THE LAST SHIPS 1975–77 ”While I couldn’t help making the photographs of shipbuilding that I made, it was a personal obsession. At the time I didn’t exhibit or show them to anyone as I didn’t want to be thought of as an industrial photographer. I had a sense that all this was not going to…
Category: Industrial Landscape
#563 – Hartford Mill 4
Last couple from Hartford Mill now, which I’d forgotten about in the fog of the pandemic. Taken from a couple of different perspectives in between gaps in the torrential rain I experienced on the day, the first one was from between the bars of a big steel gate that although locked, kept swinging wildly in…
#562 – Hartford Mill 3
I rarely talk about cameras on this blog. I find photography more interesting than cameras although I do own a few. I regard them as tools in the toolbox and I choose the most appropriate one for whatever / where ever I’m going. So when I decided to re-visit Hartford Mill a few weeks after…
#561 – Hartford Mill 2
Last week I posted some photographs taken from the ground of Hartford Mill, so let’s take a look at some of the aerial ones. Despite shooting into the light, the little camera on the drone performed remarkably well. It’s a one inch sensor so considerably smaller than my full frame Nikon but it didn’t flare…
#560 – Hartford Mill 1
On the way back from Hatfield Colliery, I decided to swing off the M62 at Oldham to take a look at Hartford Mill, a place I’d known about for years but had never made the time to visit. Oldham once had over 360 cotton mills, but like all the mill towns, this number has decreased…
#558 – Hatfield Colliery 3
As a black and white photographer, I try to start thinking about how I want the final image to look when I am at the location. As I am shooting digital, the file is a colour file and while I know that you can preview and save JPEG’s as black and white in camera, I…
#557 – Hatfield Colliery 2
My drone now accompanies me if I am going somewhere suitable to fly it, and Hatfield seemed a suitable opportunity to give it a fly. As I’m not using the drone regularly (it’s not my primary camera), I’m still getting my head round how to use the drone in my photography and how to compose…
#556 – Hatfield Colliery 1
Britain’s coal mining industry has been in a long slow decline for decades. It’s been well documented elsewhere and is an emotive subject that I have no wish to get bogged down with. But with the recent drive to lower carbon emissions, the closure of the coal fired power stations has seen a dramatic reduction…
#555 – Swan Lane Mills, Bolton
I grew up in Bolton, a Lancashire (or Greater Manchester) mill town, although by the 1980’s – a time when I hit my teenage years and became more aware of the built environment around me – most of the mills had closed and many had been, or were being, demolished. There were well over a…
#554 – Cowling Mill, Chorley
Cowling Mill is one of the few remaining textile mills in Chorley and was a typical South / Central Lancashire red brick mill. It opened in 1906 and ran until 1959, a time when huge numbers of local mills ended production. It got put into multiple usage for many years thereafter and began the inevitable…
Mechanical Landscapes 