Willingham Woods

Over the past week I went home to shoot at Willingham woods. The sort of images I was after at this location were based on the forestry side of things. I wanted to subtly show man's interference on these woods by producing images that illustrated that the forest was in fact completely man-made. As its a planted forest, the trees were all in line, they were altered to grow a certain way, I set out to show this in my images, but subtly, so that it looked like a natural wood, but when given context it would hopefully challenge the viewers perception of this 'natural' and 'unnatural'.

Over the course of the few days I shot, the weather wasn't great, it was cloudy, overcast and quite miserable creating this depressing atmosphere within my images, which I would of liked to avoided. I was hoping for breaks of sunshine to get the high contrast black and white images, but alas it did not happen. The result, was depressing, boring and quite miserable images. The floor of the forest was either mud, or dead or dying plantation due to the time of year, not ideal for the images I was looking to capture. Perhaps another shoot at this location is due at a later date.

It has been a poor start to the project in terms of capturing images, and has been quite disheartening, but I shall stick with it, and hope that things can only improve.

The images below are the best from the shoot, and I'm not happy with any of them, as I said before I think them to be a rather poor start to the project. The idea was there, showing how the trees were planted in lines, another form of crop to be harvested, showing the form of the trees (long, few branches), but the execution of the images was left wanting. I shall organise another trip to this location later on in the project, when weather and conditions have improved for this sort of work. Perhaps the fault was not taking another photographs, or lacking motivation, regardless I will have to do better next time, never the less, below are the best of a bad situation.

As you can see, on the forest floor the vegetation was trampled, muddy, dead, or dying, and I was really relying including this part of the scene within my images to make them work. This was a huge contribution to the depressing, boring atmosphere within the images and with the lack of shadow from the over cast sky, made everything look quite grey.