A panorama crop is ideal here – the scale of the place lends itself well to a wider aspect ratio, but join up panoramas are impossible due to being on a moving train!
I must admit that I didn’t take many of these with a panorama in mind, but some just suited a panoramic crop. I also tried cropping photographs where the subject matter was maybe in the middle distance, which I’d not normally do.
There’s no standout images here, cropping was a convenient way of removing unnecessary foreground and sky. Plus there were one or two where the shutter speed was too low and so I ended up with a blurred foreground where it was close to the train.
Click on any of the images for a full screen view.
Site of the former Plate Mill, now a weed strewn landscape
Coal and conveyors. I don’t normally do panorama of subjects so close, but Josef Koudelka’s work opened my eyes up to the possibilities of this kind of crop.
Concast plant. I liked the way the picture is split between the white and the grey.
More coal and conveyors
BOS plant, with the hillside aping the slope of the conveyor. It’s hard to comprehend the size of this place, but if you look below the pipe that runs across the image, you will see a train of torpedoes for scale.
Wider view of the BOS plant.
The four Queens
The four Queens viewed from the other direction. It’s this kind of wide view that suits the panoramic crop as all the interest is in the middle third of the frame.
I’m in two minds about whether this works or not. Maybe it’s just not interesting enough!
Mechanical Landscapes 