★ Deep in the West ★
02/07/2026
On the first warm day of the not so new year 2026, I drove from Cologne to Duisburg and wanted to photograph a little old industry. All of Germany still had frost, snow and some kind of winter weather. Only deep in the west, and even in Cologne, the sun came out for a day.
In February, the sun is still low during the day. Therefore, the photos have plenty of shadow.
I left out the Landschaftspark Duisburg Nord. I wanted to find active industry and previously marked some parking spaces on Google Maps, each of which was located near a larger industrial plant. Location scouting is easy here, because the industrial plants are excellently visible in the aerial photo.
And that worked really well. There are so many industrial plants in Duisburg that I ultimately did not know where to start. But it also means that I'll be back here. There's still a lot to see here.
Matching the season, and maybe the mood, I converted the photos into black and white. The images were taken with the Canon EOS R5 and the TS-E 24mm F/3.5L II as well as the RF 24-105mm F/4.0L. Because of the strong sun, I made multiple exposures of some subjects and then put them together in Lightroom to form an HDR photo. The contrasts were simply too strong.
Anyone who knows the photos of Hilla and Bernd Becher will know that they were mainly taken in overcast weather. For the documentation of these industrial plants, such a weather is better suited. There is just a lack of atmosphere. However, I didn't have that much of it either. Even if the sun was low and produced a strong side light, some steam or mist would have been nice.
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