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#575 – Haig Pit 2
Haig colliery sits on a cliff above the town and looks out to sea. While I couldn’t capture it relative to the town, I did manage to photograph this scene showing the coastline and the cliffs that fall steeply to the sea. This land between the cliff and colliery was previously home to the railway…
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#574 – Now Open – The Industrial Tourist Exhibition at Peak District Lead Mining Museum
My Industrial Tourist exhibition is now open at the Peak District Lead Mining Museum in Matlock Bath. This is my usual mix of mills, mines, steelworks and a dash of transport thrown in (although I’m beginning to think that I will remove those if I have another exhibition). Compared to the last showing of this…
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#573 – Haig Pit 1
Cumbria in the 21st century is a place we most associate with the Lake District. It’s rugged beauty brings millions of visitors every year, but as you head west through the county, you hit the little visited industrial coastline. There’s not that much there now except Sellafield and a few old industrial towns, but for…
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#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…
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#571 – My Next Exhibition – The Industrial Tourist at Peak District Lead Mining Museum, Matlock Bath
I’m delighted to announce my next exhibition will be at the marvelous Peak District Lead Mining Museum in Matlock Bath. It will open on Sunday 6th September 2020 and run until 12th October 2020. It will contain my usual eclectic mix of industrial landscapes and urban exploration from across the North – mills, mines, steelworks…
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#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…
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#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…
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#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…
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#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…
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#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…
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#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…
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#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…
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#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…
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#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…
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#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…
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#559 – Book review – The Last Years of Coal Mining in Yorkshire
In doing some online research for my blog articles I stumbled across a series of books by Steve Grudgings. Two of these cover the last days of the South Wales coalfield, and the other one was this one on Yorkshire. Regrettably, I never got round to photographing the few collieries that remained in Yorkshire until…
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Book recommendations
I also post occasional articles on my main website Mechanical Landscapes. And I do mean occasionally – this one I’m linking to is the first one in three years! This one is an evolving list of urbex and industrial landscape books that I recommend. I own them all and some I’ve had for many years…
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#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…
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#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…
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#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…
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