Category: Urban Exploration
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#218 – Derelict Mills – Part 6 – Westwood Mill
Sometimes I feel compelled to go and visit places, even if I’m not in the right frame of mind. I’d had my eye on this place for a while, and I needed to visit somewhere to photograph for a nightschool project. Reports on the internet showed it to be pretty stripped out, but with one…
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#216 – Derelict Mills – Part 5 – Old Lane Mill
Maybe as late as ten years ago, I’d never have found a place like this. I often use Geograph to search for places, and came across this place in Ovenden, near Halifax. Thanks to the power of the internet, it’s possible to scout for locations without leaving the comfort of your own home. Tools such as…
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#215 – Derelict Mills – Part 4 – Edenwood Mill
Success in many fields is all about timing, being in the right place at the right time. Take football. There are numerous players who made decent careers out of not doing a great deal effort wise, but had the seemingly uncanny knack of suddenly coming alive once or twice in a game and ending up…
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#214 – Derelict Mills – Part 3 – Knoll (Wellington) Mills
Despite training as an engineer, and even being recognised by the Engineering Council as a Chartered Engineer, I can be a bit of a Luddite when it comes to new technology. Take sat navs. My theory is that you only really need them for the last 5 miles of a journey as you can get…
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#212 – Derelict Mills – Part 2 Bailey Mill
Sometimes windows of opportunity open and you happen to be in the right place at the right time. This was the case when I explored Bailey Mill in Delph in 2007. I’d seen a couple of report on the place on 28 Days Later, and got in touch with the last person to explore it.…
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#211 – Derelict Mills – Part 1 Bradshaw Works
Printing & Steaming Building. Much of the foreground was cleared of buildings in the 1960’s. The buildings here were the Making Up, Stitching & Damping Room, and the Colour and Roller Store Growing up in the magnificent Lancashire town of Bolton, I was surrounded by the derelict and decaying remnants of the towns textile industry.…
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#210 – Using black and white, using colour.
It struck me recently that I probably convert too many of my photos to rblack and white. I got to thinking why that was and I remembered back to when I was putting my RPS portfolio together, and I was advised not to mix colour and black and white. I noticed as well that many…
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#201 – before and after – articulating your vision photographically
“It is impossible for a photographic print to duplicate the range of brightnesses (luminances) of most subjects, and thus photographs are to some degree interpretations of the original subject values. Much of the creativity of photography lies in the infinite range of choices open to the photographer between attempting a nearly literal representation of the…
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#197 – Gwrych Castle Part 3 – No Entry
Taken from a similar vantage point to one of the photos in the first post of this series, I zoomed in a bit to emphasise the shadows. In doing so, the photo has less depth as it is primarily just the flat wall, but I like the way the shadows fell and the different textures…
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#198 – Gwrych Castle Part 4 – Ivy
Final one from Grywch Castle, taken from the castellated wall that takes the driveway through the stables to the owners entrance hall, which is some distance from the visitors entrance on the lower level of the property. Large swathes of the walls were once covered in ivy, much has been cleared away but it’s growing…
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#196 – Gwrych Castle Part 2 – Weeds
It never ceases to amaze me how quickly nature takes over when man abandons his structures. Like walking through a woodland path the undergrowth makes seeing the stairs increasingly difficult. Meanwhile, inside (I use the term loosely, there’s been no roof for several years), this little plant had managed to take root on the reinforced…
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#195 – Gwrych Castle Part 1
Gwrych Castle(pronounced “Grick”, apparently), is notable for being the only castle in the UK to have no vowels in it. Or did I make that up? Not sure. Anyway, if you’ve ever driven along the A55 past Abergele, you’ll probably have seen this place on the wooded hillside to the west of the town. I…
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#192 – Beauty in Decay?
“Everything has its beauty, but not everyone sees it”. Confucius “Bleak factory buildings and billboard-cluttered avenues look as beautiful to the camera’s eye as churches and pastoral landscapes. More beautiful by modern taste” Susan Sontag Wabi-sabi is a somewhat nebulous Japanese term without any straightforward definition. In this context, Wabi has come to mean humble and simple, while means rusted…
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#181 – Thorpe Marsh Revisit part 5 – Self Portrait
Unlike many explorers, I rarely do self portraits, in fact I’m rarely photographed at all, as I’m usually on the other side of the camera. Plus, I rarely bother to take a tripod out when I explore, without which self portraiture is troublesome. Hence, I suffer from a crippling lack of imagination when I do it,…
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#180 – Thorpe Marsh Revisit Part 4 – 3 Kings
Similar to a photo from my last visit, but with a slightly different sky, I captured this just as the mist was clearing. It’s still a colour photo, but you’d be hard pressed to tell as it’s a somewhat monochromatic scene.
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#179 – Thorpe Marsh Revisit part 3 – Railway Miscellenea
Like pretty much all power stations, Thorpe Marsh was rail linked, in fact it sits alongside the East Coast Main Line. For some reason, the sidings are still intact, albeit heavily overgrown with those trees that seem to grow spontaneously on all disused railway lines. Intriguingly, there are also bits of the signalling insfrastructure still…
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#178 – Thorpe Marsh Revisit part 2 – Inside The Egg Cup
Ever wondered what it looks like inside a cooling tower? It looks like this:) Well stripped out ones do. Normally they have all kinds of cooling gubbins in, but this is just a shell. The fog had just lifted, although the sky is still slightly hazy, but the hint of a shadow shows that the…
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#177 – Thorpe Marsh Revisit – part 1
I’ve been fascinated by power stations and cooling towers since my dad took me to see the massive cooling towers at Kearsley Power Station in Bolton being blown up in 1984. Dad had grown up in their shadow in the 50’s and 60’s and it was fairly poignant for him to see them come down.…
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#176 – The Last Days Of Fernhurst Mill – DoF Tomfoolery
With the trespassing element of the visit complete, I thought I’d indulge in a bit of creative arty-fartyness. Nikon D700, 28-70mm, 1/1600 @F2.8
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#175 – The Last Days Of Fernhurst Mill – Return Visit
Depending on the circumstances, there are two approaches to exploring old buildings – stealth or high visibility. Dressing in high visibility vest and hard hat makes you look inconspicuous around an abandoned building or demolition site, as that’s what you’d expect people to wear around those places, yes? OK, its not infallible, but for sites where there’s no security,…
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#169 – Attack Of The Giant Egg Cups – Thorpe Marsh Part 3
Ever take a photo that is deeply satisfying? This one does it for me. OK, there was a bit of post processing involved and cropping involved to get the image as I wanted it, but the simplicity of this is something I really enjoy. No fancy compositions, no foreground interest, just three towers from a few…
Mechanical Landscapes 