Category: Industrial Landscape
-
#572 – Bersham Colliery 2
While I was killing time waiting for a clear or cloudy sky (see post 570), I tried a few different compositions. I quite liked this multi layered composition, which is totally different to the single layer type I’m using for the headgear project. This was taken, processed and uploaded t the blog from my iPhone…
-
#570 – Bersham Colliery 1
I’ll post a bit of history in the next post, but in this one I want to talk about the photographic aspects of this photograph. As this was going to be part of my ongoing colliery headgear project, I needed a featureless sky. Didn’t matter whether it was a clear blue sky or an overcast…
-
#569 – Industrial Fine Art
I’ve had some recent correspondence with Germanas Simonson after coming across his Facebook page ‘Industrial Fine Art‘. I’m always interested in the work of other photographers in the tiny little genre of industrial landscape photography so it gives me great pleasure to consider some of the work from his website ‘Industrial Fine Art‘. As a…
-
#568 – Barnsley Main Colliery 2
The siting of the headgear atop the shafthead building wasn’t unusual, although the backstays are supported by the winding house meaning that no part touches the ground. However, it’s certainly unique in the context of the other remaining headgear in the UK, and made all the more prominent by the demolition of the previous mining…
-
#566 – Astley Green Colliery 2
As the gates were shut and preparations for a post-lockdown reopening were still underway, I had to limit my photography to the view from the gate. This is where the camera on my phone comes in handy, as being able to poke it through the bars on the gate gave me a different perspective to…
-
#565 – Astley Green Colliery 1
Astley Green Colliery is only a 30 minute drive down the M61 from me, but I’ve not been since 2012, so I decided that my first post-lockdown jaunt would be for a quick look. As of the time of the visit (June 27th 2020), the place hadn’t yet reopened for visitors, but that was fine…
-
#564 – Book Review – The Last Ships by Chris Killip
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…
-
#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…
-
#553 – Horwich Loco Works – The End
I first visited here as a child on the last works open day in the early 80’s, and then again ten years later at the weekly car boot sale (wish I’d taken my camera….). I visited again in 2010 when the works was largely intact but gradually the site has been demolished. Before the last…
-
#552 – A Decade of Industrial Photography – Final Reflections
I always used to worry that I’d run out of places and things to photograph. It’s not so much that I let my photography define my identity, as I enjoy the whole process of research, photographing, and processing my photographs. Over the past decade, my focus has moved away from urban exploration and more into…
-
#551 – Review of the decade – 2019
As per the last few years, 2019 saw no urbex and a continuing focus on the industrial and urban landscape. After several years of waiting for a drone with the spec I wanted at the right price I finally took the plunge and bought a DJI Mavic Pro 2 and it’s seen a bit of…
-
#550 – Review of the decade – 2018
A most productive year, with a revisit to Redcar, some abandonment – albeit explored with permission – and more experimentation with long exposures. Pincroft Dyers – January 2018 I live at the other end of Chorley to this Dyeworks, pretty much the last remnant of Chorley’s textile industry that is still in use. It’s in…
Mechanical Landscapes 