I’ve pushed myself of late to get the large format cameras out to make images outside of my normal seasonal window.

It is fair to say that finding my desired high pressure windows with little wind has been a struggle but the sheer excitement of making the images using old equipment and the despatch of those latent images and tentative wait for the returned processed negatives is always worth it.

May is nearly over, in more ways than one I hope. There is something about May in that all that brightness and cheer is soon obfuscated by the detritus of everyday life. Soon we will be in June when our uncertain futures may be mapped out differently for us over the next five years.

The fact that May is nearly over is yet another scary indicator of how time passes very much more quickly as one advances in years. I am no slouch but I often wonder at how much more I could have achieved over the years.

Anyway here we are approaching the late May Bank Holiday and this image was made on May 1st. I have lived in Ipswich for 30 years now and I was always attracted to this factory when it was working. It has some history behind it and it is interwoven with my long term Docklands of the Orwell collaborative project and my extended Edgelands series that Kodak are sponsoring. The road here is so dangerous that only a Sunday or Bank Holiday make it possible to erect ladders to see over the fence.
This factory emerged from the Industrial Revolution but had it’s roots in the Agricultural Revolution. Producing Phosphate fertilizer on industrial scales was something devised in a laboratory. I don’t know how many times I have driven or ridden past this chemistry laboratory, but finally I feel I have got something about the place as these forlorn listed buildings gradually decay.

The following day saw me down under the Orwell Bridge and a quite different vessel was moored up just across the river, the National Geographic Explorer, an ice strengthened vessel. I have images of the foreshore frozen at this point but never expected an Arctic exploring vessel to come up the river, but it was rather a cold day.

Then last Sunday, it was back to the source of my Edgelands project having discovered the abundance of bunds recently. It was still rather brighter than I wanted but such is the rapid pace of change here I just had to get this image made before the last Bank Holiday of May.

One could say I am punch drunk on large format Kodak Portra at the moment. May the drunkenness continue.