Category: Urban Exploration
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#359 – Mechanical Landscapes Gallery Exhibition Now Open!
After too many late nights and a lot of blood sweat and tears, my first exhibition opened today at my local independent bookshop, the delightful Ebb and Flo in Chorley. It’s only 12 framed A3 photographs, but the exhibition space is somewhat small and probably couldn’t take many more, so I’ve gone for quality…
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#357 – Fletchers Paper Mill
This one is another of those which I’ve had trouble processing in the past. For some reason, the combination of colours, as well as the light, is slightly odd and has always left me struggling a bit – I’m still not sure if I’ve cracked it yet. I don’t know whether increasing the contrast in the…
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#358 – Old Lane Mill
Sometimes images naturally lend themselves to high contrast, others don’t. In this I’ve shown what happens when you go too far. The starting monochrome conversion was inevitably quite flat, muddy looking even although given it was a grey overcast day on a muddy wasteland that’s to be expected. But overall, the scene just didn’t suit…
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#342 – Reworked Images 8 – Bailey Mill Loom
Another one I’ve never done anything with, although I do have a similar image taken on film on theviewfromthenorth.org. The problem in Bailey Mill was the light coming through the windows, as at the time (2007) I wasn’t aware of the possibilities of bracketing to capture the full dynamic range of a scene. The raw files…
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#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…
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#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…
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#330 – Accrington Conservative Club
It’s been a sad end to the year with the family in mourning for my remarkable grandfather who left us just before Christmas, but I was lifted somewhat when I saw my photos of Accrington Conservative Club used in an article in Lancashire Magazine. Although I’ve never blogged about the club on here, the pictures have been…
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#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…
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#327 – Book Review – Abandoned Places 3
I’ve previously reviewed Hans van Rensbergens previous books, and I didn’t realise he’d released a third earlier this year until just recently. Hans has one of the longest running (and best) urbex websites on the web, and was one of the reasons for my increased interest several years ago. One of the first things that struck…
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#314 – It’s not about the space. Or is it?
I’ve just listened to a great interview on the Candid Frame podcast with Will Jacks. Over the past few years, he has been photographing the goings on in a Mississipi ‘Juke Joint’ a type of bar peculiar to that area of America. he goes every week, has befriended the owner and clientele, and has gained their trust and…
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#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…
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#310 – Mechanical Engineering 1
I trained as a mechanical engineer, and I still love the fact that you can see what’s happening with mechanical devices. Of course some pieces of mechanical machinery are incredibly complicated, but motions, cams and flywheels are infinitely more interesting, visually at least, than the PLC’s used on modern machinery. I had to laugh when a metal spinner, a dark…
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#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…
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#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.
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#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…
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#300 – Old Lane Mill Again
I just can’t get the sky right on this. Well, when I say ‘right’ I mean, that I’m struggling to get a look that appears in fitting with the rest of the image. It was dull overcast day, and although I’ve been able to recover some sky detail from the raw file, I can’t seem…
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#299 – The Hotseat
Take a seat! Brook Dyeing 2007. It’s gone now, and there wasn’t much to see in the first place, other then the remains of the water wheel pit, but I recently stumbled across this photo I’d forgotten about.
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#298 – Ainscoughs Flour Mill
Another joint explore with Gibbo and R1. Standing prominent on the rural south Lancashire flatlands, is a tall brick chimney and a Victorian flour mill. Probably the largest and highest structure between Liverpool and Preston, Ainscough’s flour mill was once a major employer in the quiet little town of Burscough. It closed in the late 90’s…
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#295 – Old Urbex Reports – Pyestock Part 2
And so on to the famous air house. This large building contained 8 centrifugal compressor/exhauster sets that blew large volumes of high pressure air to all the test bays across site, and is probably the best known building due to the huge number of photographs on urbex sites of its multi coloured turbines. I had…
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#294 – Old Urbex Reports – Pyestock Part 1
Number 10 Exhauster Cell Number 10 Exhauster Cell control room Hidden deep in woodland between the mainline railway and what is now Farnborough Airport, lies a huge, once top-secret aircraft engine test facility, abandoned and decaying, silent and eerie, no longer reverberating with the screaming wails of gas turbines and jet engines. This area was…
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#293 – Re-visiting photos 2
More reworked photos! These are from Edenwood Mill, which if still standing, must be a pile of soggy wood and rubble as it was in a right state back in 2008. This one hasn’t really benefitted much from the monochrome conversion compared to some, but the lens corrections have slightly improved things. The next…
Mechanical Landscapes 