Hale Station Cheshire
Category: Night
A few semi-experimental pictures from a night on Hale station. This is a very special location for me, and a place that featured prominently in my childhood. I spent many hours here watching trains, generally relaxing, or occasionally taking a ride to Chester or Llandudno and for many in Hale and Altrincham it was the holiday line. it was also a favourite retreat in my school lunchtimes.
The station is a listed building and quite deservedly so. The beautiful canopies date back to the era of the Cheshire Lines Committee, the organisation responsible for building and operating the Mid Cheshire line in its earliest days. Hale station building, or more specifically the canopies, and the now sadly out of use signal box, are very important townscape features and a focal point in the large suburban village of Hale, much of which was developed around the railway and rapidly became a well-healed retreat for commuting Manchester cotton tots. Though in my life-time the setting has changed a lot!
The route was always very busy with a variety of freight mostly heading to and from the industrial heartlands of west Cheshire, Liverpool and Warrington which included the iconic Tunstead to Northwich stone trains. The line is continuing to see a growth in both freight and passenger traffic today with a dramatic increase in night freight traffic due to a lack of day time capacity – some of this traffic is literally travelling from one end of the country to the other. The mid Cheshire is quite a well connected line and can be used as a relief route for anything heading for any part of the network in the south including London, Wales and the West country but is still designated as a secondary route – not a main line.
- Aperture: ƒ/5.6
- Focal length: 19mm
- ISO: 100
- Shutter speed: 2s
Saddleworth Moor Fire
Category: Night
Smoke seen billowing from the huge wild fires on Saddleworth Moor. I noticed this whilst on my customary evening cycle ride along the Middlewood Way. The picture was taken close to Adlington and smoke from the fire appeared to create a huge dense blanket of grey that stretched all the way down to Warrington and beyond.
- Aperture: ƒ/16
- Camera: NIKON D200
- Focal length: 50mm
- ISO: 100
- Shutter speed: 1/250s
Carpet Factory – Macclesfield
Category: Night
The old and rather forlorn looking carpet factory in Macclesfield, I know very little about the history of this plant but I believe they used to manufacture some of the products for the famous Arighi Bianchi store and the factory may even have been owned by them? It was a veritable hive of activity until a devastating fire ravaged much of the plant in the early 2000s and now the whole site is being cleared for development following years of idle dereliction. I ride past this on my nighttime commutes to and from a job in town and was often taken by how the building appeared in the spill of sodium light from the adjacent supermarket car park. This was obviously a long exposure tripod shot however, the exposure was not quite as long as I would have liked – mainly because rain stopped play, so to speak – but it has recovered reasonably well and I do like some of the visual and rendering anomalies in the image.
- Aperture: ƒ/4.5
- Focal length: 13mm
- ISO: 100
- Shutter speed: 48s
Manchester Night Prowl
Category: Night
A recent nocturnal mini photo adventure in Manchester. It provided some interesting contrast to my normal environment which is almost completely devoid of artificial light at night – which of course can be a great blessing in its own way. Very few areas within the city are now lit by traditional or old fashioned discharge lamps. The moody, nocturnal, urban gloom of (low pressure) sodium lighting has completely disappeared from the city and is now mostly replaced by crisp metal halide or LED light which can create some extremely interesting effects in photography, not least because it seems to produce very hard well focused shadow and contrast. Still, I was on a mission to try to photography some of those old red brick Mancunian back streets around Piccadilly lit in that peculiar ineffectual yellow sodium light that was so 1960s noir-ish — but couldn’t find any, I had a mad idea to try to create some images with a Bill Brandt quality of contrast and a similar documentary style but in colour.
- Aperture: ƒ/8
- Focal length: 50mm
- ISO: 100
- Shutter speed: 2s
High Peak – Nocturne
Category: Night
Available light photography at Furness Vale, Derbyshire. Things seen whilst on a nighttime bike ride into the High Peak. Taking advantage of the fantastic light gathering capability of my Nikon 50mm f1.4 lens which is always a joy to work with in low light or available light situations, it is also Chrystal sharp!
- Aperture: ƒ/1.4
- Camera: NIKON D200
- Focal length: 50mm
- ISO: 100
- Shutter speed: 8s
Last Train to London
Category: Night
An experiment that I have wanted to try for some time. A late night train (pendolino) passing through the Bollin Valley near Prestbury, Cheshire. I like the abstract effect in this image, the way it has come down to an exercise in dark tonality with the only significant luminosity being that of the train window streak and the signal light. I also like the way that this image is reminiscent (in a way) of the dramatic drawn illustrations in some of my classic childhood books about railways, such as the heroic activities of the night-mail footplate crew charging past signals in the dark.
- Aperture: ƒ/8
- Camera: NIKON D80
- Focal length: 20mm
- ISO: 100
- Shutter speed: 134s
