Stack in Sudbury, Ontario

This photo is something of an amalgam of things I’ve been reading in different threads here. Things like stalking the photo as one would prey, ‘zooming with your feet’, composing when taking the photo rather than while editing, symbolism and trying to push myself into seeing what the camera will see. I’m smiling as I type this…good gracious, I’m still trying to remember to check that I’ve set the WB properly before taking a photo. My mental checklist is getting so long I may find myself taking shots of pre-Cambrian rocks so the subject will still be there while I run through the list. :-D

I’ve just spent the week in Sudbury, Ontario with family and while there was determined to get this “Superstack”. It’s the largest smoke stack of the mining company INCO, the primary industry of the city. A few years ago Sudbury was declared an environmental disaster area. Mining and the clear cutting of the forest had created a moonscape, one so desolate NASA actually did simulations there in the 1970’s as part of their space program. Since that time there has been an unprecedented move to ‘re-green’ the city creating an example to other mining communities around the world. To date, 12 million trees have been planted!

I’m fascinated by this smoke stack because it seems to represent so much: domination and power, past carelessness and future regeneration, livelihood and death. The smoke belches out continuously and yet the people thrive and now so do the trees….so it represents a kind of tenacity to me as well.


So I stalked. For several days. Each street has a view of the stack but includes numerous power lines, buildings and the usual things one expects to see on city streets. When I moved beyond those streets there were a myriad of other obstructions. I should think most of the best views are on mining company lands with security as rigid as a border crossing.


I did shoot this in RAW….and would have preferred to have taken it from a lower angle but I think it would have meant a trip to the emergency room to climb down from the height I had to stand to take it. I’ve fretted and fumed over the series of shots I took of this, dithered over whether I should post it but am doing so because I would very much appreciate advice on how to go about tackling this again. I’ll be returning to Sudbury in a few weeks and would very much like to make a photo that to me makes a statement.

Holly,

Yes it's the best to perfectly frame in the camera.

When you build the set from scratch, have costumers, lighting, set designer and your own skill buttoned down you, like Benjamin Kanarek can get what you want framed exactly. You have already built everything from your mind into a perfect compositon with ideal lighting and exactly ready to move your camera to the position you intended.



When we see Benjamin's utterly wonderful image, the feelings, thoughts, expectations derived form the his brain are embedded in the picture and when we experience that photograph much of his vision and its consequences to us are reinvoked in us. So now we react with a whole cascade of emotions, thoughts, vicarious thrill, voyeurism and then add much more based on our own nature, inclinations, imagination and social values.

That, IMHO is the function built into art but not necessarily pictures which are merely decorative, documentary or instructive.

Now in your image of the trees and the smoke, I understand that you wished to go from pristine nature to the mark of industrialization.

You don't have the luxury of moving hills and changing the hight of the smoke stack as a film director might do! So you moved to the best position you could with the lens you had available. So how on earth can you be expected to frame your image perfectly with compromising your minds own image of what you want to create? Thart's why technical perfection cannot overide creative intent! You are now liberated to crop as you wish after the fact!

So let's compare your picture as the camera recorded the fixed scene and compare it to your wishesto present a dichotomy of states: nature versus the tower of smoke going to the sky.

Well, if that is the case, we are getting the message as a sandwich of ideas, rather than a simple contrast as there's a concrete lade canal/river in the foreground. So what would you think of cropping that out and then also bring down the sky, but keeping as much of the smoke as possible?

Asher

Asher, I like what you've said about sandwiching this. I hadn't seen it until you pointed it out. I've tried cropping one of the versions and it's helped somewhat. The sad truth about this photo, however, is that I haven't captured what I saw and felt at that moment. The stack is such an immense structure and so entirely dominent that it's almost iconic in the city. The impact on the environment, the citizens, the miners and the landscape so powerful and yet here it almost looks like a pencil stuck on the horizon. ....which does bring to mind the thought that perhaps that's as it should be.

This has produced something worthwhile though. It's been a fine exercise in the practice of stalking a photo yet more than that too. It was one of those experiences one has on occasion when out with a camera....a thrill, an internal bubble of excitment at seeing the scene as well as feeling it and all with the hope of producing an image that will convey that. This photo doesn't do that but perhaps I can learn for another time and opportunity.

(I've been trying to upload the cropped version to PhotoBucket but there seems to be a bit of a struggle on there at the moment.)

Holly, you have done what is so important. first you have recognized something that moves you as opposed to something that is just there!

Asher

That it has Asher and it does so every time I visit.

I think perhaps 'real feeling' is why I'm so fond of photographing farms. I have so many pictures of barns and I watch as they are slowly disappearing from the landscape around here. They represent so much...heritage, a basis of human survival...and they're just interesting architecturally. I've been asked why so many photographs of barns...red ones, green ones, weathered, broken down and crumbling, shiny new ones...all seem to call to me despite the fact I've never lived on a farm in my life. A friend of mine is passionate about photographing insects, an aquaintance equally so about birds...and ultimately I should think any form of art must really have a foundation in not only the technical but in a passion or feeling about the subject, as you've pointed out so well. Maybe that's why it's so easy to take family photos. It seems easy to be passionate about family members (at least some of them and that said with a wry smile) ..perhaps a matter of taking enough pictures that some manage to capture the exuberance, loneliness or grief.

But as for this smoke stack, I WILL find a way. I've researched it a bit and not found any photos yet that do it justice. I shall make it my mission. ;-)