Category: Urban Landscape
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#313 – The Duke of Lancaster’s New Clothes
Seeing the Duke of Lancaster from the road for the first time is a bit of a surreal experience. The North Wales coast road is a fairly uninteresting drive as coast roads go, you can rarely if ever see the sea, and the road is a frustrating affair of dual carriageways, single carriage ways, roundabouts,…
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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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#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…
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#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…
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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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#301 – Closing forever
Multipart, Pilling Lane, Chorley, May 2007 As part of the once-vast British Leyland empire, the huge Pilling Lane site in Chorley was a distribution centre for Multipart, BL’s spares arm. In the early 80’s large amounts of money were spent on the site making it into a state of the art facility according to contemporary…
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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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#290 – Book Review – Detroit Disassembled
Andrew Moore’s ‘Detroit Disassembled’ is a book that’s been on my wish list for a couple of years now. I’d discovered it just after it came out, as it was released at a similar time to the eye-wateringly expensive ‘The Ruins Of Detroit’ by Yves Marchand, but at about half the price. It’s certainly got…
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#269 – Mechanical Funscape 2
These images are variations on the same theme as the image in the last post. As before, the black and white treatment has brought out the texture of the slightly corroded, painted surfaces of the steelwork. By removing the distraction of colour, the shapes are now far more prominent as are things like the repeating…
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#268 – Mechanical Funscape 1
Engineers have turned their attention to all manner of things, developing machines to serve us in many ways – for example, to feed us, transport us, clean us, kill us, and in the photograph above, to frighten the living $&%! out of us. Camelot is Chorley’s own theme park, and about ten minutes from my…
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#262 – Prestolite of Leyland
I was quite surprised to stumble across this vast crumbling edifice, less than 10 minutes from my home, as most of the former Leyland Motors plants in Leyland had been cleared. Yet, sat behind rows of houses and a dense row of shrubs was this huge, wartime-era factory, now empty after its last occupants…
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#261 – Cheadle Bleachworks
For reasons that are, at best unclear, and at worse, downright weird, I have this thing about industrial ruins. Not so ruined that you can’t tell what it was, but ruined enough to be beyond repair. Proper mongy old crap – roofs caved in, doors hanging off and such like. They’re usually quick to explore…
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#259 – Staffordshire Collieries Part 1 – Chatterley Whitfield
Another one from the archives here, this was an ‘official’ visit to this crumbling edifice on a so-called open day. Actually, that’s being harsh and doing a disservice to our guides from the Friends of Chatterley Whitfield, who are probably more disappointed about the condition of this place than anyone else, and I’m sure…
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#257 – Riverdance
I posted this photograph of the MS Riverdance a couple of years back, but seeing the recent posts on Geotopoi of the wreck of the MV Carrier brought back a few memories. The story is well documented – storm force winds hit Britain at the end of January 2008, and overnight, the cargo ferry Riverdance was hit by…
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#235 – Best of 2011 Part 1
In an idea shamelessly ripped off from Martin Creese’s excellent blog, I’ve decided to post up some of my favourite photos from the past year. Regular readers will probably recognise these pictures, but I’m halfway through writing half a dozen posts currently, so this seemed like a quick and easy way to fill in the…
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#223- Derelict Mills 11 – Oakwood Mill
Some places are so derelict that they aren’t even worth spending much time photographing, let alone trying to find a way in. I’d spotted this place near to the old Railway Warehouse hidden in the woods in Mossley, so after mooching round there for a while, I thought I’d have a look at this place.…
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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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#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.
Mechanical Landscapes 