Docks - Industrial Coast - Establishing Image

I feel that this image shows 'industrial coast' very well. I chose the docks because it was the first place that came to mind locally as being industrial coast and is one of the most well known parts of falmouth. Also, the docks are very complex and always have large ships docked or being worked on there making potential for an interesting image.

I chose this image to be in my final 3 because of the composition. I carefully framed the photograph so that the centre of the boat was directly in the centre of my frame. I think that putting symmetry into photos is hard to make it look 'right'. If it is not perfectly symmetrical it is very off putting. It took me several attempts to get a shot where I was happy with the symmetry and this shot is shown here.

I chose to shoot in the dark because I knew there were a lot of lights around the docks and since I was shooting from above, I felt that I could add an aesthetic and unique view of the environment that most people wouldn't see as they would be there during daylight. This did lead to difficulties with exposure because when I got to the area, I found that the railings where too high for me to use a tripod without the metal getting in the shot. Therefore, I had to hold the camera by hand a push the ISO very high, up to around 2000 in order to get a decent exposure. This meant I had to sacrifice some detail in order to shoot at this time of the day at this location.




This shot is very similar to the first of the same ship but at a different angle. I chose to shoot from this angle to show more of the ship and therefore give more information about the industrial coast subject. This is important due to the title of the brief being 'Establishing Image'. This means it needs to show as much information it can to the story behind it. The story being about the falmouth docks being such an active area.

Again, I lost some quality in this image due to a boosted ISO in order to  deal with the low light. The way I prepared for the low light problem was to use a Canon 6D which is a full frame camera with 20 megapixel sensor. This was to allow me the most chance of maintaining quality in an already grainy image which I may have to crop.

This last shot I tried to make the image fairly dull apart from the subject in the centre which is the brightly lit ship emerging over the large building in the foreground. This is my least favourite shot out of the three because the composition hasn't worked as well as I'd have liked. This could have been improved by making the frame tighter to the subject but due to the grain in the image, I cannot do this without loosing a lot of detail and quality. I have considered re shooting this shot but after looking into this I have decided that I prefer the previous 2 anyway even if this was shot again.