10th Pier - John Brown's Slipway launches

BACKGROUND

Although this is not typically speaking a pier, the shipping yard at John Brown's utilised its slipways to launch many internationally important ships, such as the QE2 (as pictured above) which was launched back in 1967.  The yard consisted of two sets of slipways on the east and west and east slipways were used to accommodate the construction of larger vessels, whereas the west slipways were for constructing smaller ships.  The shipyard also used berthing "dolphins" which were structures that were used to guide in floating ships and they could be tied to a bollard on the dolphin, which served as a mooring point for ships at the yard.     

The history of the shipping yard itself began back in 1871 when John Thomson moved his shipyard from Govan to Clydebank.  For almost 70 years, John Brown's was world leading in shipbuilding as it built the biggest passenger liners as well as battleships, battle cruisers and aircraft carriers. 

However by the 1960s the shipyard was no longer considered as being economical and was threatened with closure.  Later a merger took place for the shipyard but this fell through in 1971, although it was subsequently taken over by other businesses.  Ultimately the shipyard was finally closed in 1998 and the site demolished in 2002, however today the east yard slipways still exist as does one of the berthing dolphins.  

IMAGES OF THE PIER TODAY

Above are some images I had taken of the slipways as they are today and they were taken on the 5th (the day shot) and 7th of April 2017 (two night shots) using an Olympus E-M1 camera with an Olympus 12mm wide angle lens and Lumix 14-42mm lens.  The first shot shows the remaining slipways taken during the daytime and it is a long exposure image.  The 2nd and 3rd images were also long exposures taken at night and show one of the slipways with the others submerged due to the tide being in and also the one remaining "dolphin" structure.

As already mentioned, all three shots are long exposures that were taken with the camera set up on a tripod and I used a Lee 10 stop neutral density filter to again smooth out the water in the 1st shot but given the 2nd and 3rd shots were at night time, no filter was required .  

Overall I think these shots work very well as the 1st shot shows the structure of the slipways and they act as a leading line toward the grass fields in the distance.  The 2nd and 3rd shots also work well with the green tinted light adding something a little different to the image colour and again there is a nice use of shadow in both images.