of my strong points at all) to try and capture some of the detail on the inside of the building, but i found that this didnt work at all, there was too much information for the eye to take in and no real defined focal point.
I whittled the choice down to 4 and picked my favourite based on composition and how pleasing it was to the eye, no mean feat when photographing something as banal as a bit of wasteland!
My final shot, before and after editing. I chose this one because of the darkness of the inside walls, it feels like you are looking at a picture within a picture and i like this effect a lot. the wasteland outside is in focus and shows a lot of detail, both in the sky and on the ground, and i was pleasantly surprised at how well this turned out.
For my 2nd shot, i was again influenced by the photographers above, especially in terms of the lead in lines from the road, and again i knew what i was going to photograph. Burnley is a very deprived town and a lot of the old derelict houses are being knocked down, especially in the area that i was living in until last year-i got a bit of a shock when i took a drive down to find 4 or 5 streets missing, and every time i go past some more is gone. So i decided to photograph one of these missing streets alongside some of the still-standing houses using the road as a focal point.
Contact Sheets
The bottom 3 images are individual images taken from slightly different angles but, on the spur of the moment-and mainly because we had a very dramatic sky-i decided to take 3 exposures of the same shot and see how the scene would look in HDR.
I was very very glad i decided to make 3 exposures of this scene when it came to editing. This shot, i think, looks great as HDR, the effect is subtle (i dislike over-processed HDR images) and i think works very well indeed.
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