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Access

I would have liked to stay in bed this morning but having got agreement last weekend to get onto the demolition site at the end of my road today I needed to get down there as the workers knock off early on a Saturday and the site is closed up by one.

The foreman wasn't around but John the Welsh security guy I've met a few times seemed to be expecting me.  I was given a high-vis vest and a hard hat and was told to watch out for the heavy machinery moving around the site. 

I dunno why they don't tell me to piss off really after all if I got injured on their site I'm pretty sure their insurance company would be appalled that a photographer was allowed to wander around at all, let alone unsupervised while heavy work was going on.  I'm a liability.  Excellent.

The English summer light consists of changeable conditions so this time I lazily set both cameras to auto white balance which looks odd but the alternative is to be going into the menus to swop back and forth every few minutes which slows me down - and with the risk of forgetting to change from one to the other could cause more problems when correcting afterwards.

In theory I like the idea of a flat, overcast light, to suggest the mundanity of the traditional male work environment (and for me by implication being male itself when there is a alternative feminine side, too).  But as some 'artist' photographers confess, there is a need to make photographs that will 'seduce' to sneak ideas in alongside.  For many reasons there is a real ambivalence still about making images that have something about them that appeals to the eye.  Still, when the sun shines though the world is shaped and given a surface interest that is hard to ignore.  It has drama and simply more information.

It was a buzz to stand close to a machine that had a steel tip that was hammering through large chunks of concrete and masonry.  The ground trembled under my boots with the effort to crack through those quarter ton chunks.  And I was impressed by the dumper truck driver who every ten minutes reversed at speed up a steep hill of earth to unload a ton or two of dirt. Building sites seem to involve a lot of this moving stuff from one point to another.

After a couple of hours the workers were leaving so I gave back the vest and hat and collected my rucksack, and handed Welsh John a bottle of red to show appreciation for being given site access.  It's cool.