Revisiting … Dean Clough

The Dean Clough mill complex in Halifax is a favourite haunt of mine photographically and has been for a long while now. My wife works in one of the former mills and when she works late I pick her up in the car, usually arriving far too early and having to wait for her to finish. Last night I took the Fuji X100T with a vague idea of wandering around whilst I waited to see what caught my eye (sound familiar?)

The X100T was the perfect choice as it is small, light and as I’m quickly realising ideally suited for such meanderings. Indeed, it has quickly become my street-camera of choice and the perfect go-anywhere companion.

Fear not, this is not a blog full of windows! The diptych above features adjacent windows in another converted mill and was shot as a single frame. However the gap between them was about eight feet and capturing them in that single photograph left a huge gap between the two that I felt added nothing to the narrative. If anything the contrast between the two was lessened by the “blank” space. So after processing them as a single picture I simply cropped out the space between leaving a narrow white border to provide a clue as to what I had done.

One of the joys of digital photography is the ability to produce variations on a theme from a single file. In the set above the original is bottom left, a straight forward shot of the mill reflected in a large puddle. Being me I of course produced a mono variation, bottom right. But, inspired no doubt by yesterdays cafe shadows (see previous post), I then flipped the original to produce the main image above.

I appreciate that none of these would win a camera club competition but that is not the point of the series, indeed of the ongoing project that is my documentation of Dean Clough. I do make photographs specifically for my club competitions and monthly folios but they are separate from my ongoing and rather more personal projects such as Dean Clough. I enjoy wandering around the complex and photographing whatever catches my eye. If others like the results that is a very pleasing bonus but it’s not the purpose of the exercise.

I must be getting to the point where I have enough images from Dean Clough for a book!