Presenting Assignment 3.

For A little while now I've been thinking about how best to try and encourage conservation within this environment through my photography and as I said in a former post I though the best way to accomplish this was by showing people what would be lost whether they realized or not if our woodland habitats disappeared. This has been done a lot before so I wanted to come up with a more unique way of visually presenting my message and this is what I came up with.

Let me explain what I've done here so you'll understand better what you're looking at and my thinking behind it. When I was first thinking about the message I wanted to get across in this section I had printed a few of the photos I'd taken when examining the issues and the habitat itself and I'd just scattered them about me on the floor so I could see them as clearly as possible while I thought about where I was heading with my work. I'd already had the idea of picking a particular woodland and examining it in more detail but I need a different way of approaching it, I don't know really what triggered the idea it isn't from any one particular photographer that I've looked at but I had the thought that wouldn't it be interesting to look at the woodland in away that illustrated how full of life it is from the ground level to the tops of the trees. There's no way you could do this in a single photo without a hell of a lot of luck so the way I chose to approach it was to take photos that capture a small part of the living landscape and then produce a much larger image incorporating all the best shots. Above is my first attempt where I placed the photo of the cleared woodland in the middle to say look here's what we're doing to our woodlands, then by placing all the other images around it in order from the ground up I'm saying this is what we're losing because of this process. For me it was a good start but I felt it was a bit of a jumble and it was hard to really take in all of what is being presented to you so I had another attempt but made some slight alterations.

For my second attempt I've gone for a far more structured layout and removed the central image of woodland destruction, instead I think it works a little differently because now its just giving the message of how alive and diverse our woodland habitat is. By cropping many of my photos to a 1x1 format I felt it gave a far more focused feel to the piece because I had to be really picky about what I could and wanted to show in each frame, plus it gives the final image a much more structured and balanced appearance to my original effort. Now though I felt I need a second image that could be put along side showing what damage is being done to our Woodlands.

Above is the collection I put together under the heading of destruction but this isn't really all its got to say, if you start again from the bottom it seems like all bad news with issues of woodland clearance and burning to clear the land but as you move towards the top there's a change of tone. What I discovered is that it isn't all bad news with some areas being retaken by nature when left alone, replanted with new trees or even with the last image top right replaced with much need health land habitat. The lesson to take here is yes its bad that our woodlands are been taken away but it isn't always for the wrong reasons. One theme that I would have liked to include in the above image were tree diseases such as Ash Die Back and Acute Oak Decline, luckily/unluckily depending how you look at it I couldn't find any examples of tree with these issues in any of the woodlands I visited. I'll be keeping an eye out because if I can find some good shots it give a fuller view of the situation that we find our self's facing right now.

To finish off this assignment I want lastly to highlight the creation of new woodland through the National Forest scheme, with the piece I wanted to show the evolution of the area over time from being very regimented in its layout in the beginning to nature taking control and an increase in species begin evident, to it pretty much being left to itself over time other then in a few case where some management has been needed with small numbers of live stock being introduced to manage the paths and clear the undergrowth. If you take it layer by layer on the bottom row you have the setting up of the woodland, the next row shows management taking place and species beginning to move in, this continues on the third row but I also wanted to show that the area had begun to mature and as we move into the fourth row now its a fully mature area that's beginning left for nature to look after itself with it becoming more and more of a wild wood in essence. The firth row continues this theme and then with the final row it shows this woodland is being managed but in a very natural hands off attitude with as I've said live stock introductions and pretty much leaving the other inhabitants of the area to look after it.    

So what have I learned about woodlands and there conservation needs from this assignment? First I think that they don't need a lot of help from us its more we have leave these areas alone, 9 out of 10 times we do more harm then good when we try to help and after all nature does know best how to look after itself regardless of what we think. Today more then ever we understand how these areas are important to our world as a whole but maybe in this country we're losing sight of this as more and more land is need because of the ever increasing population and other land needs and issues, so its isn't a bad thing that schemes such as the national forest have been up and running for well over 2 decades and we're now starting to see the fruits of this work. My only issue is how long until some government decides that the land could be better utilized if it were cleared and returned to farmland or some other use because with the way the world is conservation is sometimes a secondary concern.