Boddam's Chimneys

Boddam is a small town 3 miles south of Peterhead.  When I first came upon it in 1978, I was shocked by the towering chimney that loomed over the grey rows of houses and an adjacent RAF base – I never want to live under something like that.  When I returned this time, the whole town had a lighter air, colour and was a picture of tidiness and care, and perhaps I’ve mellowed a bit… but the chimneys from the Peterhead Power Station are still inescapable from anywhere in the town. 

I used an upward movement of an Intentional Camera Movement (ICM) to try to express my response to the chimneys. I fitted a Neutral Density Filter to close out as much light as possible, but forgot to reset ISO from the high sensitivity that I had used elsewhere earlier in that day.  Nor did I chimp the first set of exposures. They were severely blown out.  I nearly ditched them, but I then tried to retrieve more detail within the images in post processing, with partial success.  I like the surprising effect of the overexposure combined with the ICM.  My photography is a bit like that ... less hit and more miss ... especially when attempting ICMs.
I have posted a few examples as ‘Extra Photos’, including some normal sharp exposures of the scene for comparison.  ICMs are not everyone’s pleasure (some friends call it “blurry shit”), but I like the more abstract and sometimes quite moody effect – it’s a bit like painting (with a camera) compared to a hard-edged sketch.

Blip is encouraging me to dig a bit deeper about the background in the images … thanks Blip team, you have created a wonderful platform for sparking learning.  In this case, I discovered a back story about the Peterhead Power Station that gives me hope and lifts my feelings about the place and the images I captured. Originally an oil fired and then a fossil gas power station, the plant also has been the site of experimental hydrogen generation capacity. In 2016 there was a (now stalled) attempt to capture and store carbon from the emissions flushing out of those chimneys … CO2 was to be stripped from the emissions and stored back in secure geological formations under the North Sea.  Could this be part of the solution to climate change? There is much debate about carbon storage: Is it safe? Will it leak out?  Is it worth it (set-up costs are enormous - £12.5 billion, or £7 million a day over 5 years for Boddam)?  Does it just allow fossil fuelled business as usual when we should get on with fundamental change in our carbon economy and food production (Trump’s touted “clean coal”)?  It seems that the Peterhead proposal was abandoned because of bureaucratic delays in government decisions, but a new proposal was brought forward again this year. 

I’m all for developing smart new technology like this to help transition to a low carbon economy, but am sceptical about claims that we can get out of our climate crisis using new technology alone. But I would feel happier living near chimneys like these if I knew they were at the cutting edge of solving a problem that impacts on us all.
[Sources for these notes are: [url=http:en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peterhead_Power_Station#cite_note-3]Peterhead Power Station[/url]; Carbon capture; Carbon capture at Peterhead