What is a site of special interest? (SSIs)

Natural Sites of Special Interest (SSIs) are places that are considered to be of public importance because of their special zoological, ecological, botanical or geological interest, or a combination of these and other special qualities. They’re also land and water that people consider to represent natural heritage in terms of their flora, animals and geology.

Natural SSIs are given legal protection as the best examples of this natural heritage and some areas are of international importance and the government has an added responsibility to maintain their quality.

Sites of Special Interest in Jersey:

• Les Blanches Banques (better known as the sand dunes) – the sand dunes of St Ouen’s Bay are important for the diversity of wildlife
• La Lande du Ouest (better known as Gorselands) – the heathlands connecting Le Corbière with Beauport
• Les Landes de L’Est (better known as Les Landes) – on the north west corner of Jersey, the heathlands of Les Landes provide a valuable mosaic of habitats and open landscape
• L’Ouaisne – this small site in St Brelade’s Bay is a haven for an amazing array of animals and plants
• Portelet – situated above L’Ouaisne Common, Portelet Common offers an unrivalled coastal landscape
• Noirmont – the sister reserve to Portelet, this headland is very popular and valuable for its ecological and historical wealth.
• La Mare au Seigneur (St Ouen’s Pond) – a highly valuable wetland area for the varied and numerous waterfowl it attracts
• St Ouen’s Bay coastal strip compartments (areas between the Five Mile Road and the sea wall – areas of the fore-dune which contain a number of rare species associated with salt marsh habitat
• Le Petit Pré – a secluded woodland area in Trinity which surrounds a picturesque wet meadow
• Rue des Près – a wetland area which is important for the wet meadows and low lying marsh
• Grouville Marsh – a complex of habitats comprising wet meadows, marsh, fen, wet and dry woodland
• Bouley Bay and Les Hurets – coastal heath and maritime cliff on the north coast of botanical and zoological interest
• Mont Orgueil (Gorey Castle) – the ancient walls of this castle offer niches for rare species of animal and plant
• South Hill Battery – the grasslands alongside Mount Bingham support a wide range of grassland plants and is unusual in a largely urban environment

What is a Geopark?

UNESCO Global Geoparks are single, unified geographical areas where sites and landscapes of international geological significance are managed with a holistic concept of protection, education and sustainable development.

Their bottom-up approach of combining conservation with sustainable development while involving local communities is becoming increasingly popular.

UNESCO’s work with geoparks began in 2001 and at present, there are 177 UNESCO Global Geoparks in 46 countries. 

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Jersey’s Geopark:

‘The Bailiwick of Jersey – consisting of 120 sqkm of land
and 2,455 sqkm of marine waters – is an ecosystem of
interconnected habitats, species and processes. Biodiversity
is the variety and diversity of life and species that exist
within this ecosystem and is present everywhere in the
Bailiwick – from the centre of Town out to the Island’s
territorial limits. Geodiversity is the variety of geological,
geomorphological and soil features, which play a
fundamental role in sustaining biodiversity.’ -Draft Bridging Island Plan

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Settings:

To make an auto joiner in photoshop you’ll need to have the images ready in a folder and then find the photo merge button (file > automate > photomerge). Then there will be an option to open your folder and select your images. This will then take up to 5 minutes to create depending on how many images you have, so if you have a lot then you can just do 10 or 20 at a time.

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Final Joiners:

————-Manual———

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————-Auto———

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————-3D———

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For these edits I just used the ‘3D’ tool which is just on the top bar in-between ‘Filter’ and ‘View’. I didn’t enjoy this method because I don’t think they turned out nice and are quite boring. In my opinion they look better as flat images.

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For this photoshoot we went on a geo walk around Jersey’s coast line. Our aim was to take photographs of different types of granite. You can tell the difference through the colour of the crystals, size and patterns.

We started at the L’Etacq car park (red) and took pictures of the rocks in that area (took round 20 minutes). I focused on different granite textures by taking close ups and different angled images. When we were done, we moved to the little beach (Le Pulec) that was in the same area (blue) and focused on the same thing. The rocks there were cave like, which looked interesting, so I took multiple images of it in order to create a joiner later on. After an hour , we moved on from L’Etacq and walked up the little hill (pink) all the way to Le Pinacle. Being up there gave us a nice view of the rocks at L’Etacq. We stayed at Le Pinacle for about an hour focusing on the same things.

Contact Sheets:

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Best Shots:

L’Etacq/Le Pulec

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Le Pinacle

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Joiners:

David Hockney started creating photo collages in the 1980s and called them ‘joiners’. His earlier collages consisted of grid-like compositions made up of polaroid photographs. Later on he started working with photoprints and overlapping them in order to create a new image. He takes multiple and varying images of just individual subject.

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For my virtual gallery, I decided to have two sets of monochrome images and two colour images to show diversity. I also used a mixture of landscape and portrait photographs.

The first monochrome set consists of two landscape images that are opposite to each other on a white background. I paired them up as I thought they worked well together. The second set consists of four portrait images, one after the other in a straight line. I think they work together because they are all images of buildings and scaffolding.

The first colour set is another juxtaposition. In the image on the left there can be seen a bench in the distance and this links to the images on the right because the main focus of it is a chair. The second set is simply a landscape image of a roof with two chimneys. I like this image because the colours are nice and vibrant.

After I decided which images I was going to use for my final piece, I went into Adobe InDesign and created a zine. Overall, I think my zine wasn’t as successful as I would’ve hoped because I didn’t have a great selection of images and I struggled to put the whole zine together. I was also unable to print it because I didn’t really like the way the layout had turned out. I think I should’ve stuck more to one colour theme in order to not make the zine look too cluttered. I did however improve my zine making skills and now I know for next time to be more careful when doing phtooshoots.

Final:

Settings:

I will be printing these images in a range of sizes in order to create an interesting layout. I really like how the black and white images turned it because of the high contrast and because I think they will look very nice together as a little group of images due to their similarities.

For my Anthropocene project I also got inspired my Anastasia Savinova. She uses different parts of houses (doors, windows, roofs etc.) to create a collage of a new building. A thing I would improve next time would be taking more images from far away and only from one angle. I would also take more pictures of roofs because this time I didn’t and my pictures ended up looking uncomplete.

My Work:

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For my Anthropocene project I was inspired by Dafna Talmor’s work called ‘constructed landscapes’ and so I created edits similar to hers. She deconstructs her own landscape photographs by cutting them up and recombining multiple negatives in order to create a new composition.

The main difference is that she used photographic film to capture her images and then edits them by hand (probably using a knife to cut them). She places them carefully to create a new landscape and also leaves negative space in between them to make the place in the image look familiar at first but then unrecognisable. I took my photographs on a digital camera and simply edited them on photoshop using the lasso tool to make the cuts more natural like hers.

When Talmor creates a collage like this, she shoots all her images in the same place but from different angles. I, however, used pictures that were all taken on different days, in a different location each time and of different things.

DIFFERENCES Dafna Talmor	SIMILARITIES both	DIFFERENCES me
sand dunes	outside	grass
film	environment	scaffoldings
scalpel used	black lines/space	industrial
non digital	cut through the middle	black and white
white line	two connected cuts at the top ish	3 different images
hand made	colour	photoshop
		digital