Day 9 - Old River
I’ll not lie, I am surprised I have managed 9 straight days of photographing and blogging!
The aim of this month long project was more than just taking images each day - it was about trying to develop the habits of editing and sharing regularly, of consistency.
I think its beginning to work.
I have found that I have struggled to find some cohesion from day to day of the subjects though. They are tenuously linked but the full story will come after the month is done.
Back to today - I had seen and heard of an old concrete boat wreck on the muddy shores of the River Wear so decided that I would explore that and the Northern Spire bridge that crosses the river.
The light was not kind to me, it was a very bright and diffuse day. truth be told I should probably revisit this later on in the day toward the early evening when the warmer rays come down and bathe the banks of the river, but for now I made do.
The images are in 2 parts - firstly the boat and then the Bridge
This project has also been good for editing - I am exploring different looks and feels. These ones are being edited with a softer contrast and subtler mix of highlights and shadows. I am also avoiding masking to try and make me think more about the image when I’m actually taking the photo.
Not that there is anything wrong with masking, or any other type of edits. Its all a personal thing - saturate away if that’s your aesthetic, its one of the great things about photography that the same image can be seen in so many different ways depending on personal taste.
Take the first image in the gallery for instance. This has a little colour grading on it. Some red int he shadows and some extra cyan in the highlights to give more of a polaroid or fijifilm look.
The boat is an old concrete tug called the Cretehawser Wreck. Built in 1919 it was one of 12 concrete barges built in an attempt to see if concrete was a suitable substitute for steel post World War 1. Turns out it was more expensive! Until 1935 it regularly ferried barges between England and Spain with a crew of 17. After then it was towed and abandoned on the river banks as a breakwater and remains there today.
Far to say that the concrete has probably outlasted the steel after 90 years sat on a river bank with twice daily dunkings in seawater!
With these bridge shots I was looking to try and find some different angles and focus a little more on the elements that make up the whole, rather than just an image of the whole bridge (which I did also take).
The first image is particularly busy as it really shows the evolution of the river banks over the years. First the old wooded remains of what were docks that edged out into the river. These are now submerged each tide and you can see the wearing down of the river banks. Then the new bridge in the background showing how time change and technologies advance.
Finally I have a couple of wider letterbox format images of the same scenes:
Looking upriver
This was a 9 image panoramic that I then cropped in a letterbox format