Lifting a Stone Bucket - Black & White Photos

The small and medium size stone being trucked in and piled up is being used to build up the core of the jetty. This smaller stone is then being covered by the large mutli-ton stone blocks. How are they getting this stone out to the Salisbury jetty? They have several large steel buckets on site which they fill with stone. Four cables are attached to the bucket and the crane lifts it off the beach onto the barge. In the next post I will have video showing how the buckets are dumped onto the jetty.

I find that black & white photography is very effective at conveying the industrial and mechanical feel to the site.

If you drop by the Salisbury Beach State Reservation to see the action (It is worth the trip to see this operation up close!), I have few tips on photographing. The lighting conditions have proven challenging to deal with. you have the sky which can range from a nice blue to hazy white to gray overcast. The ocean and Merrimack River tend to be on dark end of lighting range. Digital camera tend to struggle trying to balance these strong contrasts. A number of digital cameras have an adjustment for EV +/- which I made extensive use of to compensate for the lighting. Another detail to be aware of the lighting on the tractors and cranes. Depending on the angle of the sun, they can be either in  good lighting showing their coloration or in shadow. Shadow makes everything dark and you lose a lot of detail. This problem is evident with the barges in the last photo. The lighting conditions can shift dramatically simply by swing the camera around to a different angle.

The crane swings around with four steel cables.

 

The crew attaches one cable to each corner of the bucket.

The bucket lifted up just high enough to clear everything on the construction site.

The bucket is swung over to the  barge.

 

Overall view showing the crane barge, two stone scowls tied up to the barge on the right, and two tugboats the ferry the barges around the jetty.