For my final assignment in my current module – Digital Photographic Practice – I’m doing a study on the Rochdale Canal. It’s essentially a look at the “aftermath” of the canal – from its original construction through to it’s restoration. In August I did a set of photos from Castleton. Yesterday I walked from Castleton to Manchester – around 14 miles and 4 hours. Foolishly without a break!
I ended up with around 330 photos from that trip, which I got down to 37 I published to Flickr. With the 21 from my previous trip I’ve got a fair batch of images – and the assignment calls for 12 in total. I still need to do a couple more trips – including along the City stretch of the Canal and further along the length of the Canal in Rochdale towards Littleborough. For now though I’ve got some reasonable shots and some I’m really happy with and are likely to be short-listed for the final assignment. Time may change my thoughts on this though, especially when I’ve got more shots to choose from. Below I’ve highlighted some favourites. The rest are on Flickr:
Security
I like the mixture of textures and the contrast in this image. In the background is a factory building, and the foreground is the protection from those passing on the canal. While other buildings and features are making use of the canal in this case the canal is an unwanted avenue of access.
City Green Space
This images shows the contrast in use when placed next to “Security”. The flats show it’s in a city landscape but it’s being made us of as green space – a place to escape from closed surroundings.
Design
This is another good illustration of the contrast in uses of the space beside the canal – here a designer furniture outlet; which is as far away as you can get from the closed space of the factory in “Security” and utility of the old mills.
Splash
This is the kind of use of the canal that has probably never changed – kids throwing stones in to see who can make the biggest splash.
Abandoned
This is from my first walk – in this case it’s the clear state of abandonment of a canal-side building that puts the re-use of other buildings and canal-side land into context.