Desolate Landscape

Last weekend my friends and I went on a short hike near a small town called Trefil, not far from Ebbw Vale. The weather was not as good as the day before, see below for evidence, as it was horrendously overcast. It even threatened to rain a few times, which is not a nice feeling when you have an expensive digital camera in you hands! Luckily it decided in the end that rain was a bad Idea and it did brighten up a bit.
The walk itself was very interesting; the landscape is completely different to my local mountains, completely desolate in places, lots of large rocks about the place and seems to be littered with small piles of rocks and massive craters. We’re not sure weather these craters we created naturally, from bombing during WWII, collapsing mine shafts or from blasting at the local quarry. Either way they were very interesting and absolutely huge as you can see from the picture below, I asked my brother and Adam to scramble down into the bottom of this one to give the shot a nice reference point.




We also chanced upon the chartist caves, which were used by the Chartists from Tredegar, a local town, had made and stored weapons before they marched on Newport. The caves themselves were very interesting and pretty deep, I tried to take a few long exposures inside the caves themselves but the didn’t come out very well due to the high dynamic range that was present from the sunlight hitting the outside to the darkness of the recesses.




We also had a chance meeting with some wild horses, not something I expected to see on top of a mountain. We walked passed them as they were grazing but a little later while photographing a cairn the two horses started to run about all over the place, I managed to get a few shots, the one below was the best of the bunch.




Here is a link to the rest of the shots on my website.

Blaenavon Ironworks

I finally managed to visit Blaenavon Ironworks last Friday to see if I could get any nice shots of the lift, by far the largest remaining structure on the site; it must be around 150 feet tall. I was blessed with extremely good weather for the whole time that I was there, which was lucky since it has been all over the place lately. I took shots with both my Mamiya and my D70 which gave a nice contrast to the shots I’ve ended up with; I shot Ilford FP4+ in the Mamiya and kept all the digital shots in colour. Here are a few of my favourites from the shoot:



The ironworks at Blaenavon lie in the north-eastern corner of the South Wales coalfield and were largely responsible for the development of both the iron and coal industry in this part of Wales. Blaenavon Ironworks today represent one of the most important monuments to have survived from the early part of the industrial revolution.

Here is the link to the full gallery on my website.

Cardiff in B&W

Last Thursday I had a half day in work so I took the chance to get some photos on the Welsh capital on film, my choice of ammunition: Ilford HP5+, the camera; a second-hand Olympus OM2 that I had picked up from Jessops earlier in the day. I only had 1 roll of film so 36 exposures was my limit, I was quite surprised since this seemed about right; I didn’t find myself cursing the fact that I only bought 1 roll.



I centred my efforts on the area around the university buildings and some of the civic buildings in Cardiff since the last time I was shooting in Cardiff we ended up shooting more around the shopping centre areas.



I got home and developed the film as soon as I could, it’s a lot easier to get 35mm onto a developing spiral than 120 film since you can start the reel off in daylight plus the film itself is a lot tougher than the medium format stuff.



Here is a link to the full gallery on my website.