Assignment 3: A conclusion

This post marks the point where I draw this to a conclusion, gathering a set of files with metadata to submit to the tutor.

Work up to this point

To avoid repeating myself, please also refer to:

• Assignment 3: preliminary
• Assignment 3: Preliminary, Aerodrome
• A story in pictures: Make a page layout

Gathering the photographs

The following factors should be noted:

• Access to the refinery site was requested but declined. Obviously the range of images could have been greatly increased had some access been permitted.
• I was given permission to photograph from the main roads (hard for them to legally object anyway). In doing so I sought to remain discreet as I didn't wish to spend time explaining myself to security personnel and/or Police.
• I have only had time to cover the site during the winter period. As the surrounding area is farmed it undergoes distinct transitions over the seasons which a much longer assignment could capture.
• Winter in Scotland has typically equated to freezing temperatures, high winds and low sun.
• Considerable quantities of steam render some areas of some images somewhat unsharp.
• I first tried catching the tankers on the road to the motorway but found they past by at high speed making well composed and sharp images a challenge. For motorsport shots I sometimes position myself at corners to get the cars as they slow down and before they accelerate again. Borrowing this idea I resorted to catching the tankers at the roundabout where they go in and out of the tanker depot and this resulted in many more successful shots.

Some oil refinery facts

It is nearly 30 years since I studied any Chemistry, barely scraping through at A level. So it is fair to say that I didn't know much about oil refineries and have had to pick up a little as I go, enough to at least provide some keywords and captions for the images.

Here are a few Grangemouth Refinery facts I discovered:

• 9 million litres of clean fuels are produced daily
• A single tanker can carry as much as 35,000 litres of fuel
• The site was the first to introduce Ultra Low Sulphur Diesel & Petrol to the UK market
• The site produces aviation fuel for Scotland's (remaining) major airports
• The site holds ISO14001 accreditation for environmental management systems
• The site occupies about 1,700 acres (640 football pitches)
• The site employs about 1,350 people
• There is over 4,000 km of pipework

(These facts mainly taken from material provided to me from the INEOS marketing department)

Metadata

Notes on EXIF
As I follow a typical digital workflow the EXIF data is captured automatically in camera and stored as metadata attributes with the image. This ensures a mostly accurate record but it should be noted there are a few exceptions:

• Date and time are whatever the camera body is set to. It is up to the individual to ensure accuracy and to decide how to handle daylight savings, time zones, international date line etc. Personally I always synchronise my bodies at UTC and do not adjust for daylight savings.
• Many lens related details are not recorded, e.g. if extension tubes are used (not strictly lenses and not applicable to this assignment), and lens settings such IS modes, focus ranges etc.
• Use of filters is not recorded (UV, ND, polarisers etc)
• Flash on/off only captures on-camera compatible flashes (or if connected with a TTL lead) so often indicates off when in fact flash has been used.

Notes on IPTC
My camera bodies record data for a couple of IPTC fields, Artist and Copyright. I then apply a standard metadata template as part of my raw import process with Lightroom. This populates some of the 'regular' IPTC fields such as the Contact set (fields associated with the Creator). Typically I populate other fields when processing for stock, editing Keywords, Title and Caption/Description. For this assignment I have also populated Headline.

Lightroom, in common with most photo editing packages, does not support the controlled vocabularies used by certain IPTC fields, for example Subject Code and Scene Code. I do not usually populate these fields.

There are some inconsistencies across packages in how IPTC fields are labelled, even packages from the same company. For example Adobe Lightroom has a field Job Identifier but this is shown as Transmission Reference when viewed in Photoshop.

More at
http://www.iptc.org/site/Photo_Metadata/

My previous related posts:
P and P: Assignment 3: Revisited - Metadata
DPP: Performance with Photo Mechanic

Delivery

My tutor has suggested I deliver:

• Any layouts as PDF
• Contact sheets as PDF (allowing a wider selection of images to be presented)
• Files submitted on a DVD with the exif data intact and the IPTC data completed

In practice a swift delivery would probably best be facilitated by transmission using the efficient FTP protocol. There are also now many 'cloud' type services (such as Dropbox, FilesAnywhere etc).

In view of the large file sizes it is not practical for me to load all the files up to my usual Picasa folders (Google+ Albums as they are starting to be called).

Conclusions

For me I think the real story here would be that of the Central Scotland Airport but that cannot effectively be told without resort to historic archive photographs and so does not fit well with this brief. All along I wanted to resist the idea of just showing the site as an ugly industrial polluter, I felt this would not be entirely fair and I always viewed the site as something quite wondrous.

I feel that attempting to create a set of page layouts proved a very worthwhile activity. When I came to think about the subject and the story it became a very simple idea, that of Scotland's oil refinery (it only has this one). I wanted to show something of the scale of the site and how it sits in the surrounding area. And I wanted to tell a simple tale, that crude oil comes in by underground pipeline, that the oil is refined into fuels which are delivered by tankers (in fact some oil also goes back out by pipeline). And that there are a number of by-products from the refining process (e.g polymers) and hence a number of other chemical companies on site.

Providing images in both vertical and horizontal orientations is fine across the set but for any individual scene it tends to work better one way or the other. Providing a given scene in both orientations can require some re-composition, potentially changing shooting position, focal length etc. Sometimes it only really works one way.

Captioning a large number of images takes some not inconsiderable effort. I found myself repeating 'chunks' of text from one to another. Sometimes I found myself writing 'redundant' style text, for example when there is an image of a large cooling tower I found myself stating something along the lines of "Large cooling tower", its obvious but it can be hard to get beyond that without more knowledge. So clearly a more in-depth knowledge of the refinery and the refining process would have been desirable, if not directly then access to an industry subject matter expert (SME) would have helped (the photographer may not necessarily be the best person to do the captioning).

In an ideal world I would have liked to have more time and more access, to have taken more photos during more seasons and from more angles. I may do some of this in my own time anyway but from a course perspective it is important to be able to draw a line and progress and I feel now is that point.