With business a bit slow this time of year, I decided to re-visit a location I shot at between 1995 and 2004 at the Port of Long Beach. This facility loads bulk materials such as potash, sodium sulfite and petroleum coke onto ships. There are rail cars and conveyor belt systems all over the yard, much of it hidden underground. They even have their own locomotives to move the rail cars. Most of the process is automated, but there is a small hearty group that operates the frontloaders and other heavy equipment.
I had not been to the site in about 7 years, so was surprised to see some of the facility has been demolished, including the round sulfur barns, that I photographed in the 90s. There are several images of this location in my 2002 book, Industrial Night.
This group was shot over two evenings, with a view camera on 4×5 film, as usual for my personal work.
This twilight view on an overcast evening shows a shed that the rail cars are wheeled in to drop their load into the hoppers below onto an underground conveyor system. The white on the ground in the shed is sodium sulfite, a white granular chemical mined in the desert about 150 miles from LA.
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This colorful image was shot at night with a very wide lens between shift changes. Within minutes of completing this 5 minute exposure, the locomotive was again pushing the railcars into this shed. This facility actually rotates the rail car to the inverted position to dump the product. The camera is about three feet off the ground for this shot as finding just the right position to block most of the lights was a challenge. I could not hide the one on the left, although it’s partially blocked. The ‘light’ at the top is actually the crescent moon moving across the night sky.
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This image is lit by a mercury vapor light spilling from the partially open door on the left. It has a sense of mystery that caught my eye. It was quite dark and required a 12 minute exposure.
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This shot of the side of one of the containment buildings shows how these facilities are all about function over form. It might sound strange, but I find these completely man-made locations intriguing. There is nothing ‘natural’ in this view, with everything being designed and built by humans to get a job done. While I was setting up, a worker drove the Bobcat tractor into the position in the background totally by chance. I quickly moved the camera a bit to the right to get it completely in the shot. I used front swing of the view camera to maintain focus from the Y-valve in the foreground to the background. It was “only” a 4 minute exposure which would have required a 30+ minute exposure without using the camera movements.
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About a week later, I came back again and made this shot with the last few minutes of the setting sun casting shadows on this “coke barn”. This image is all about textures and colors. Within a couple of minutes this view was totally different.
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This view, using the last of the setting sun gives the gray building a warm glow. The massive 6 foot high tires in the foreground are covered with a dusting of sodium sulfite. It took almost 30 degrees of front lens tilt to get the tires and the background in focus, as this is shot with a “normal” lens and the tires are only 2-3 feet away.
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The intense blue of this twilight shot of the rail cars of sodium sulfite have an interesting hue, with a green tinge on the rusty cars. This is my favorite time of day to shoot, and unfortunately, only lasts a few minutes. It was a clear night as compared to the previous overcast evening.
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These two rail cars are “white”, but are they really? With the wide mixture of industrial lamps on them, they become a cornucopia of subtle colors. The blue/cyan sunset seen between the cars is the last of light in the sky. The sunset appeared orange to the eye, but if I balanced the colors for the sky, the “white” rail cars would appear an unattractive muddy brown. This color balance compromise is my version of “artist’s license”.
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This is a study in pipes and conveyor tubes. Those tubes are about 12 foot in diameter and have a fast moving conveyor belt inside. The light is predominately mercury vapor–a cold blue green, but there are sodium vapor lamps, including one on the shed on the right that is giving the magenta color cast. There is almost 2 inches of front rise on the camera to maintain the dynamics of the image and the verticals vertical.
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It was great to re-explore this facility and to find new views. Considering I shot this location over a period of 9 years, stopping 7 years ago, it is remarkable that there are still new images to be made. Photographing with this sense of dedication and discipline is what I do with most every project I take on. In this day and age of shortened attention spans, there are still a few of us who still have the persistence to study a location and the patience to shoot it at night at that, waiting for the camera to make the image.