For my first shoot I planned on taking my camera into my workplace and when I’d finished late one evening I’d walk around and capture some photos of the place that I have worked at for 35 years.
Plan
My plan goes something like this:
Concept
The concept is to capture a hibernation state of the factory kept breathing by the air, electricity and water supplies while the humans that operate the internals in the aim of producing product. What does the factory look, feel and sound like once humans have deserted for the day or weekend.
What ?
Photography of parts of my workplace once the general workforce has left for home and the factory is shutdown for the night. Images of the internals of the structure, machinery and walkways capturing the light and shadows created in the unlit environment.
Kit ?
I will take only my handheld mirrorless point and shoot Leica Q2 camera with it’s 47 Megapixel sensor. Not taking tripod this time as it’s really only an initial investigation. No flash required as I’m using the available light in the environment. I’ll use digital first to see if there is something here and contemplate film at a later date.
Colour / B&W ?
My Leica Q2 is a colour camera, it does have a B&W mode but I’d prefer to leave it in colour mode and change it in lightroom post processing if required. The colours of some lights and leds around the factory might prove to be important to setting the scene. Also there are few colours outside of the usual industrial greys, blacks and machine greens so an odd colour might stand out more.
When ?
As described previously I’ll stay on late one evening after the rest of the factory workforce finishes at 5pm. I’ll need to be done and dusted by 10pm when the limited number of night shift personnel come in and turn lights back on again in some of the areas.
Other Considerations ?
Health and Safety is of great concern to me when shooting in the factory environment. There are trip hazards, machines, liquids, sharp corners, things to bang my head on and all this is magnified when I’m doing this with the lights out. As you can imagine, H&S is taken very seriously at my workplace and I must ensure that I take steps to ensure that I am as safe as possible. I will inform the security guards for example that I am going to wander around the factory with a camera so they know if I do not come out at the expected time to send someone in to look for me. I will also use a torch to see where I’m going in the event that there is not enough light to see the path ahead clearly. PPE will also be required, a High Vis reflective vest, safety shoes with metal toecaps, safety goggles, ear defenders and sometimes a bump cap. These are requirements to enter the areas, as is the requirement to remove watches and jewellery so we can be as safe as possible.
Another consideration is the factory owner. I work for a company who like to carefully control their intellectual property, brand image and public perception, rightly so too. I must therefore ensure that I am ultra careful about what I capture in the frame and how it is presented so that no confidential information is shared where it should not be. Careful scrutiny of the images before publishing is a concern that I must take seriously.
Time To Shoot
It got to around 6pm and I had a mission to go and check the locations for some assets, so that asset management processes could be followed. I used this as the opportunity to take my little Q2 and head out into the factory environment.
The first asset on the list was the network upgrade from a few years back, which have an asset sticker in the offices. I wandered into the darkened and deserted space which was eerily lit by the green leds used to indicate that the emergency lights are powered up and charging their batteries.
Green Energy
I looked at the way the corridor between the desk partitions gave me a leading line with the strange ethereal green lights slowly lessening as it got deeper down the office block. The strange patterns emanating from the LEDs were illuminating the walkway and then reflecting off the ceiling light reflectors. The car park adn exterior lighting was able to get into the offices by the large windows on either side of the building but wasn’t too distracting.
This image was made using ISO 8000, f/1.5 on the 28mm Summilux lens for 1/15 seconds. Usually for a shutter speed as slow as this I would be using a tripod but was able to brace myself against a girder and just about hold it still enough. I got this photo from a series of about four, the first and last are blurred due to the motion of the shutter being depressed and released, but the images in between are acceptable. If i return to this spot I’ll definitely be using the tripod and remote shutter release cable. I might also be tempted to use a longer focal length to compress the pillars together and remove some of the wider elements of the image.
Plant Room
My next asset to locate was a fire extinguishant system and to access this I needed to wear the correct PPE which involves a bump cap, due to low pipework and metal objects being relatively easy to bang your bonce on. This room above the facility is allegedly the home of the ghost and a few people over the years have been creeped out by being in this area, but I don’t believe in the supernatural so am not that bothered. It does feel eerily strange though, with bumps, bangs, pops, whistles, and bubbling noises occurring as the systems maintain themselves.
These photos I chose to treat with a black and white post processing operation as the equipment in the shots are grey metal with only a few points of colour that stood out and distracted from the eyeline. In the larger photo of the gallery above you’ll notice a fire extinguisher sign that shows up red as you can see from the colour version below. There are also other distracting colours further into the shot such as a yellow pipe and blue tank. The black and white version gets across the eeriness and deserted nature of the space in a better way to my eye.
The desolation of the area appears more bleak and stark in the monochrome image. In some of the images from this location there were also some very bright fluorescent strip lights in the foreground that are burnt out in terms of exposure and do not lend anything to the photograph so I’m not a big fan of these.
Testing Corridor
Onwards to the next location which was the corridor underneath the previous spot. Both have a good vanishing point to them, with leading lines and perspective. The lighting in there was an issue though as one side of the corridor had it’s led panel lights left switched on thus not portraying an eerie or creepy location. It was just a bit too well lit and bland for my liking so onto the next place for a photo.
Corridor Of Mediocrity
Off into the factory and another area that still had some lights on, meaning that the images weren’t really what I was after but I stopped and snapped away. You can see what I was aiming for with the long corridor style view and the obviousness of it being an industrial environment but the rows of lights in the ceiling meant that I wasn’t going to hang around here.. I toned down the vibrancy of the colours in this image to appear less well lit it still didn’t help.
Alien Lighting
With my asset list saying I needed to check on replacement lights in another office I wandered into a stairwell where I was immediately taken aback by the green light produced from more emergency exit signs. the walls are painted white and the floor is a very dark colour as are the handrails so the green light seems to flood the walls in the area. My camera was set to it’s highest really usable ISO of 6400 for these photos and they still display significant amounts of digital noise which has a similar effect to grain on higher ISO films but for different reasons to do with physics.
The one photo I liked from this set is the bottom right corner image showing the last set of steps to the ground level and a flight going up to my left. The green colour was alien-like and could have been from a scene in Ridley Scott’s 1979 Alien. One thing I’ve noticed since looking through the images on the PC was the two underneath the flight of stairs showing light being projected in through a window onto the wall. It’s caught my eye because the photo shows a trapezium-like light projection with a couple of blue stripes alongside a white stripe. This isn’t painted onto the wall so it must be projecting in from outside. I think I need to revisit the location and see what structure is being reflected onto this white wall. It feels like a camera obscura style effect. I looked into Camera Obscura a little in this post here from a couple of weeks ago.
Not Creepy Corridor
Time to head into the main office block again and going through the double doors that until recently I pushed through every single day for 20 years. the long windows in the dark coloured doors let too much light through from the illuminated hallway so, again, it’s not as creepy as I feel it could be. I still like the photograph though, the way we’ve got the leading lines going to a vanishing point beyond the doors including the lines from the suspended ceiling.
There is also some green light being thrown from the emergency lights in the ceiling but this is drowned out by the bright, white light coming from the corridor beyond.
External Eeriness
Now it was time to head down to building one for another couple of asset captures and image captures. To get there I had to go into the yard, and then up a small set of stairs and down a larger set. Both of these stairs are illuminated to prevent slis, trips and falls but they both looked erie in the evening. The lights facing opposite directions appear to make it darker in the gap between the tops of the two sets of steps. The shadowy nature of the trees without their autumn plumage, which can be seen scattered on the floor. The yellow grit box is quite distracting to me in this image so I carried on up these steps and then down the other side.
The light on the right of the image above is the same as the central light in the below image, looking up a flight of concrete steps. As the top of the steps are elevated above the rest of the surrounding environment there appears to be nothing past them except the small concrete bollards. The leading lines of the rails heading upwards to the corner draw me into the scene.
I tried this image in monochrome too but the colour does lend to the overall eeriness. The yellow painted stair edges aren’t obvious but do highlight the edges. The way that the light falls away to the right of the image also adds to the mystery of what might exist out of the frame. The contrast between the grass on one side and the stones on the other is also strange and discombobulating. To me it’s as if the stairs divide the two sides as well as what is on top and at the foot of the stairset.
The handrails are obviously industrial and functional with no real flair or designed aesthetic. It looks municipal to me.
Flicker Of Hope
Down these stairs into the number one building, I came across an area that had an issue with an emergency light flickering, and it caught my attention, flashing away at irregular intervals up in the roof space. I captured a few more scenes that were like this in the factory over the next couple of shoots and stiched them together to create a short video which I published on YouTube. The flickering light mentioned above can be seen at 1 minute in.
Uneven Lighting
Further strolling around this building led to many more dimly lit photographs that can be seen in the gallery below. Most of these are not suitable for my shoot plan as they are not dim enough or have no real composition that I like. The only one I do like is the larger picture below which has the green and yellow lines painted on the floor along with the yellow barrier that gives us the leading lines into the darkness beyond, The strong ligh from the right hand side is distracting but the light it throws onto the barrier and the cross motifs on the racking is quite pleasing. This along with the single green light and the long reflection on the concrete floor gives another detail to pull the viewer into the image. The lit area is on the bottom line of the rule of thirds also and this I feel helps it be a more successful image than the other three in this small gallery.
Shoot Favourite
The next photo is probably my favourite from this shoot. The towering windows from floor to roof are lit by an unnatural light from the lamp posts outside. The light is thrown onto the walls of the internals and we can see silhouettes and highlights of the contents.
The image truly shows what it’s like in the factory space in the dark hours, the pipes and cables surrounding you are like a giant cobweb of a huge spider, or even vines in a jungle landscape with the moonlight coming in through the tree canopy. For me though, it’s a big part of my life. For the 50 years I’ve been alive, only 16 of them have been spent outside of this environment, I’ve grown up and matured within these walls from the geeky, awkward spotty teenaged apprentice who was tasked with repairing parts of the building as part of the maintenance team, to the overweight balding and geeky manager that now has responsibility to keep the buildings serviceable and safe.
This image was made with the camera being set up for 1/40th of a second, aperture of f/1.7 and an ISO of 6400. Still a bit noisy for my liking and I think if I were to repeat this, I might take my Canon 5D as the Leica Q2 seems to be exceptionally noisy, digitally, when at these higher ISOs.
The factory has been there as part of my life longer than my wife and children and whilst sometimes I’d prefer to stay in bed some mornings, it is still a huge part of my character. This image showing some light entering after hours feels like the building charging up with energy for the next day of production. Like a fuel being allowed to spill into the facility to provide light and life for the employees who will be back on site at 7:30am.
The darkness hides the grime of industry and the pipes are actually from parachutes that capture water leaking in through the roof. A roof that I now have responsibility for.
Stacking It
Back up the hill to the office block now and I walk past a ventilation stack from an old wash area, that is no longer in use but I regularly photograph it as I am walking past. In the daytime the sun rising up over another building throws beautiful light on this and catches my eye. At night though it looks more sinister, the light next to it throws some large and strong shadows from it. The lines on the corrugated wall behind it also lend these images some wonderful texture. The third image in the gallery is a reflection in some water that lies in the yard in a metal tray. I’ve got many images of this chimney stack throughout the different times of the day so I’ll probably do another post of these in the future.
Summary Of Spookiness
Overall my shoot was successful and I came out of it with at least two images I was happy with. The first being the light through the vertical window stack and then the large stair set photo. As you can see from the contact sheet (digital) below there are many photos I haven’t called out in this post as they were mediocre and didn’t fit my brief for the shoot plan. The eeriness and weirdness of seeing these environs in darkness and strangely lit is odd and when I show these images to the people I work alongside they may wonder why on earth I have found these parts of the complex to be so fascinating. To me though it is about the ordinary being captured in a way that people don’t usually see it. Take the last few images of the chimney stack for example, people walk past this many times daily but I bet that not many of them have taken the time to see how it changes appearance in different weathers and at different times of day.
A revisit with more time and planning might see me use a tripod and shutter release cable along with a camera more suited for low light conditions. Not so it will pull more light in, that’s something I’m happy with, but to capture the scene with less digital noise. Using my Canon 5D would be better as the ISO and noise balance is superior to the Leica Q2 in my opinion. Use of a film camera might also be something I’d try too, it would have to be a colour film with a reasonable ISO that captures the light well but doesn’t give me tonne of grain, the equivalent to digital noise.
The sounds and flickering lights I found have also captured my attention and I’m seeing flickering lights or reflections everywhere now. I’ve captured sounds in my voice memos on my phone for a few years and there are a few that fit well into this, resulting in the video that I published on YouTube and referenced above.
The photos contained in this shoot are not quite up to Maurice Broomfield’s level or Todd Hido but I do think that they represent my life at work.
It’s important to remember that the photos included here are all courtesy of my employer whom I can’t thank enough for the 35 consistent years of employment especially in a market that is sometimes unstable. The fact that this factory has helped me pay my bills, mortgage and enabled me to afford the luxuries in life like cameras and computers has all led to this place and position. Without my 16 year old self starting this apprenticeship (when I originally wanted to go into civil engineering) I would have not formed a “relationship” with the buildings and environment as I have.
The factory is part of me and I am part of the factory.
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