We were asked recently by E.on to provide photography for their annual CHP yearbook.
The work involved visiting all of their CHP sites across the UK and producing a range of images to illustrate that sites pages in the yearbook.
For those who don’t know, a CHP facility is like a little mini power station that can provide Heat and Power to a particular site or range of customers, such as a hospital. In the case of one of the sites they actually provide cooling as well.
It’s a very interesting side of the energy industry which doesn’t get much exposure and most people are probably not even aware of!
The agenda on each site was a 2-4 hour visit, during which we produced portraits of the staff, as well as various images of the site itself. (GV’s or “General Views” in the parlance.)
To do so we brought our range of portable lights to bring light into darkness, as well as doing quite a bit of available light photography. All of this needed to be done quickly with minimal disruption, bearing in mind that the sites often have a small staff and there can be considerable Health and Safety issues as well.
In total several hundred images were produced, which has given E.on CHP a good library of images from their sites for use in the future. This is one of the good spin-offs from a project like this, you produce a range of images which you can continue to use for all sorts of internal and external communications for a long time to come.
Most of the photography was produced on our new Canon 5dmk3’s, and the low noise from these cameras really shone through. With the new cameras it was reassuring to know that we could easily match the available light to our portable lighting without having to worry about noise. This is probably for me the real advantage of the advances towards cleaner high ISO images that Canon have been making, the ability to balance the available with the fill light in very low light situations. This opens up the opportunities and speeds up the work on location, as you don’t have to bring as much portable lighting to bear on a job.
Of course a job with a schedule like this is always a challenge. You only have so much time to produce a large body of images from each location, and you are dependent on weather, people who have more important things to do, and the situation at a location which you have never seen before. Getting the balance right and driving each day to make sure we get the results we need in the time allowed is a key focus of the job.
On this job we were lucky, despite the overall poor weather through the winter, we only had a few rainy days on location, plus, even better still, the staff at all of the sites could not have been more helpful!
Here is a small selection of the photography, which was produced by both Dave and Doug.
Thanks to the CHP team at E.on for giving us the opportunity, and thanks to all the guys at all the sites for taking the time to show us around and help us out!
Please note that all of the above images are fully copyright.
