[Kombisaurus]

Another place I visited yesterday was the old power station on the coast just south of Fremantle.
I first discovered this place just after moving to Perth about 7 years ago, and since I first laid eyes on it my life's ambition has been to buy it and live in it (dispite the fact it is falling down, impossibly huge and impractical, located right beside a massive electrical substation and now heritage listed).
It is *right* on the coast (ie you walk out the front door onto the beach, and gets the most amazing afternoon sun. It's all fenced off but I climbed through a hole in the fence. This is the first time I've been this close to it, but the big sign on the doorway warning of survellience cameras and prosecution for trespassers stopped me going inside.
I got there a bit too late in the afternoon, the sun was hitting the horizon and light was fading. The angle and colour of the light was fantastic, but for awkward hand-held shots through windows where tripods couldn't reach, it was getting a bit dark without pushing the ISO too hard. I'll definately have to re-visit this one another time.

Here are some of the photos I got:

[adam]

How coincidental Today I was looking through someone's pbase and came across an old power station photographs, then I come on shuttertalk and see more powerstations
On Hin Chua's pbase: http://www.pbase.com/hinius/east_perth_power_station

[Kombisaurus]

Hey Adam,

That is a coincidence! (and Hin's other galleries are great too)

Yeah I've driven past the East Perth one and often thought I need to do a little expedition there. I love those kinds of places.

Do you know any history behind the one south of Freo? It is owned by Western Power and obviously used to have something big in there, but I can't work out what it was actually used for. Not only that, but there seem to be no doorways big enough to get even a modest-sized truck through, so it doesn't quite seem to make sense. I haven't walked all the way around it yet, so maybe there is something around the back?

[adam]

I haven't seen the one south of Freo before; I rarely go that far south.
Searching on google, I found a mention of Wind Turbines at South Fremantle, I doubt it's that, but on the timeline I did find in 1985: "South Fremantle Power Station closes after 34 years service (September)." (from http://www.westernpower.com.au/html/abou..._1976.html)

And I found a company that was involved in the demolition of
"South Fremantle Power Station Demolition, Western Australia

East Perth Power Station Demolition, Western Australia "
(from http://www.kaefer.com.au/PROJECT%20PROFI...0Australia)


And the power station's designer John Charles King (from http://library.swantafe.wa.edu.au/History/king_john.htm)

but that's all I can find for now, would be nice to know more about it
Do you think we can squat there and own it? haha joking

I better continue with my microeconomics essay!

[Kombisaurus]

Hey Adam,

Thanks for those links.. duh.. yeah I "forgot" about google.

Hey, I also found this which is quite interesting WRT the East Perth station, and it has a couple of old photos that show the turbines inside the building - and it looks like the south freo station could well have been set up the same way.

http://www.heritage.wa.gov.au/pdfs/pubLi...m_0411.pdf

and I also dug up the heritage listing for the South Freo station... which doesn't have a lot of info except the quote below (it was built in 1951 btw):

http://register.heritage.wa.gov.au/viewp...escription

"South Fremantle Power Station is a former coal-fired electric power generating installation. The surviving Main Building, now stripped of all plant, equipment and services, remains aesthetically significant; the building demonstrates the strong expression of a structure specifically designed for an industrial process. It was the second and largest purpose-built thermal power station in Western Australia."

Interestingly though it does list the titles of a few interesting-looking library entries that relate to it... but the entries themselves are not on the net... and the idea of actually setting foot inside a library to look up some info is just all a bit too hard.

As for the idea of squatting... well, it sounds like a great idea, but I don't think we'd be the first people to have tried that.

[guerito]

Really impressive pictures!

[Irma]

I like very much #2. I also like the B&W treatment in the last one, it has an interesting perspective too
The colors are great, probably because the time of the day you took the pictures. Very nice series.

[adam]

I was searching for other heritage sites (hoping to find abandoned places) but found this:
http://register.heritage.wa.gov.au/viewp..._seq=32701

[Kombisaurus]

hahahaha..

what tha...?

Maybe I should register my nanna.. she was "constructed" earlier than that tree.

[adam]

I really like the dark blue skies!

[Kombisaurus]

Thanks G and Irma
Yeah there is something about #2 that I love too Irma... not so much because of the composition, but just that combination of colours and the lovely soft edges in the building seem to work together.

I also like these kind of skies Adam. In the same spirit as "never letting the truth stand in the way of a good story", I'll take a nice stylised sky over a "true" realistic one any day if it helps portray the desired effect without being distracting. Often the true feeling of the quality of light in the scene is lost in a photo, and exaggerating the sky is one way I find to put it back in. Perhaps I overdo it a bit though.. hmm..

And I've just been looking a bit more through Hin's work.. it is amazing. Wow, those street photos around Freo are just fabulous. He's also got an excellent sense of humour and puts just the right spin on his titles and descriptions to make them interesting and entertaining without taking the mickey out of the subjects. Thanks for that link!
I saw the gallery titled "Stalkers Only Come Out At Night (or: How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love Street Photography)" and had to laugh, coz I'm too "scared" to do street photography, but I love to look at it.

[shuttertalk]

Lovely shots, Adrian.

#1, #2 and #5 take my fancy, but #2 is my absolute favourite. Did you have to bracket much, or did the exposure pretty much work itself out?

[Kombisaurus]

Bracket? That's something you use to hold bookshelves up with, right?

hehe.. no I don't use the camera's bracketing functions at all. I think they're a good idea, but it's so easy to do the same thing manually and have more flexibility from shot to shot, so I don't bother with the built-in bracket functions.
I do manually bracket to cover myself regularly though, but I usually do so not because I'm unsure of the exposure but because I want to bracket the DOF, shutter speed or ISO to try to get the best quality image I can but still have a "safety" shot.
When I'm shooting the shot I just concentrate on capturing as much detail in the exposure as I can (ie exposing the shadows without blowing the highlights). A quick glance at the histogram after taking the shot tells me if I've got everything I need in there. The fine-tuning to get it looking the way I imagine it, I do on the PC later. Same with White Balance - I don't think I've switched the WB on the 350D off auto, but I always tweak it manually when looking at the RAW's on the PC.
The DPP software is my new best friend I think its the first piece of software that's come bundled with a camera that I've actually liked and found really useful.