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Creating a visual story for NLMK
NLMK Group is the largest steel producer in Russia and one of the leading steel producing companies in the world.
The Group’s production facilities are located in Russia, Europe, and the USA, and its products are available in almost 80 countries. NLMK Group is the world’s leading manufacturer of high-quality steel products. Extraction of raw materials and steel production are mostly concentrated in Russia, while finished products are manufactured in proximity to the main consumers in Russia, North America, and the EU countries. The Group’s flagship site is the Novolipetsk Iron and Steel Works.
In November 2020, the Studio set to work on creating a visual case for NLMK Group. In 14 days in Lipetsk, we took several thousand high-quality photographs. Most of the production processes were photographed. As a result, we got a detailed photo story of the Works, starting from raw material research and processing, and ending with sorting and delivery of finished products. We manually processed 450 most interesting photographs, combined them into a single photo bank, and provided it to the customer.
The studio prepared photographs of NLMK research center and its unique instruments. The center has the best electron transmission microscope in Europe and a powerful optical emission spectrometer. The hardening-deformation dilatometer allows simulating mechanical loads of the metal in real time. The work of NLMK Group’s Research & Development laboratories allows testing and introducing new products. Our photos help to see the high research potential of the center.
We took pictures of rolled steel — hot-rolled, cold-rolled, zinc-coated and polymer-coated steel, electric steel, and various types of profile iron.
We photographed the IT infrastructure of the plant. The company has implemented a set of digital solutions for production planning. All the main processes in the company are united into a digital platform. Through this platform, orders are received; production time is automatically calculated and adjusted given utilization of capacities, optimal schedule for using equipment and other factors. We tried to reflect the modern style of NLMK production processes in our photographs.
We made spectacular photos of blast furnaces, including the upgraded blast furnace DP-6. After upgrade, the furnace is controlled by AI–based applications, and its capacity has increased to 3.4 million tons of cast iron a year. In addition to DP-6, four more blast furnaces are operated at the Lipetsk site: No. 3 (1.6 million tons/year), No. 4 (2 million tons/year), No. 5 (2.9 million tons/year), and Rossiyanka (4.2 million tons/year).
Now all blast-furnace gas that is formed during smelting of cast iron is used to generate electricity at thermal power plants, and blast-furnace slag is processed into products for construction. We photographed slag heaps and the process of slag processing into crushed stone.
The amount of photography done, the well-coordinated work of directors, photographers and retouchers made it possible to create a detailed visual story about steel production, employees, technologies, and products of the Works.
Масштабы проведённой фотосъемки, слаженная работа постановщиков, фотографов и ретушёров позволили создать подробную визуальную историю о производстве стали, о сотрудниках, технологиях и продукции комбината.
