A sports field renovation seen from the air – VRJ Pohjois-Suomi

I photographed the renovation of the sports field on Jokelantie in Haukipudas for VRJ Pohjois-Suomi. The work came straight from the client. The field sits between the river and the buildings, and the site spreads around it in every direction: cabins, sand stockpiles, haul roads and parked cars.

An earthworks site is hard to photograph from the ground. A trench, a layer of crushed rock and a rolled surface are all low and brown, and side by side they look the same. From above they separate, because each has its own shade and straight edge.

I therefore flew the whole shoot, including the frames that look as if taken from the ground. The difference is not where the camera stood but how high it was: the highest frames say what is being done to the field, the lowest say who is doing it.

From above the stages are visible at once. An excavator was loading a lorry beside the fence, a wheel loader drawing crushed rock along the edge of the field, a roller compacting a finished surface, and at the bottom of the trench a worker joining a pipe to a drainage well. I went round the stages one at a time, because no single frame tells them all.

I brought the lowest flights down to head height, because from there you see who does the work. Surveyors were taking levels with a total station on the crushed rock, elsewhere a worker was compacting an edge with a plate compactor, and a bucket came to rest in the sand within arm's reach.

VRJ got the same site from two heights: from above the whole of it and the order of the work, from low down the people and stages. The pictures went into their own communications across several channels.

Do you have a site whose stages are worth recording before they vanish under the surface? Get in touch, and let's look together at which stages to photograph and from which height.