Trading Air

Southampton has a long and proud association with the sea. Known around the world as the home of the finest cruise ships and ocean-going liners, the Port of Southampton is also one of Europe's largest commercial ports. A familiar site to locals, a great many ships come and go with their cargo in containers. These containers are stored in yards within the Docks; some empty, others with their cargo still inside. Each container is nine and a half feet high and forty feet long, and it is common to see them stacked as many as six high, in long impressive rows.



When confronted with such a mass of containers the mind starts racing to come up with some way of translating such obvious potential into pleasing pictures. The containers are lined up almost like terraced houses in some northern street, often with dark forbidding alleyways between the rows. Trying to find a composition that showed this aspect of the yard is something that escaped me, and is still rattling around my head looking for a solution. (Height may be the answer, stacked nearly 60 feet high a ground-level shooting position may be the cause of this problem)



Eventually I decided to concentrate on shapes, patterns and colours, to try and reduce the enormity of the scale of the yard to something more easily digested. Some close-up views accentuated the sameness to the view, others highlighted the subtle differences from container to container. The detail shots here represent some of the ideas I felt worked best. Another trip to the Docks might give me further room to explore the best ways to present this subject. As the light levels dropped, and after my excellent photographer friend Steve had finished an especially enjoyable shoot of his car within the Docks, I asked him to adopt the position, and trained an SB28 on him and an SB28 on the containers some 20 metres away (both triggered by Steve's Pocket Wizards, the backlight had full CTO gel, the light on Steve had 1/2 CTO gel). Steve specifically wanted the logo in the background to be prominent, which works well. There's also a lot of potential to de-focus the background here and use the suggestion of shapes, textures and colours in a more subtle way. Expect to see more shots from this opportunity-filled environment.