It’s nice to do creative work.  It’s even nicer to create work for a company that I like and believe in.   That’s why I was excited last fall when ecomaine approached me to create a library of images.  Ecomaine is a non-profit waste waste management facility run by 21 different municipalities in Maine that makes energy from trash—yours and mine.   They also recycled a staggering 35,000 tons of material at their recycling center in 2010-11.

I love to photograph industrial operations—the bigger and the more technically challenging the better.    Ecomaine has three physical locations: a landfill, a recycling center and their waste-to-energy facility.   Gleaming on the outside, the waste-to-energy plant (perhaps not surprising given that they take in trash and incinerate it)  is full of dust, extreme temperatures and dark corners requiring extra location lighting magic.

It’s the whole ball of wax, as they say.  That is, if the wax is full of sodium-vapor lighting, large moving globs of machinery and lots of dust.

I love a challenge.

We carefully planned out a full day that would take us to all three facilities, starting with a landfill and then ending with the power plant.    With the outside temperature heading south from 33 degrees and an inside environment that approached the temperature of a Russian bath house,  our challenge was to move quickly and not let lenses fog or our energy to waste.  The lighting was fairly simple, since we had to be on-the-move all day.   From a scouting visit we knew which areas were high-priority for ecomaine.  Of key importance for me was to recruit workers as we progressed, incorporating them into images to provide scale and a human element.

All in all, the day went very well.   My assistant and I got a great workout climbing from the bottom to the top of the waste facility (broken elevator!).   Here’s a few of the images I really enjoyed creating from the shoot, (mostly) minus the dust.  Enjoy!