1: Orkney is notoriously flat; Flotta is even flatter. (Ha!)
A friend from University whose dad worked for years making documentaries in Scotland told me that cameramen used to refer to an “Orkney Shot”; a shot framed so that something – anything – acted as a stop on one or other sides of the frame, to stop the eye just sliding through and out. This is maybe a bit unfair on Orkney, but once you’re out of the towns, there is an awful lot of sky over quite flat horizons and – if you want to take a picture of some foreground thing, it is likely to have sky behind it. My first thought almost all the time was to make sure that the sky didn’t simply blow out, and in processing the pictures back at my sister’s house, to keep some interest in the overcast sky, while raising the general lightness of the the land and the objects on it. Also, on an overcast day, there isn’t a lot of contrast around as the sky acts as an enormous soft box, spilling diffused light over everything; black and white was not going to work for my Flotta pictures and anyway, the muted range of August colours is quite attractive. All the assignment pictures therefore remain in colour.

2: Generally, I took fewer photographs of each thing than I did during assignment 1. To an extent, I think this was a result of limited time on the island concentrating my mind somewhat, but it also marks less of a tendency to think that tiny little things – marginal reframes, a slight shift of my weight – will result in a profoundly better photograph; rather the pictures where there a many shots were taken because of something I was consciously trying different things with: the windmill shots were repeated to try and vary the timing of the blades in relation to the corners of the frame, and the pictures inside the searchlight emplacement (# 3 in the final selection) were trying different flash settings, trying to get a still dark inside, but not black balance between inside and outside and a couple of different lenses. On the whole, i think I was much more consciously taking pictures, rather than just concentrating on what was in the frame. It also felt more like fun at times. I hope this shows in the pictures.

3: Buildings in Orkney were traditionally made from stone, and now tend to be made from breeze-blocks and then harled. The wartime installations used that most uncharacteristic material brick, with some parts made from reinforced concrete. There were a lot of corrugated iron nissen huts too. Quite a few nissen huts are still in use, and the  brick buildings have lasted well despite wind and rain and neglect. The reinforced concrete is starting to go though (and signs are going up saying, don’t enter the buildings because they’re dangerous) but you can still see that the batteries were designed by people who’d recently qualified as architects and were throwing their dreams of Bauhaus into the war effort.

4: It’s remarkably easy to lose track of time when you’re walking and taking pictures, and thinking and looking. It’s easy to see fro the contacts that the amount of time spent getting to Buchanan Battery far outweighed the time I had to get back to the ferry (even if you allow for some of sheet 1’s pictures being taken on the boat back to the mainland). While taking the pictures on sheet 6, I had a late lunch; sheet 7 was all taken as I walked, picking up my pace as time slipped by. I still managing to stop to take some, but not that many pictures, although a close look shows that they’re much more rushed than the earlier ones, and there were glaring things I missed, like the spot of rain on the lens spoiling some farms set among rather nice overhead cable geometry). The two shots of the ferry approaching the slip on sheet 7, show how close I came to missing it. Really, I should know better…