With the sweet hot smell of rotting vegetation and humid conditions making camera equipment and lenses drip like something resembling the glass of an ice cold drink on on hot summers day, the challenge was going to be more than the usual logistical problem of lighting, schedule and brief.. this was going to be much more fun!

After initially uploading only one of the images from this shoot, I’ve finally got around to providing a little more on the subject.

The smell was sweet and sickly, this was the place that all the garden waste around the North-West tourist region around near Blackpool gets recycled and was a far cry from the breezy seafront and it definately wasn’t as hot there as it was here.

 

‘All the photos we take come out blurred and dark’ said the client.. ‘Not too dissimilar to this then’ I said after doing a quick test shot to get the measure of the situation…

‘Pretty much like that – but yours is much better’ laughed the client.

 

As always we were prepared for such problems, working in such large environments inevetibly leads to requiring a plentful supply of lighting – and that we had in a van load. I was working with an assistant on this assignment and although the vantage point here illustrates footways and various locations to hide lights, actually getting to those locations with the lighting, clamps, stands and cases took a lot of legwork. The walkie-talkie instructions to adjusting the light outputs to provide the finished result was essential to ensuring we didn’t spend too long, and we managed to shoot the machinery in one of it’s productive cycles even whilst the machinery was moving and changing the lighting configuration.

  Quite possibly the difficulty of the environment doesn’t reflect in the results produced. Often, (and I’ll post another sample later) photographers will rely on available lighting rather than provide their own, which in some circumstances can work, but compared to positioning lights just where they’re needed, available light often provides inferior results. 

 

Here’s an example of using available light compared to adding our own lights. The darker version was pretty much how the interior looked; quite dark, little detail in the dark compost and too much contrast in the scene. The added problem was vibration. Along with lots of other locations we’ve worked in the amount of movement in the stairways and access platforms was quite considerable.

 The waste is continually rotated across the filter beds until it exits the composting area via the conveyor system.

 Beneath all that waste are filter beds extracting water and gases for processing, along with ambient gas being processed by further exraction to peat filter systems. The scale of the process is probably better illustrated by the following images of the filter beds. It is easy to estimate from these the total mass of recycled waste which is being processed.

 

 The scale of the Industrial filter bed is quite staggering compared to the height of a worker inspecting the filter prior to commissioning.

 

Prior to materials arriving at the composting area it is grappled into a crusher and graded through 3 different sized Trommels. These Trommels separate the smaller waste from the larger waste which is again crushed and revisits the system. The Trommel is like an inclined washing machine with large egress ports progressively getting smaller making the treatment of waste that more controlled in its process. In action, the waste tumbles around until it will eventually make its way to the bottom of the Trommel and commence recrushing or processing.

Working in the background to all this front end processing is the main control room monitoring the systems and programming the rate of rotation of the decomposing material. It was cooler and cleaner in here.