#244 – Belgrave Mills

I’ve had an IPad for a while and find it to be a monumental distraction – mine’s stuffed full of music, photos, games, books and various other apps. It’s ease of use and quick start up make our netbook feel like a Commodore 64.

One thing I hadn’t really tried out until recently were the photo editing apps. I knew there was a huge range of apps available for the IPhone and while I like the idea of being able to take a photo, edit it and upload it all on one small tool, that small size is limiting, and the phones are expensive  (and until recently, the IPhone cameras weren’t as good as my Nokia’s is, and possibly still aren’t).

However, I’ve downloaded a few apps and I’ve been tinkering with a few pictures. the results aren’t bad, given their price of less than a fiver (bear in mind that photoshop costs about £500, and Elements is about £70).  These apps have a decent range of functionality for their price, especially when used together.

The beauty of the package though is the portability. It’s possible to download images off the camera onto the Ipad, process them and then upload or display them quickly.  I know that this has been possible to do on a laptop for years, but the IPad takes it to a completely different level.

Ironically, the above image was taken back in 2005 using a film camera and the IPad hadn’t even been thought about! I don’t normally go for this kind of effect in post-processing, it was more of a what-if exercise to see what I could do.

# 243 – Failed Heritage – Dunaskin Brickworks

I’m a regular visitor to Ayrshire on the west coast of Scotland, and ever since my first visit, I’ve been intrigued by its industrial past. The cross country road from the M8 to Kilmarnock, Ayr, etc crosses a bleak, moorland landscape, pockmarked by past and current mining activities. Today, it’s exclusively opencast, but until the 1980′s there were many deep mines, and the pot-holed road, worn out by the daily onslaught of artics full of coal, winds its way through the grim former mining towns and villages that no longer serve the pits they were built for.

The Ayrshire coalfield is one that has been mined for hundreds of years, and along with coal, iron ore was also mined until the 1930′s. It was these two minerals that  form the background to this unique site. Built as Dalmellington Ironworks in 1847, it worked until 1921, after which it became a brickworks, complete with Hoffman Kiln. Post war, the site was inherited by the NCB thanks to its owners being the local colliery owners, and brickmaking finally ceased sometime between 1976 and 1988, depending on which source you go off!

Like an irrepressible Phoenix, the works rose again from the ashes in the late 1990′s as the Dunaskin Heritage Centre, only to be closed in 2005, although part of the site is now used by the Ayrshire Railway Preservation Group.

It was against this backdrop that, faced with the prospect of an afternoon sitting in a Kilmarnock living room listening to my wife’s 6 month old nephew crying the house down, I excused myself for a couple of hours and made the short drive to the Doon Valley.

The Railway Group was on site, but not open to the public, so noting their presence and the palisade fence round the front of the site, in the best tradition of urbex, I went round the back. On the higher ground overlooking the works, lay a large level clearing, which was once home to a network of railway sidings, and a bit of mooching off the beaten track led me to the highest part of the site, the pug mill.

The Pug Mill from above – looks like more than 4 years of decay to me

Inside the Pug Mill

Looking down over the conveyor to the main works, and the landscape beyond

In the four years since closure, this place had fallen into abject decay (or maybe had been untouched since the works shut?) but looked an intriguing installation nonetheless. Amongst the fallen rafters and smashed up slate roof were two great iron wheels for crushing material. which was fed by conveyor to the buildings below. I couldn’t figure out how to get to them other than scaling down a 20 ft wall. So I continued to mooch in the direction of the works along the network of footpaths that ran across the hillside, until suddenly, I was standing next to brick buildings. Clearly the fencing budget was only sufficient to enclose one side of the site, so I just wandered in, albeit mindful that the railway group was active about 3o feet away.

Looking across to the Railway Preservation Groups part of the site

The first thing of interest was a large steam engine (a Howden compound enclosed high speed steam engine according to a correspondent to my website). It appeared to have been dragged out of the adjacent building and left on some railway sleepers, which seemed to be collapsing under the weight, leaving the engine at a somewhat jaunty angle.

You can’t really tell from the above picture, but the one below shows the somewhat precarious position of this engine.

A breize block wall into the building had been smashed down so a quick venture into the darkness revealed some kind of workshop facility, with a number of machine tools rotting away in the darkness. Upstairs was a large empty space. This building was originally a power station that was built in 1917 to supply electricity to the Royal Flying Corps’ Aerial Gunnery School at Loch Doon which was never completed, it remained in operation until 1956 and supplied electricity to the works.

A couple of milling machines rotting away in the basement. Beyond repair by now I’d have thought.

With not much else to see, I ventured outside for a walkabout and came across the Hoffman Kiln. This was similar to the one at Langcliffe albeit not as big.

A wrong turning took me down a dead end where I stumbled across some abandoned batteries. Naughty, I’m quite sure this kind of thing shouldn’t be left outside to just rot away into the ground?

Inside the buildings – not that much of interest to the untrained eye, although this conveyor system was neat.

I’m told that these pillars are part of the original blowing engine from the sites original use as an ironworks. I’m not entirely sure of their function in that regard, but I love the Victorian approach to embellishing functional things that are rarely seen.

# 242 – Loch Long Torpedo Testing Station

For a good period of my career, I worked in a compact disc manufacturing plant. Thanks to continuous investment, the factory was arguably a world class facility with excellent yields, excellent quality and the capacity and expertise to be highly responsive to customer demands. Despite all this, it closed in 2009. CD’s were rapidly becoming an obsolete technology, with consumers and record labels turning to the massively more convenient downloads.

That’s the thing with technology, it’s constantly evolving. Such was the fate of the Arrochar Torpedo Testing Range. Opened in 1912, it was ideally situated close to the Clyde naval bases and the Admiralty torpedo factories at Greenock and later Alexandria.

By the time it closed in 1986 (ironically, around the time the first CD’s were being pressed at my former employers), torpedo technology had moved on and were capable of operating in greater depths than afforded by Loch Long, and were not restricted to going in straight lines. In short, the geography of the area played against it.

Although I visit Scotland regularly, I didn’t get the chance to visit this place until 2009, two years after demolition had started (and then stopped). We were staying further down the Loch in one of those Victorian pseudo-castles so beloved of Victorian industrialists and financiers who had pretensions of being a country gent. Excusing myself for a couple of hours, I hot-footed it down to the top of Loch Long, although this took twice as long as envisaged due to the fact that Loch Long is a) long – hence the name, and b) surrounded by narrow, badly maintained, and windy roads.

Still it was an uncharacteristically sunny day, and by Scottish standards, quite warm. Set against the backdrop of the green Arrochar hills and still waters of the Loch, this was without doubt the most idyllic explore I’ve ever done. Sure there have been other rural explores, but the barren, windswept moorland around Grove Rake was not comparable to this.

Although the site was well fenced off, as you would expect of a former military installation, a wander round the beach and under the pier enabled me to get on site easily, once I’d figured out where the gaps in the fence were. As always,if at first you don’t succeed, go round the back for a look.

The place had been partially, actually, mostly demolished. It looked like the demolition contractors had stopped for the night, and then just lost interest and took their machines home. The control room at the end of the pier had been torched a year or so before, and while probably accessible if I’d been minded to, the idea of picking my way through a fire damaged building twenty or so feet above water was not that appealing.

Reading up on the excellent online history of the place here, helped give some context to the remaining features. All in all an interesting way to pass a spare hour or so.

Slipway up to the sheds. The rails would indicate that whatever was being pulled up (or down) would have been on a cradle, and as the gauge is quite wide, I’m guessing it was for a boat.

Looking south down the Loch. The burnt out remains of the control room can be seen at the end of the pier.

This remains one of  my favourite urbex photos.

Not so much a narrow gauge railway as a method of moving torpedoes round the place on their cradles.

A half arsed job of demolition.

Winch for what I’m guessing was the boathouse.

View of the pier from the other side. Not sure why they left some of the buildings partially intact during demolition.

Looking throuigh the locked gates to the burnt out end of the pier.

The timbers of the pier were substantial and in good condition.

Opposite the site, were a number of old prefabricated houses, I think these were for visitors or admiralty personnel on secondment.

#241 – A (slight) change of direction?

Photography is a fairly solitary pursuit, so a recent photo charter I attended brought me into contact with a load of other photographers. I was intrigued to see the variety of equipment people were using. As well as a few high end pro level DSLR’s such as Nikon D700′s and Canon 5d Mk2′s, the majority were using (for lack of a better expression) entry level and mid range DSLR’s. However, there were a few people using film SLR’s, and two using medium format film camera’s. Now I also had a film camera and used it to take a dozen or so shots to finish off a film, but I wouldn’t want to shoot the entire day on film. Why not? Other than the obvious inability to instantly check my results, the poor and changing light made the ability to change the ISO a godsend. And yet, photographers made do with this for years, although the ability to change backs on some medium format cameras does give the ability to change ISO. And the lack of continuous shooting and limited number of exposures per roll demands more thought as to when to press the button, rather than just clatter away and select the best shot afterwards in post processing.

My Nikon F100 – looks like a D700, handles like a D700, isn’t a D700.

Although digital photography is here and won’t go away, there are not only people who haven’t and won’t move over from film, but also people who’ve used digital and either use both or have jacked in digital completely. Going onto film photography forums and flickr groups is a bit deceiving as you get the impression that there’s loads of people using film, when in reality, there isn’t, it’s just that they all go on the forums. OK, so I can’t prove that last statement, but it’s a phenomena you see in any minority community that thinks they are bigger than they actually are because they don’t see beyond the community.

All this pondering brought me round to thinking about using my own film cameras more. I’ve done a bit of medium format before, I even have a Mamiya 645 somewhere that yields nice results but I can’t get used to the lack of a meter and the upside down view in the waist level viewfinder. And although I run a few films through my Nikon F100 a year, it’s very much in support of my digital camera. So how about giving the digital a rest for a while and using more film? The downsides are the expense and the wait to get the film back. And there’s the argument that if you’re going to scan it anyway, you might as well just use digital. And yet, I always find myself thinking a bit more when using film – you’re paying for each shot you take, so might as well make them count. It’s just that digital is so convenient! But there is a question that’s nagging away in my head – am I using the awesome technology of my DSLR as a crutch to support me, or as an aid to improve my photography? There’s a subtle distinction to be drawn there.

With film, there’s something satisfying about getting a packet full of photographs and negatives that you haven’t seen before and seeing how well they came out that I sometimes miss. I think my challenge for myself this year is to shoot 15 rolls of film, just to see if this is a passing whimsy that I need to get out of my system, or something I need to get into more. While I think I’m competent enough a photographer to be able to take a half decent picture on any camera, it’ll be interesting to see how I get round the limitations of film and older camera technology.