ENR's "2016 Year in Construction" Photo Contest Winners
The 2016 ENR Photo Contest benefits from the proliferation of cameras on jobsites and the continuing improvement in their technical capabilities, but the contest judges still find that the standout images are touched by artfulness, skill, planning, attention to detail and a strong sensibility for construction safety. Please enjoy the 2016 winners gallery!
Confined-Space Training, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada
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Photographer: Nicholas Grancharoff
Confined-Space Training Edmonton, Alberta, Canada
Submitted by Jen Jonas, Zachry Group
After Zachry’s 2016 buy of an industrial services firm, Grancharoff’s shot of worker Sean Seecharan in confined-space training provided a “dramatic photo” of the new asset. Grancharoff, who took the shot from a platform above a training vessel lit by one incandescent bulb, used a Nikon SB 900 flash gun and a PocketWizard remote flash, held by an assistant below. “The light pattern was exactly what I’d envisioned!” he says.
East Bay Bridge Demolition, San Francisco
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Photographer and Submitter: Sam Burbank
East Bay Bridge Demolition, San Francisco
Documenting a two-day operation to remove a 504-ft-long, 2,500-ton truss, Burbank shot this sunrise photo as the truss was lowered to barges. To get details despite a bright backlight, he used a Nikon D810 camera and exposed for the highlights. “You can’t bring the highlights back, but you can bring up shadows in post,” he says. “It’s almost like magic that there’s so much information buried in the shadows with modern cameras.”
Times Square, New York City
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Photographer: Ralph D’Angelo
Times Square, New York City
Submitted by Terry Kuflik, CNY Group
D’Angelo’s assignment to shoot a tower-crane pick on a Saturday night in Times Square didn’t worry him at first. Night shots are easier than in the past, thanks to high-ISO digital cameras, he says. Still, D’Angelo hit a snag: The bright lights of Times Square behind the crane left it in almost complete darkness. Then, to the right of his frame, he noticed a large, pulsating LED display, which shed flashes of light on the subject. D’Angelo timed his shots to the LED lights, turning the display into a giant flash bulb.
Bernalillo High School Project, Bernalillo, N.M.
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Photographer and submitter: Trevor Clancy
Bernalillo High School Project, Bernalillo, N.M.
The photographer says this jobsite shot was an exercise in light and perspective. “I was fascinated by the way the light refracted through the mesh of the metal roof decking and created bands of color,” Clancy says. “I had to wait for some time for another worker to walk by in just the right place, but the wait paid off.” The photo was shot on a Canon 5D Mark II camera with a 24-105 f4 zoom lens.
Johnson County Gateway, Kansas
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Photographer: Jason Clarke
Johnson County Gateway, Kansas
Submitted by Laura Wagner, Gateway Interchange Constructors
Clarke is an inspector with Lamb-Star Engineering, the quality-assurance subcontractor on the Kansas Dept. of Transportation’s first design-build job. Clarke flies a DJI Inspire 1 Quadcopter drone as a hobby and gives photos to the team, which uses them to keep the public informed of progress. Clarke says his drone can launch quickly to capture activities, such as workers forming a bridge deck, caught in this shot from 298 ft high. The controller lets him maneuver the camera up to the 400-ft federal limit, and he can view the image on an iPad. “It’s like having a 400-foot tripod!” he says.
Graniterock Asphalt Plant, Burlingame, Calif.
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Photographer: Ian Bright
Graniterock Asphalt Plant, Burlingame, Calif.
Submitted by Operating Engineers Local 3
Walking through the Graniterock asphalt plant in Burlingame, Calif., Bright was out to take photos for the newsletter of operating engineers’ union Local 3. “I go out to jobsites to capture our members at work and to highlight what it is they do,” he says. Bright spotted utility worker Robert Langley and asked him to sit in a nearby skid-steer loader for a photo. “I go with another editor and have them talk, so I can capture natural expressions and smiles,” he says.
Qatar Expressway, Doha, Qatar
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Photographer: Aurelie Korady
Qatar Expressway, Doha, Qatar
Submitted by Dean Trueman, KBR
Korady manipulated her Nikon D800 and a 24-70mm f28 lens in a tight space to capture a welder crafting a section of the Al Wahda arches in Doha. They are part of Qatar’s multibillion-dollar expressway program, one of the world’s largest transportation infrastructure projects. Workers are assembling a total of 54 steel sections for two 102-m-high arches. Korady was captivated by the effect of the tiger torch flare, says KBR manager Trueman. The freelance photographer, hired to shoot progress photos, is a veteran of global project sites and has exhibited work in Qatar and France. The final arch sections will be lifted into place by February.
Charlotte, N.C.
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Photographer and submitter: David Murphy
Charlotte, N.C.
On assignment for HNTB—the construction manager for the Charlotte Area Transit System’s 9.3-mile Blue Line Extension—Murphy was walking the site on a hazy, gray winter afternoon. He noticed a pile of scaffolding bars that soon would be used to support concrete forms for a box tunnel. “The alternating colors really caught my eye,” he says, recalling dropping to one knee and quickly getting this shot. “I’d nearly forgotten taking it when I came across it during editing,” he adds, noting it came out “very much to my liking.”
Marriott Courtyard Hotel, Schenectady, N.Y.
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Photographer and submitter: Paul Knapick
Marriott Courtyard Hotel, Schenectady, N.Y.
Knapick is the staff photographer for project contractor BBL. Spending all day shooting the workers as they formed concrete, he decided to leave the site for a while but came back near sunset. “It was a case of waiting for it all to come together,” he says. “I knew the sun would be setting. In setting the camera exposure, it really was to silhouette the person on the machine, so I exposed for the sky—but it’s like that perfect storm where everything lined up. There was no way I knew that little glint of sunlight would be coming through there, but that little blink of light really added to it. You shoot with an objective, and then there’s that little bit of luck.”
Qatar Expressway, Doha, Qatar
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Photographer: Maizurah Hatta
Qatar Expressway, Doha, Qatar
Submitted by Dean Trueman, KBR
While new to construction photography, Hatta embraced—“with a vengeance”—the challenge to capture workers welding stormwater jacking pipes in the Al Rayyan tunnel in Doha, says KBR manager Trueman. The firm is program consultant to Qatar on its multibillion-dollar highway construction effort, which now includes 50,000 workers, he notes. Despite the uneven floor and confined space, “the directional lines inside the surface of the tunnel caught [Hatta’s] eye and inspired her to take the shot,” Truman adds. Hatta, a former TV producer in Malaysia, works for project engineer Egis International. Micro-tunneling work, which began in 2014, is set to finish by midyear.
Museum of the American Revolution, Philadelphia
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Photographer: Jeffrey Totaro
Museum of the American Revolution, Philadelphia
Submitted by Amelia Popovic, Keast & Hood Structural Engineers
Totaro is a lapsed architect and structural engineer. In 1996, after five years in practice, he left to be a photographer. “I found I didn’t enjoy the process of design and didn’t really get to enjoy the end result,” he says. The opposite is true for photography, says Totaro. For the shoot at the Museum of the American Revolution in Philadelphia, he scouted the site ahead of time, selected the stairway as a subject and shot during the lunch hour to steer clear of workers. The shower of sparks was a happy accident.
Northwestern Mutual Tower, Milwaukee
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Photographer: Chris Utley
Northwestern Mutual Tower, Milwaukee
Submitted by Sarah Olson, Gilbane Building Co.
This early-morning shot, looking south from Milwaukee’s downtown over Lake Michigan, was taken atop the tower’s 32nd floor during final enclosure. Utley shot from the elevator motor platform, approximately 500 ft above the ground, overlooking a mechanical enclosure. “I saw it right away, and I thought, ‘I need to capture this,’ ” he says. Later, when the construction team saw the photograph, they not only appreciated the graceful composition of the workers against the grill and vista but also the workers’ commitment to safety.
Hålogaland Bridge Project, Narvik, Norway
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Photographer and submitter: Erik Mårtensson
Hålogaland Bridge Project, Narvik, Norway
Since joining Swedish contractor NCC as staff photographer in 2014, Mårtensson has shot its epic projects, such as the building of the $476-million Hålogaland Bridge and related transportation construction program in northern Norway. Located about 140 kilometers above the Arctic Circle, Hålogaland will be the country’s second-longest suspension bridge—stretching 1,533 meters across the Rombaks Fjord—when completed this year. NCC is building the 170-m-high bridge towers. Last March, Mårtensson joined NCC workers on a crane about 200 m above the water to capture this shot of the final concrete casting. He is used to Scandinavia’s tough project conditions, which include strong winds, rough seas and temperatures that can drop to -22° F.
507 West Chelsea Project, New York City
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Photographer: Steven Giordano
507 West Chelsea Project, New York City
LaToya Holloway, T.G. Nickel & Associates LLC, New York City
Since last February, Giordano, 23, has been taking monthly photos of all T.G. Nickel & Associates projects. On a November shoot in Manhattan, as he was walking through a lobby that connects three residential buildings under construction, he looked up and was struck by the bright colors of the rotunda’s skylight. Giordano snapped the candid and almost stealth photo, without the workers noticing him. He liked the fact that there was a crew working on the skylight, which is visible from the elevated Manhattan High Line.
Airport Demolition, Salt Lake City
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Photographer and submitter: Sue Zaybal
Airport Demolition, Salt Lake City
Zaybal, a manager for the $3-billion Salt Lake City International Airport redevelopment, took this photo with a Canon EOS Rebel T3i. “I caught the demo contractor [Grant MacKay] tearing down what was a Budget Rental Car,” she says. The gray blustery day “was a menacing background as ‘the creature’ snatched bites out of the old building,” Zaybal says. “I waited for the moment to catch a Delta jet taking off, and I got lucky to have the jet on southern takeoff pattern. The position of the excavator bucket made it look like … the jet had a narrow escape.” The backdrop of unsettled weather makes the photo more dramatic, she observes.
Gerald Desmond Replacement Bridge, Long Beach, Calif.
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Photographer and submitter: Marie Tagudeña
Gerald Desmond Replacement Bridge, Long Beach, Calif.
During a lengthy concrete placement at the $1.2-billion Gerald Desmond Replacement Bridge that stretched into the nighttime hours, Tagudeña came up with the idea to depict negative space around the construction scene. With the workers well lit but with almost no environment visible around them, they appear to be in “an abyss of space,” Tagudeña says. Switched to black-and-white in postproduction, the end result highlights the key focal points of the concrete forms, concrete arm pump and the workers, while the formwork below seems to dissolve into nothingness in the background.
Habitat creation, Anahuac National Wildlife Refuge, Texas
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Photographer: Laszlo Bencze
Habitat Creation, Anahuac National Wildlife Refuge, Texas
Submitted by Katie Howe, Great Lakes Environmental & Infrastructure
Bencze’s assignment to capture a heroic image of rice fields being turned into a duck sanctuary motivated him to drive to the shoot through rain so heavy he had to pull off the road. Arriving, he transferred to a tracked vehicle that, for 40 minutes, waded through 2 ft of water to reach the site. “I asked, ‘What do you have that will be impressive?’ ” he recounts. “They had one thing: the excavator.” Bencze knew the storm pulling away could make for a spectacular sunset. As a professional, he was ready, having lugged a huge flash, a 15-lb battery pack and a 12-ft-tall light stand into the paddy field. With lighting, “you can turn a drab shot into something spectacular,” he says.
Mark III Fab Shop, Sacramento, Calif.
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Photographer: Jeremy Sykes
Mark III Fab Shop, Sacramento, Calif.
Submitted by Keeley Lambert, executive coordinator, Mark III Construction Inc.
“I did not stage this shot at all,” Sykes says. However, he allows that, if he had tried to capture this image on film—rather than with his digital camera, which lets him see his shots instantly and adjust the settings to improve them—“it would be a photo guessing game. You have to have an aperture small enough not to blow it out, but you also have to drag the shutter to get the streaking of the sparks and get a little motion going on. So, I’m there with my tripod, tucked in the corner, wide angle … definitely at f22 and dragging it to a 30th of a second—maybe a second—to get the ambiance of the room.” He adds, “It’s hard, too, because you don’t want to look at the welding spot. I have done that.”
147th Avenue Culvert, Rosedale, N.Y.
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Photographer: Matthew Lapiska
147th Avenue Culvert, Rosedale, N.Y.
Submitted by by Dan Leibel, NYC Dept. of Design and Construction
Finding work on a water-main replacement project stalled due to wet conditions, Lapiska spontaneously captured this shot of Antoine Bedard, project manager, reviewing plans inside a shipping container that served as the site office. Lapiska has worked as a video producer and photographer for the New York City Dept. of Design and Construction for two years, photographing libraries, firehouses, ribbon-cuttings and sewer projects. “Infrastructure is harder to shoot because the activity is less visible when excavations get filled in,” he says. “This shot was an effort to give context to the project.”
Superstorm Sandy Restoration, Queens, N.Y.
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Photographer: Matthew Lapiska
Superstorm Sandy Restoration, Queens, N.Y.
Submitted by Dan Leibel, NYC Dept. of Design and Construction
Lapiska shot Ernie Johnson, lift boss for contractor Ducky Johnson Home Elevation LLC, as he operated a hydraulic lift to raise a home in Queens to permanently protect if from future flood damage. The work was part of New York City’s “Build It Back” program, which is repairing Superstorm Sandy-damaged housing and building resilience into vulnerable structures. “My biggest challenge … was to capture the concentrated focus of his face without obscuring his view of the house he was lifting,” says Lapiska, who shoots for the city’s Dept. of Design and Construction. Johnson “was at the master control, and I wanted to convey the intensity of his job at that moment.”
Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital Stanford
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Photographer: Barry Fleisher
Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital Stanford
Submitted by Yumi Clevenger
When DPR started a 521,000-sq-ft expansion of the hospital for children, infants and pregnant women, Dr. Barry Fleisher, a neonatologist there until he retired 14 years ago, returned as a photographer to document the work at the institution he cared for deeply. For three years, he has taken thousands of shots of workers and details of construction. He says he was particularly fascinated by this daylong demobilization of a tower crane and the physical intensity of the work but also by the way the workers share a mission to build a facility to care for sick children and their families.
Cincinnati Music Hall, Cincinnati
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Photographer: Matthew Zory
Cincinnati Music Hall, Cincinnati
Submitted by Bryan Beischel, R.J. Beischel Building Co.
Beischel carpenter Matthew Miller was gathering his harness in front of the Cincinnati Music Hall’s iconic 26-ft-dia Rosette window when Zory snapped this photo with a 1957 Rolleiflex twin-lens reflex film camera. Zory, who also is a musician in the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, says he used a digital camera to shoot the majority of the renovation project. But he pulled his manual Rolleiflex out of his bag a moment before taking this photo. “My favorite part is that he is in midstep,” Zory says. “You can see the light coming under that foot and its shadow.”
Amli Arts Center, Atlanta
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Photographer and submitter: Cory Sherman
Amli Arts Center, Atlanta
Sherman, a safety specialist for project contractor JE Dunn Construction Co., was conducting a routine site inspection when he spotted a tower crane gently dropping into place a rebar mat for a vertical shear wall. “People don’t always get to see the working parts of what goes into actual construction,” says Sherman, a previous ENR photo-contest winner who regularly captures images of construction activity as part of his job. “Once everything’s built, the people and material that went into it are often forgotten.”
Minnesota-to-Wisconsin St. Croix River Crossing
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Photographer and Submitter: Peder Thompson
Minnesota-to-Wisconsin St. Croix River Crossing
In July 2016, photographer Thompson captured placement of some of the last of nearly 1,000 precast segments for the new, extradosed St. Croix River Crossing between Minnesota and Wisconsin. “I liked the low angle of the morning light bouncing off the St. Croix, so I chose to make my images from the vantage point of the river,” says Thompson. “I remember changing my lens to a wide angle to capture more of the existing structure as the visual elements of the scene came together.”
Quintana Island, Freeport, Texas
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Photographer: Nick Grancharoff
Quintana Island, Freeport, Texas
Submitted by Jen Jonas, digital brand manager, Zachry Group
Zachry Group’s corporate photographer recalls seeing a “forest” of pile drivers and drilling rigs as he arrived at an LNG facility construction site on an August morning. Drillers were installing DeWaal displacement piles up to 100 ft deep to support holding tanks. He noticed that one rig was beside a ditch and thought, “What a great vantage point to accentuate the height of the rig.” As he laid on the ground, he saw “the beautiful S-curve of the concrete feed line climbing toward the sky.” He loves the way “the viewer’s eye is forced to travel to the top of the rig, back to the bottom and then back up the concrete feed line.”
Mountain View Elementary School Project, Albuquerque, N.M.
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Photographers And Submitters: David Murphy and Trevor Clancy
Mountain View Elementary School Project, Albuquerque, N.M.
The photographers wanted to capture the sunlight coming from behind the equipment being used by Naomi Naranjo, a project manager with HB Construction. “To do that, we positioned the sun directly behind it,” Clancy says. “Once the composition was right, we locked into a tripod and took several frames, experimenting with our lighting ratios before getting this final shot.” It was done on a Canon 5D Mark II camera with a 24-105 f4 zoom lens.
Power Parasol Project, Arizona State University, Phoenix
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Photographer and submitter: Michael Nothum
Power Parasol Project, Arizona State University, Phoenix
Nothum has been into photography since the days of film and wet-line printing. As chief operating officer of a young company that creates architectural shade structures that generate solar power, he still carries his camera to document everything on the firm’s projects, from design meetings to fabrication and construction. One of Nothum’s favorites, this shot depicts a welder securing tabs to attach solar panels to a wide-flange beam. The welder was under a shed roof and the lighting was low, so he shot on a tripod and experimented with settings to capture the smoke and sparks. “I shot in color, of course, but I love black-and-white. When you pull out color and focus on the contrast between shadow and light, that’s really what our structures are all about.”
Chinatown Station, Central Subway Project, San Francisco
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Photographer and submitter: Mark Kroncke
Chinatown Station, Central Subway Project, San Francisco
McMillen Jacobs Associates, Oakland, Calif., provides construction management services on the Central Subway Project, on which Kroncke serves as geotechnical and structural instrumentation engineer, monitoring for ground and building movements. He often stops at this vantage point atop a set of walers, about 30 ft above the bottom of a 100-ft-deep, slurry-wall-supported excavation, because of the amount of activity he can see from there, he says. “I always find it fascinating how small the folks building this cavern are compared to the cavern itself,” he says. He believes it is the largest soft-ground cavern in the U.S. and maybe all of North America. “To see a human next to it, in comparison, is very impressive,” he notes.
Mathworks Campus, Natick, Mass.
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Photographer and submitter: Robert Umenhofer
Mathworks Campus, Natick, Mass.
When photographing construction, Umenhofer feels he has an advantage. “I come from a long family of carpenters, I’ve been on jobsites since I was a kid, and I have a degree in architecture,” he says. “That helps me see the angles of the building a little better, and … the workers are comfortable with me being there.” Umenhofer says he “pays attention to things like safety glasses and gloves and [personal protective equipment].” He adds, “ I always try to get my subject off-center while getting the negative space that gives your eye room to move around the picture.” This shot has all that. He likes the photograph for its color composition—the warm tones of the steel and the blue of the sky—good lighting and contrast.
Tower 12, Seattle
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Photographer: Francis Zera
Tower 12, Seattle
Submitted by Melanie Deitch, PCL Construction Services, Bellevue, Wash.
With lots of training in construction and safety under his belt as well as years of documenting PCL Construction projects, Zera says he has “earned the trust” of workers and can “just disappear by knowing where to go without getting underfoot.” Zera used his invisibility—and a Canon 5D Mark II with a 17-40mm lens—to capture two workers on the 23rd floor of a Seattle apartment tower as they guided beams for support tables for a concrete placement. A veteran architectural photographer, he was drawn to the “leading lines and the way they converge.” Even the cloud behind lined up, Zera notes.
Jerome L. Greene Science Center, Columbia University, New York City
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Photographer and submitter: Mike Paras
Jerome L. Greene Science Center, Columbia University, New York City
Lend Lease, a client of Paras’ for more than 30 years, hired him to shoot an array of projects for a portfolio of work to be used for proposals and adorn office walls. “I pretty much had carte blanche,” says Paras. “I don’t get hired to document what the structure looks like. I’m bringing the human element—who these guys are. This carpenter was carrying beams back and forth, and we became friendly that day.” The graceful arches of the steel viaduct in the background enhance the image.
Ring Road Upgrade Aaist, Belgium
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Photographer and submitter: Erwin Tecqmenne
Ring Road Upgrade Aaist, Belgium
Photographer Tecqmenne took this photo of a three-year, $46-million upgrade of a ring road in Aalst, Belgium, on an October morning. “The mist in the background gave an extra dimension to this picture and, together with the smoke of the hot tarmac road, made it look mysterious,” he says. “I was waiting for the moment these three road workers all looked at the same direction.”
Birmingham Bridge (SR 2085) Rehabilitation Project, Pittsburgh
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Photographer and submitter: Amber George
Birmingham Bridge (SR 2085) Rehabilitation Project, Pittsburgh
When George was a little girl, her dad gave her a Crayola digital camera. Her hobby led to a graphic-arts degree and, ultimately, to a newly created position as a graphic designer at Joseph B. Fay Co., a mid-Atlantic general contractor. She prepares sales presentations, fliers, marketing brochures and social media feeds. Having upgraded from the Crayola 110 to a Nikon D3100, she relishes construction-site visits. On the way to one Fay job, George arranged a quick drive-through of another—the $28.5-million rehabilitation of the Birmingham Bridge, a tied-arch span over the Monongahela River. Just before she left the site, she leaned out of the vehicle window to capture crew members in a lift basket affixing a containment system prior to sandblasting.
Minnesota-to-Wisconsin St. Croix River Crossing
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Photographer and submitter: Peder Thompson
Minnesota-to-Wisconsin St. Croix River Crossing
Members from Ironworkers Local 512 guide a rebar cage into place on the only pier on the Wisconsin side of the crossing. The bridge-building joint venture of Lunda Construction Co., Black River Falls, Wis., and Ames Construction, Burnsville, Minn., is using top-down construction to decrease the impact on the bluff. “I got a heads-up from the ironworkers that the rebar cage was to be placed,” says Thompson, who was ready to make compromises to cope with the poor lighting in the confined space. But he was pleasantly surprised. “The low morning light came indirectly through a 12-foot gap as the rebar cage was being lowered,” he says.
New NY Bridge Project, Tarrytown, N.Y.
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Photographer and submitter: Jeff Henschel
New NY Bridge Project, Tarrytown, N.Y.
Riding out in the boat on the Hudson River one morning in May to the New NY Bridge Project, Henschel didn’t plan on taking glamour shots. As a resident quality-assurance engineer for Greenman-Pedersen Inc., he focuses on documenting concrete going into the bridge’s towers. “I think I was up in Pier 31, looking at Pier 32 as we were getting ready to pour concrete, and said, ‘Oh my God, look at that,’ ” recalls Henschel. Glancing up to look east across the river, the morning fog had begun to clear. “I’m not a big picture-taker, but this was a big opportunity,” he says.
Underground Mine Expansion, Northern Sweden
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Photographer and submitter: Erik Mårtensson
Underground Mine Expansion, Northern Sweden
Mårtensson, a staff photographer for Swedish contractor NCC, shot company craft worker Juha Niskanen as he renovated shafts in the Kiirunavaara mine—the world’s largest underground iron-ore mine in Kiruna, Sweden—for client LKAB. The 1,540-meter-deep, state-owned mine, located 90 miles north of the Arctic Circle, now is expanding downward. “Once you’re lowered down the shaft, the only light comes from the headlamp on your helmet. It’s cold, and the water in the mountain comes down on you like a hard rain,” says Mårtensson, a three-year NCC veteran. “It was too dark for the autofocus to work. After about 10 minutes, there was so much water in the viewfinders I barely could see what I was photographing.”
A veteran of NCC projects in Scandinavia, Germany and Russia, Mårtensson has submitted winning photos to ENR since 2014, when he joined the firm. As a construction photographer, he relishes “getting a peek into the realities and lives of people across the world and getting to photograph history in the making.” Mårtensson adds, “NCC’s fantastic workers make my work easy.”
Folsom Dam Auxiliary Spillway Project, Folsom, Calif.
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Photographer: Ian Bright
Folsom Dam Auxiliary Spillway Project, Folsom, Calif.
Submitted by Operating Engineers Local 3
Photographer Bright found deck engineer Jeff Saenz welding while making repairs to the mouth of a clamshell lying on its side on a barge. Using a Canon EOS 70D with the f-stop set at 5.6 and the shutter speed 1/500, Bright positioned himself at the top of the clamshell. Bright says he later retouched the image to bring out the colors. A trained photographer who also serves the operating engineers Local 3 as an art director, Bright says he loves trips to shoot projects but that he never knows when his visits will produce uninteresting photos or, as in this example, an image of lasting value.