Final Piece

The final piece is now complete for sending in.

The topic has remained the Fife defences, concentrating on those from WWI and WWII. These are coastal remains that fascinate me, as they are so rarely visited except by the local graffiti artists, and were so important in the defence of Britain.

I ended using a mix of monochrome and colour to show the feelings they evoked in me. Many were taken in poor weather, a few in bright sunshine. Most were taken using a Panasonic Lumix G1.The images were taken in RAW, processed via Lightroom 3, and the pages put together in Photoshop Elements 8. The font for all the pages except the title page is Ariel.

Title Page.

This shows the tank blocks that were made in their thousands and lined the coast. They are hardly visible today in most places, and many have been moved. Monochrome was used to emphasise the graphic nature of the cubes. The font is 'Day Poster Black', which was then outlined with a white stoke in Elements.

Page 1.

The castles along the seacoast make dramatic images, especially when seen on a stormy day. I choose to concentrate on the skies to show the often threatening nature of the weather in Scotland in winter. This was emphasised further in monochrome.

Page 2

The later defences are much less dramatic, and often much less visible. Here the lower image shows how the bunkers sits on the hill, and uses the hill as protection, unlike the castles which stand above the landscape. The colour detail image shows the overgrowth of ivy and closed over window.

Page 3.

The colour images here show the scale of the massive gun emplacements, and how desolate they are.

Page 4.

The use of colour shows how different the bunkers look in different seasons, but they are still overwhelmed by the new (relative to the age of the bunkers) tree growth.

Page 5.

This page uses a combination of detail (above) and landscape of the same building. The lower image is taken from where one would stand if operating the gun.

Page 6.

The graffiti, from inside the last bunker in the line, was taken with a slow speed rather than using flash, as the flash distorted the colours and made it look too 'new'. An alternative would have been to use flash and alter the colours in Lightroom.

Page 7.

The landscape image shows a line of blocks looking over the coast, here the alien nature of the blocks is emphasised by the grey against the blue, but in most cases the blocks are being slowly broken down by the elements and lichen.

Page 8.

Colour was chosen here to show the deserted, rust streaked, nature of the hangers. A similar image in monochrome also worked well but did not fit so well in the sequence when looking from the previous page (7) to this one.

Page 9.

Here the defences stand out from the landscape of the nature reserve, and are being slowly destroyed by nature.

Page 10.

I returned to monochrome for the final image to show my emotion when faced with the lack of care given to these monuments of war. This image also has the only human figure, a hardly visible person  sitting waiting in army dress.

The hardest part of this project was to cut down the number of image used from hundreds of possible ones. Initially I had several more on some of the pages, but the pages looked cluttered, and the additional images did not add anything to the story.  I also tried using all monochrome and all colour, but in the end decided a mixture told the story better and was more interesting to look at. I also tried a variety of fonts for the text, but they made reading it more difficult and proved an unnecessary complication.