Link to artist’s page: Eilis O’Connell

Taken in the early 1990s when the steam function still worked, now it’s long gone. Situated on one of the busiest roads into Cardiff Bay, the site was ideal for boosting the image of the new Cardiff Bay development that began in the late 1980s and continued throughout the 1990s. It was commissioned by Cardiff Bay Arts Trust in 1992.

I took the picture as part of a Black and White Landscape course at Ffotogallery, the national development agency for photography in Wales. In the space of a couple of years, I’d done several City & Guild courses that also included darkroom printing. Using a darkroom was something I’d never done before, and the thrill of watching your print appear in the chemical trays captured me from the off. Doing these courses helped me gain access to the Ffotogallery darkroom, and I did another class at a college in Copenhagen a couple of years later while living there. An opportunity presented itself when I moved back to the UK in 2006, and I built a darkroom in my house. My home darkroom lasted a couple of years before I switched to digital. If money and space were no object, I’d go back to a darkroom today in a heartbeat. But, you can’t deny the attractions of digital and being able to make images so quickly and cheaply.

This image of Secret Station was taken on a Hasselblad 501c and an 80mm lens. The film, a favourite, was Ilford Delta 100asa, which was great for long exposures as I could usually get a couple of seconds for an exposure even during the day. I used to expose at 80asa and extend the development in ID11…those where the days!

In the 1900s Welsh coal was known throughout the world, it was considered the best of the best. Ships from all over the world would come to Cardiff to fill their holds with the stuff. Roll forward a hundred years, more or less, and things have moved on. The area is in ruins, and the coal is gone, and the ships retired. All that is left is the murky mud flats visible twice a day at low tide, and the old wooden remains of what used to be the quays that the ships loaded up alongside.

To regenerate the area in the 1990s, the UK Government pumped money to transform from the industrial past into a vibrant future based on shopping, tourism, restaurants and bars. One part of this major plan that has seen Cardiff rise in the ranks to become one of the top cities to live and work in the UK was the building of a barrage across the mouth of the River Taff to form Cardiff Bay.

At the same time, I was doing a City & Guilds photography course on Black and White Landscape.
I wanted to take pictures before the flooding of the mudflats for posterity. I wanted to contrast the old with the new. A new hotel by the Rocco Forte Hotel group was in the process of building Cardiff’s first 5-star hotel, and the mudflats were in the foreground, making a great composition. I took the photograph of the Norwegian Church at the same time, and a few others that I’ve still yet to scan and upload…but I will, in time.

I took this with a Hasselblad camera mounted on a tripod for a long exposure of around one minute at f16/f22. I wanted to set the aperture right down to get as many star lights as possible, and luckily the lights on the hotel construction provided just that.

The clouds provide just the right amount of movement, and there’s plenty of drama in the foreground, and the two cranes were in perfect position.

It was always one of my favourite pictures and looking back on it; it still is..!