Tag: Industrial Landscape
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#321 – The Last Days Of Bamber Bridge (New) Mill – 5
Once I’d got the main photos, I tried a few more experimental ones. I like to try to get different perspectives in an attempt to tell a bigger story, and the flexibility of a 14x zoom enabled me to do this easily. These are variations of one I took at Fernhurst Mill a few years back,…
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#320 – The Last Days Of Bamber Bridge (New) Mill – 4
The view from the north (end) The once monolithic landmark is reduced to a much more compact form. The demolition has been a methodical dismantling, and a relatively neat affair (or at least as neat as deconstructing thousands of tonnes of brick, concrete and other dusty, dirty materials can ever be), and just one section…
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#319 – The Last Days Of Bamber Bridge (New) Mill – 3
The days of swinging a big iron ball are long gone, demolition these days is more like deconstruction. A long arm excavator with a powerful claw pulls the building apart, and then places all the material for recycling into big piles or straight into trucks. It does make for slow progress though, especially when there is…
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#318 – The Last Days of Bamber Bridge (New) Mill – 2
I grew up in a town full of red brick mills. They were all very similar to New Mill, being very large 4 or 5 storey mills, sometimes in large complexes of two, three, four or even five mills. As the industry shrunk dramatically from the early 60’s onwards, these giants and their chimnies started…
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#317 – The Last Days of Bamber Bridge (New) Mill – 1
New Mill was a massive local landmark, towering over the main street and neat terraced streets of Bamber Bridge. It could also be seen quite prominently from the M6, and was adjacent to the Blackburn – Preston railway line. You really had to try hard not to see it, as it was the tallest building…
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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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#265 – Book Review – The Industrial Landscape – Bernd and Hilla Becher
Zeche Concordia, Oberhausen (1967), Germany I’ve heard a lot about the industrial photography of Bernd and Hilla Becher over the years, but from the work that I’d seen, I just couldn’t get excited about it. OK, I’ll be the first to admit that this field isn’t exciting in the same way that, say, motorsport photography…
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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…
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#120 – Cupola Flowers!
Like all abandoned sites, nature has taken up where it left off before the site was developed.
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#115 – Pattern
Pattern found in the foundry. Note sure why, but casting patterns are often painted red (although you can’t see that in this photo). There were quite a few patterns left around the place, quite surprised they’d not gone on a bonfire when the place shut.
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#113 – 13
Huge bowl mounted on a railway wagon for transporting iron round the works. Sometimes photos work just as well in colour as they do in black and white, this is an example of that, as the rich brown texture of the image is such a dominant part of the composition. By converting to black and white,…
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#112 – Terex
This giant dumptruck had its engine removed before being dragged by a bulldozer up the hill to its current resting place. I can only imagine the strength of the guy who apparently sat in the cab and steered it while it was under tow as without an engine there’s be no power steering!
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#111 Bunker
Entrance to some kind of bunker at ROF Wrexham. This was once a huge site, but it was closed after WW2 and most of it has been cleared for the Wrexham Industrial Estate. A few buildings remain, but are often innaccesible due to the thick undergrowth that, especially in summer, prevent you getting anywhere near.
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#100 – Lead in lines
Railway lines are a great way to lead into a photo, although, you do normally need permission to be on them! This was taken at a charter on the Ribble Steam Railway in Preston, and I got down low, to take the shot. With an increasing number of DSLR’s having live view on them, using…
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#83 – Welcome To Oblivion 1
You think that barbed wire is going to keep me out…………?
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#79 – Vale Mills Re-Visit
I’d nothing to do, so I decided to head back over to the Keighley & Worth Valley Railway to check out some possible locations. After a brisk walk around Keighley, I headed back up to Oakworth to check out Vale Mills. This time I put on a 24mm prime to give a wider field of…
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#77 – Haworth Landscape
First shot of the day from my visit to the Keighley & Worth Valley Railway was from a road bridge that overlooks the sheds at Haworth. Although the railway have an excellent viewing area that overlooks the sheds, I tried here first and was rewarded with a view along the rainy valley (it was absolutely throwing…
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#76 – Vale Mills, Oakworth
War Department 2-8-0 storms out of Oakworth Station on the Keighley & Worth Valley Railway. I’d spotted this location when I was on the train earlier and drove down for a closer look. When I got there, I had a walk round to see if I could include the mill and the railway in the shot,…
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#74 – it’s grim up north
Vale Mill, Mytholmes. I think that this was a path from Oakworth village and I imagine that it was used by generations of mill workers going to and from the mill in the valley floor. I took this when I was unsuccessfully trying to figure out a composition where I could include the mill and the…
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#64 – Guesswork / bulb mode
Sometimes, you run out of pre-set exposure times on your camera and you have to resort to the ‘guess’ mode, AKA Bulb. This particular scene was tricky as the big floodlight in the background kept being turned on and off, which made exposure a pain. After several tests, I ended up thinking f*ck it, counted to…
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#61 – British Industry
I took this photo about 5 years ago on an old film camera, and developed the film myself. For some reason, it’s one that I keep coming back to and remains one of my favourite industrial images. The composition was almost forced upon me as I just poked the camera through a fence and hoped,…
Mechanical Landscapes 