Mechanical Landscapes

Category: Industrial Landscape

  • #339 – Reworked Images 5 – Dinorwic Flower

     The finished image The starting point – pretty much straight out of camera with one or two tonal adjustments. I originally cropped this into portrait format, processed it, and subsequently presented it that way for several years. When I revisited it, I decided to process it in its original landscape format, and then decide afterwards…

  • #338 – Reworked Images 4 – Pleasley Colliery

    Pleasley Colliery is the only preserved coal mine in Nottinghamshire, and is worth a visit if you are in the area.  I don’t think I’ve posted this before and it’s probably the best one I took on my visit. Unfortunately the sun was behind the mine when I was there, which made photographing it from the best vantage points…

  • #337 – Reworked Images 3 – Chatterley Whitfield

    Another rework, with some quite dramatic changes to the mood. It is somewhat timely as I read this morning that two of Britain’s remaining coal mines are under threat of closure. The storm clouds continue to gather over Chatterley Whitfield with every passing year resulting in further deterioration, and I really don’t know what the future…

  • #334 – Reworked images 2 – Grove Rake

    This is another problem image that I’d had several goes at over the years and never came up with anything that I liked. I think it’s getting somewhere now, although I’m not sure it’s there yet. The problem has always been in balancing the tones. The light on the day was constantly changing as the…

  • #333 – Reworked images 1 – Bridge of Doom

    This was an image I’d struggled to do anything with in monochrome. As a colour image, it works quite well, but converting it to monochrome always left it looking flat. That’s not a problem as the initial conversion normally does look flat, but I could never get anywhere with it after that. However, after my…

  • #328 – Bridge of Change

    I’ve posted before about the once-vast Leyland Motors works in Leyland. Its buildings sprawled for several miles from Lostock Hall right the way down into Leyland town centre, employing thousands of workers and manufacturing lorries for the home market and for export all over the world. Following privatisation it was bought by DAF who went…

  • #323 – The Last Days Of Bamber Bridge (New) Mill – 7 – a few more in monochrome

    As I was about to go on holiday, I thought I’d swing by after work to get a few more shots of the mill, in case it had gone by the time I got back (it hadn’t, it was still there). The evening sun was largely in my favour, and with a cloudy sky, there…

  • #322 – The Last Days Of Bamber Bridge (New) Mill – 6 – a few in monochrome

    With a spare hour after a week spent on the road, I made the short trip up the A6 to see what was left of the mill. The answer – everything that was there on my previous visit the week before, nothing had changed. Unfortunately, I’d forgotten that in the morning, the sun is behind the…

  • #321 – The Last Days Of Bamber Bridge (New) Mill – 5

    #321 – The Last Days Of Bamber Bridge (New) Mill – 5

    Once I’d got the main photos, I tried a few more experimental ones. I like to try to get different perspectives in an attempt to tell a bigger story, and the flexibility of a 14x zoom enabled me to do this easily. These are variations of one I took at Fernhurst Mill a few years back,…

  • #320 – The Last Days Of Bamber Bridge (New) Mill – 4

     The view from the north (end) The once monolithic landmark is reduced to a much more compact form. The demolition has been a methodical dismantling, and a relatively neat affair (or at least as neat as deconstructing thousands of tonnes of brick, concrete and other dusty, dirty materials can ever be), and just one section…

  • #319 – The Last Days Of Bamber Bridge (New) Mill – 3

    The days of swinging a big iron ball are long gone, demolition these days is more like deconstruction. A long arm excavator with a powerful claw pulls the building apart, and then places all the material for recycling into big piles or straight into trucks. It does make for slow progress though, especially when there is…

  • #318 – The Last Days of Bamber Bridge (New) Mill – 2

    I grew up in a town full of red brick mills. They were all very similar to New Mill, being very large 4 or 5 storey mills, sometimes in large complexes of two, three, four or even five mills. As the industry shrunk dramatically from the early 60’s onwards, these giants and their chimnies started…

  • #317 – The Last Days of Bamber Bridge (New) Mill – 1

    New Mill was a massive local landmark, towering over the main street and neat terraced streets of Bamber Bridge. It could also be seen quite prominently from the M6, and was adjacent to the Blackburn – Preston railway line. You really had to try hard not to see it, as it was the tallest building…

  • #312 – Mill Yard

    I revisited these pictures of Bailey Mill recently and re-processed them more to my liking. The first one is taken from the middle window of the bridge that you can see in the second picture. The bridge was well and truly sealed up at one end, so I couldn’t get into the other building, in…

  • #309 – Brook Dyeing

    #309 – Brook Dyeing

    This place is long gone now, but was fairly typical of a semi-rural bleachworks that were common across Lancashire and Yorkshire until recently. Located next to a stream in Meltham, Royd Edge Mills was last home to Brook Dyeing who shut some time before 2007 when I went. It was pretty unremarkable apart from the…

  • #308 – Chatterley Whitfield

      This is a photograph that I missed from my post a while back on Chatterley Whitfield Colliery. The image here shows just how much infrastructure is left at the colliery, and the monumental job of upkeep that, well, hasn’t been taking place. When something like this is busy producing coal and making money, then…

  • #307 – Chatham Dockyard 2 – Chains, Trains and Cranes

    #307 – Chatham Dockyard 2 – Chains, Trains and Cranes

    As well as the ships, the yard is stuffed full of all types of mechanical goodness. There is a short section of the once extensive railway system intact, along with a number of operational steam and diesel engines that work on some weekends. The big slipway is also full of a huge collection of machinery,…

  • #306 – Chatham Dockyard 1 – Ships

    DING, CLASH, DONG, BANG, BOOM, BOOM, RATTLE, CLASH, BANG, CLINK, BANG, CLATTER, BANG BANG BANG! What on earth is this! This is, or soon will be, the ACHILLES, iron armour-plated ship. Twelve hundred men are working on her now; twelve hundred men working on stages over her sides, over her bows, over her stern, under…

  • #304 – Gate

    Oakenclough Paper mill was a large rural mill in he middle of nowhere that closed quite suddenly in the 1960’s. It is in a strangely isolated spot onthe edge of the moorland above Lancaster, and is still occupied by a number of busineses so there was no exploring to be done unfortunately. I was impressed…

  • #303 – Ivy Bank – Shadows of Change

    I love these long shadows! Like something out of scooby doo where the haunted house becomes alive and the windows become eyes. Backlighting (centre jour) can do interesting things, and this was taken on an April morning, when the sun was still low in the sky.

  • #302 – Loom Of Doom

    In the corner of the top floor of Bailey Mill, sat this, one of the last looms produced by the Dobcross loom company in nearby Diggle. The loom industry used to be huge, with the likes of British Northrop in Blackburn employing 3000 people at their massive site in Blackburn. But with the rapid decline of…