For my third photoshoot I wanted to focus on the more of the industrial aspects of buildings in this shoot. I first visited Sand Street car park which is surrounded by houses and buildings being near the centre of town. I also wanted to walk around and explore the roads in that area to fins more industrial buildings and structures. I narrowed my images down to 60 and displayed them below in a contact sheet.

For this photoshoot i went to an location outside of the area i was assigned to find different buildings and structures in St helier that link to my previous ones.

When walking around Sand Street car park I found this building structure that had wire and lamps on it giving a very industrialised appearance. I particularly liked this image as tones and colours in it are many black, grey and white even though i haven’t edited it this way. This means that building looks like its been edited in black and white in real life, representing how the industrialisation in Jersey is taking away the colour and culture. The cloudy sky gives a white background to the grey and black building in the foreground creating a hostile appearance. The angle this image is taken at emphasises the bold black wire running up the side of the building. I chose this photo as one of my final images as you cannot tell that it was taken in Jersey and could be anywhere industrial in the world, representing how Jersey is losing its heritage and culture by new constructions and starting to look like other towns and cities.

I like this image as it gives an overview of an area in the center of St Helier, showing the different and mismatched styles of building like tower blocks and smaller town houses. The angle which the photo was taken in a car park gives people a different perspective of St Helier than they might normally see. The way the buildings are arranged in this image to me looks like the buildings are being stacked and layered on top of one another. The smaller groups of older looking houses looks like how St Helier wanted housing to look like when they were first being built. Other buildings, like the flats, look like they’ve been stacked on top of the previous buildings, representing how St Helier keeps adding more buildings to the land when there isn’t much room, resulting in the overcrowding of buildings and a mismatched style of old and new.  The black, structured  fencing in the foreground adds another more interesting aspect to the image  which looks like the buildings and town have been caged, giving the image a more industrial and hostile appearance. This makes the front of the  image very symmetrical and ordered, which is juxtaposed with the mismatched buildings in the middle ground and background. The land only goes up half the image and is contrasted with the white/grey sky emphasising the whiter parts of the rest of the image and contrasting with the black fence in the foreground. Cool colours like grey, white and black with blue tints gives the overall image a dull and spiritless appearance. I did this on purpose so the idea to bring more vibrancy and culture into St Helier is emphasised.

 

I also chose this photo as one of my final images as I like how it’s only showing an industrial metal structure with no signs of life. The yellow/brown tint on the metal gives the impression that it is rusting. What makes this an interesting image is that its simplistic but contains many different tones of metal from white to black to yellow. I think this image would work best as a part of a series rather than by itself as I think it could be apart of telling a story as now it doesn’t have any obvious meaning behind it when looked at.

 

Edits

When editing this image I wanted to see if I could change overall appearance. So i experimented by increasing the exposure and increasing the brightness in one of the images so all the colour was taken out of it and was left with a stripped down version. This changes the appearance of the image making it look decolourised and bleached.

 

For these two image I edited them in black and white as well as increased the gradient in them so they give off a more historical and archival appearance. I like this as it makes them look more authentic like they’ve been cut out of a newspaper. The black and white edit takes out any remaining colour giving them a lifeless and desolate appearance emphasising just on the buildings and not on the lives of people who live in St Helier.

 

I also experimented by editing different colours to see if one was more aesthetically pleasing or had more of an effect. Although the coloured versions may be more interesting as an image, I prefer the images edited in black and white as it makes them look more authentic, which the colour doesn’t.

I edited this image in black and white and experimented with the exposure and contrast. In the first image I focused on emphasising the harsh black lines of the fencing in the foreground of the image and tried to show the different in the buildings by highlighting the lighter and darker tones. Whereas in the second image I focused on creating a blurred effect so the distinction between the buildings wasn’t as clear and the harsh fencing in the foreground was softened.  The blurriness creates a mist-like appearance like something has been put on the lens when the image was taken. I prefer the blurred image out of the two black and white edits as it gives the image another aspect that makes it more interesting to look at and makes it seem as like there is a meaning behind it. This could be that the blurriness is a representation of how the perception of St Helier is confusing as people don’t know what it will look like in the future with the increasing number of constructions being built.

Shoot Conclusion

I think this shoot was successful at capturing the increasing industrialisation of St Helier, focusing on metal structures and buildings with cooler tones to create a lifeless appearance. The editing also emphasising this by taking the colour out of the images and presenting the buildings and structure simplistically.  For my next shoot I could perhaps focus on how St Helier could bring back some of Jersey’s culture and liveliness and portray a solution to distract from the continuous industrialisation.