A few years ago I’d seen a photo on Flickr taken from a street in the Margam district, that depicted a blast furnace towering over the terraced housing. This was exactly the kind of scene which fascinates me and I resolved to make my own version of the photo. Unfortunately, I hadn’t realised that there…
Tag: Wales
#636 – South Wales Road Trip Part 4 – Penallta
The aerial photograph from 1930 of the site shows what I think is a coal washery along with extensive railway sidings to the east of the site. These are long gone and housing has recently been built on the site, it as this is at a lower elevation than the colliery, the headframe on the…
#635 – South Wales Road Trip Part 3 – Penallta
I’d seen a few photographs online of the upcast headgear, viewed through the downcast headgear structure. My plan was to try and hold my camera over the fence and photograph this through the legs to see if I could get a usable photograph for the typology but I wasn’t expecting much. As I ended up…
#634 – South Wales Road Trip Part 2 – Penallta
Pennalta Colliery was my first planned port of call on my South Wales road trip. My plan was primarily to get a photo for my headgear typology and then get some from the adjacent housing estate that has recently been built on part of the site. I’d done some research on the internet to get…
#633 – South Wales Road Trip Part 1 – Hafodyrynys
This bizarre contrivance is a slime thickener, which was part of a coal washery, the only remaining part of the former Hafodyrynys colliery. A colliery had been in operation at Hafodyrynys in the 1870’s, and another opened in 1914 which operated until the 1950’s. The old shafts were closed and three drifts were sunk, with…
#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…
#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…
#546 – Bernd and Hilla Becher’s Industrial Visions at The National Museum, Cardiff
I try to go to a few photographic exhibitions a year, normally in the North of England. But when I heard that The National Museum in Cardiff were exhibiting work by Bernd and Hilla Becher, I started to make plans for a trip as their work is rarely exhibited in the U.K. As an added…
#542 – Review of the decade – 2011
2011 was my first full year of fatherhood and the sleepless nights coincided with a lot of business travel. Consequently photography fell down my list of priorities as my camera was mainly aimed at my daughter. Nonetheless I managed to fit a couple of explores in, and got a few snaps of the PS Ryde…
Mechanical Landscapes 