Forth Bridge - Sketch to Photo Project

Growing up in South Queensferry I became captivated by the beauty and complexity of the Forth Bridge, one of the finest examples of Victorian engineering in the World.

Viewed as a whole it is breathtaking and wholeheartedly worthy of its World Heritage status. Get up closer to it and you begin to see just how challenging it must have been to build such a magnificent structure.

Just the sheer number of rivets (6.5 million) and the volume of individual pieces required to build such an enormous structure, and in such a hostile climate, beggars belief. The fact is has gone on to function flawlessly for over 130 years is even more staggering.

While editing some images from a sunrise shoot in Queensferry I was doodling pictures of the bridge on a post-it. On that post-it I had unconsciously drawn out images of girders and supports, imaginary close up sections of the bridge. This gave me an idea - what if I took that principal further and sketched out a series of close up images of the bridge, just random pleasing shapes of the structure and then went out to see if I could find areas to photograph that matched the drawings.

I rough sketched nine potential ideas that I was happy with and went out in search of the real life versions. I spent a day just looking and studying the shapes and forms, trying to pick out anything that matched up with the initial sketches. After a long day craning my neck and camera upwards I had what I thought was a series of images that matched up as closely as I could get to the nine drawings.

This is the eventual culmination of that little unconscious moment of imagination on that post-it.

A project gallery of nine individual images based upon a series of pre-imagined shape and form sketches of the Forth Bridge.