Mechanical Landscapes

  • #375 – Library of Congress Images – Building Liberty Ships at Bethlehem Fairfield Shipyard

    Bethlehem-Fairfield shipyards, Baltimore, Maryland. A shipyard with a crane. (sic) One of the biggest contributions America made to the war effort was its enormous industrial base and associated ingenuity. It was Henry Fords protege’s from the motor industry who were brought in to help the conversion of the peace time manufacturing industry to an incredible machine…

  • #374 – Library of Congress Images – Industrial Landscape Panorama

    This is a join up of two 8×10 glass negatives so as you can imagine the digital file is huge! Panoramas are (relatively) easy to produce digitally, especially when you have the right tripod head, a fast computer and the right software, but taking one using a large format camera and making darkroom prints must…

  • #373 – Library of congress images – Bingham copper mine

      Bingham Copper Mine, Utah. Carr Fork Canyon as seen from ‘G’ bridge. In the background can be seen a train with waste or over-burden material on its way to the dump.       Bingham Canyon, Utah. Ore train at a mine of the Utah Copper Company. Until recently Bingham Copper Mine was the largest open…

  • #372 – Library of Congress Images – Virginia coal trains

    Boy this was hard work! The negatives were as rough as the environment they portray and must have been developed in gravy and moonshine. Most of the Library of Congress scans that you may have seen in earlier posts have required a few minutes work in Lightroom to give them some contrast and a bit…

  • #371 – Library of Congress Images – Allied Railways (and British Engines) in Iran

    An American locomotive with an American soldier crew hauling freight to Russia somewhere in Iran. I was quite surprised to see world war 2 photographs of the Persian Corridor in the Library of Congress. This was the supply chain set up through Iran by the allies to supply Russia by road and rail. The motive…

  • #370 – Union of South Africa on the East Lancs Railway 2

      Of course, it’s not all rural locations, but the urban locations around Bury aren’t really accessible. Even those around the railway station are only accessible on occasions like this, but it did allow for some variety as I do like to capture the people side of the railways where I can.  Finally, some alternative…

  • #369 – Union of South Africa on the East Lancs Railway

    If I could draw an automotive comparison to the sound of a streamlined A4 steam loco it would be to a flat 6 Porsche engine – a taut, highly tuned mechanical beat with the underlying threat of huge power. I’m not well up on the different noises of steam locomotives, but hearing the Union of…

  • #368 – Library of Congress Images – a trip on the Santa Fe in Black & White

    People talk about how in the digital age, there is a lot of ‘machine gunning’ of scenes with dozens of photographs taken, and not all with a great deal of care and attention. In looking through the photographs of the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe railway it seems that the practice wasn’t unheard of in…

  • Upcoming talk – Hebden Bridge, Wednesday 8th October 2014

    My next talk will be this Wednesday for Hebden Bridge Camera Club. It will be held in the Masonic Hall in Hangingroyd Lane (I’ve been assured that there are no funny handshakes needed), postcode HX77DD. This will be my Mechanical Landscapes talk, and if you’ve seen my website and blog, you’ll know what to expect…

  • #367 – Library of Congress Images – Santa Fe in Black & White

    Going up? Or down? Wheel shop. Not sure what the significance of the white painted ones are – dummy ones for works use only? Or maybe ones that are waiting for machining / new tyres? This almost has a production line-like feel to it. The workshop is clearly quite large and by british standards quite modern. Interesting to…

  • #366 – Library of Congress Images – Santa Fe in colour

                                          A few more images of the Chicago and North Western railway to complement those I blogged recently. In some respects, the outside environment probably suits the film better (Kodak Safety Film again), as by modern standards it…

  • #365 – Library of Congress Images – Chicago Railway Yard

    http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/owi2001045480/PP/resource/   http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/fsa1992001024/PP/ http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/fsa1992001028/PP/ http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/owi2001045487/PP/resource/ http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/owi2001045474/PP/resource/ http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/owi2001046046/PP/resource/ Having explored inside the railway works, Jack Delano continued his documentation of the Chicago and North Western outside in the switching (shunting) yards. One tends to forget the enormous size of American steam locos until you see them with people next to them, and those depicted in these…

  • #364 – Library of Congress Images – Chicago Railway Workshops in Black & White

      http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/owi2001010167/PP/ Following on from the last post of the colour photographs of the Chicago and North Westerns workshops, this series are in a more familiar black and white. I say familiar due to the abundance of shed photographs taken in the 50’s and 60’s by British enthusiasts. However, these are different inasmuch as they…

  • Brymbo Steelworks Heritage Open Day

    All that remains – the empty space in the background is where the main works used to be. Brymbo Heritage Group have contacted me to let me know that they will be open on the upcoming Heritage Open Day on 27th September 2014. It starts at 1030 from the Brymbo and Tan-y-Fron enterprise centre, Blast road,…

  • #363 – Library of Congress Images – Chicago Railway Workshops in Colour

      http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/fsa1992000703/PP/               http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/fsa1992000725/PP/     http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/fsa1992000693/PP/                                 http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/fsa1992000724/PP/                           http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/fsa1992000693/PP/ http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/fsa1992000647/PP/ In my nightschool studies of the history of photography, we…

  • #362 – Library of Congress Images – USS Maryland in dry dock

    I mentioned in the first post in this series about the quality of the glass plate negatives in the Library of Congress archive.  I love looking at these images at 100%, it’s not so much pixel peeping as seeing what is in the image as they are so big. They are scans from 8×10 negatives…

  • #361 – Library of Congress Images – Launch of Battleship Georgia at Bath, Maine.

      http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/det1994015360/PP/ I recently discovered the Library of Congress online photo archive, an amazing archive of photographs depicting many aspects of American life up to the 1950’s. Online are thousands of scanned photographs, many of high quality glass negatives. The resolution on these will blow you away, and the high resolution scans are available to…

  • Facebook Event for Mechanical Landscapes

    https://www.facebook.com/events/635693669871777/ Diane at Ebb and Flo Bookshop has kindly created a Facebook event for my little exhibition. It’s an ongoing event rather than a one off thing, so the ‘join’ aspect is rendered a tad superfluous, but if you are a Facebook user, feel free to join or share or whatever to help spread the…

  • #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…

  • #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…

  • #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…