With it being overcast, it seemed a good day today to try and capture an image of the solar park located near to where I work. Shotwick solar park was once the biggest in the UK, and at 250 acres with a capacity of 72.2 MW it is pretty huge!
Obviously this posed a few problems, not least of which was how to fit it in the frame, but also to try and illustrate its vast size. After several attempts from different angles, I eventually settled on a panoramic shot. I’m pleased with the result for its aesthetics, and how it portrays that such a massive man-made thing can still be easily overshadowed my Mother Nature, shrouding it in dense cloud cover. (I’m sure the solar panels still work, but you get the point). However without a drone or such like, I couldn’t quite portray how massive this thing is.
Link here to the Solar Parks web site, and some nice aerial shots to see the full scale of the site:
Prior to this solar park being built, these fields were full of cabbages, but as time rolls on supply and demand evolves, and I guess the land became more valuable to farm energy, as opposed to food.
It’s an amazing spectacle, and close up the panels are huge, sitting in row after row after row, all standing perfectly still doing nothing but looking at the sun and gathering its energy.
Learnings – I thought I had a good view point planned out for this, and that it would be a quick hit “smash and grab” style affair getting this picture; however again reality was different to my imagination, and I had to think on the hop to get the pictures I did. You clearly can’t go right up to the solar panels, but I did manage to get fairly close. At first I didn’t like all the signs on the gate, and cropped them out of the picture; but on reflection I thought they added something to the overall image, just a little bit of detail front and centre breaking up the big swathe of grey/blue panels. Plus of course it adds to the pictures story, that though beautiful, in their own industrial ways, these panels are potentially coursing with high levels of electricity! Maybe not all pictures have to be perfect, and it’s the little details that really tell the full story.
I also split the picture in half, so if your viewing on mobile and want a better view, hopefully this will help you:
Onegav 
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