View From The Roadside

Southampton Container Terminal, Originally uploaded by Liam O’Neill.

Where Portsmouth has the Spinnaker Tower, Southampton has the Container Terminal and it’s giant loading cranes. I’ve wanted to take some sort of picture of them for a long while, but I could never seem to find anywhere in around Totton that gave a good view, and none of the lanes around Marchwood looked any better. This was before I found the little slipway I used for the Queen Victoria shots, and charged with a new determination, I set off one evening a few weeks ago to try again. I very nearly failed again.
I went to where the map seemed to say my best chance would be, and again found access to the waterfront blocked behind gates and apartments. I was about to go home, when I noticed a family out walking their dogs, walking along a little dirt path by the side of a block of flats. Did the path continue around the corner? How close to the water would it get me? I parked the car and went for a walk.
As soon as I turned the corner I knew I’d found what I was looking for. The path led all the way to a little shingle beach were people were fishing or walking their dogs, and right across from the Terminal. I took a few shots, but knew I really wanted to be there as darkness fell to get a night shot.
When I went back I found my spot, and took a picture every few minutes over about half and hour as darkness fell, looking for just the right balance between the natural light of twilight and the lights of the terminal. This shot, for me, was it.
Now that I had a picture without a big container ship there, I began to wonder how different the picture would be if there had been a ship there at the time. I knew I was going to have to go back and see. I can’t remember if I checked ais-live or not, but the next time I went down, there were three ships unloading, one right opposite my little spot. I took some ‘daylight’ pictures, wandered off to see how close to the new Ventura cruise ship I could get (not very) then came back as night started to fall.

Dublin Express originally uploaded by Liam O’Neill.

It wasn’t a great nightfall. The cloud in this picture turned into a proper rain cloud, giving both a fairly boring flat sky, and rain that I couldn’t shoot in. It did finally stop, and I did take some pictures, but the Dublin Express, pointing right at me, had long ago turned on some very powerful lights on the bridge to illuminate the containers on deck, and these lights, and their long reflections in the water, very prominent in the middle of the frame, were just too bright. Instead I concentrated on the earlier pictures, and saw the Black and White potential in this one, where the threatening clouds add a real interest to the scene.

This entry was posted on Saturday, April 19th, 2008 at 2:10 pm and is filed under About Pictures. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.