A few years ago I’d seen a photo on Flickr taken from a street in the Margam district, that depicted a blast furnace towering over the terraced housing. This was exactly the kind of scene which fascinates me and I resolved to make my own version of the photo. Unfortunately, I hadn’t realised that there…
#636 – South Wales Road Trip Part 4 – Penallta
The aerial photograph from 1930 of the site shows what I think is a coal washery along with extensive railway sidings to the east of the site. These are long gone and housing has recently been built on the site, it as this is at a lower elevation than the colliery, the headframe on the…
#635 – South Wales Road Trip Part 3 – Penallta
I’d seen a few photographs online of the upcast headgear, viewed through the downcast headgear structure. My plan was to try and hold my camera over the fence and photograph this through the legs to see if I could get a usable photograph for the typology but I wasn’t expecting much. As I ended up…
#634 – South Wales Road Trip Part 2 – Penallta
Pennalta Colliery was my first planned port of call on my South Wales road trip. My plan was primarily to get a photo for my headgear typology and then get some from the adjacent housing estate that has recently been built on part of the site. I’d done some research on the internet to get…
#633 – South Wales Road Trip Part 1 – Hafodyrynys
This bizarre contrivance is a slime thickener, which was part of a coal washery, the only remaining part of the former Hafodyrynys colliery. A colliery had been in operation at Hafodyrynys in the 1870’s, and another opened in 1914 which operated until the 1950’s. The old shafts were closed and three drifts were sunk, with…
#632 – North Sea Canal Industrial Landscape 3 – Seaway Alfa Lift
This gigantic crane is mounted – somehow – onto a ship, the Seaway Alfa Lift operated by Seaway7 and can lift 3000 tonnes. The boom is normally lowered and stowed flat over the bow but it was undergoing some kind of maintenance while in port. I tried to capture it juxtapositioned with the gantry crane in…
#631 – North Sea Canal industrial landscape 2 – industrial minimalism
As we cruised up the canal, I observed the archetypal Dutch countryside, which was for short spell largely agrarian until the outskirts of Amsterdam at which point the landscape changed dramatically to one of docklands and industries. I decided to keep myself amused by photographing small fragments of it. I took just one lens with…
#630 – North Sea Canal industrial landscape 1 – IJmuiden Steelworks
In my last post, I talked about a photo taken from a ship leaving Southampton, and these are taken the following day as we approached the coast of Holland. The smoke from the chimneys of IJmuiden Steelworks was visible some miles out to see, and as we got closer the unmistakeable cluttered skyline of the…
#629 – Marchwood Port
This photograph is of a scene that I saw and photographed knowing that there was potential in it, but I’m not sure if I’ve managed to bring that potential out yet. Marchwood is a military port, but unlike Plymouth and Portsmouth it is not a dockyard. Rather its purpose is more to load cargo ships…
#628 – Talbot Mill, Manchester 2
As I often do, I’ve inverted this reflection because, well it just works better this way in my opinion. I like the way the texture of the fluffy clouds gives way to the lumpy asphalt. This was taken on my phone, the grittiness of the puddle and the textures elsewhere make up for some of…
Mechanical Landscapes 