Urban Exploration in West Yorkshire

Urban exploration (often shortened as UE, urbex and sometimes known as roof-and-tunnel hacking) is the exploration of manmade structures, usually abandoned ruins or hidden components of the manmade environment. Photography and historical interest/documentation are heavily featured in the hobby and it sometimes involves trespassing onto private property.

Source - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urban_exploration

After finding myself with a free day today, myself and Hive account@fastchrisuk headed up to an abandonded waterworks in West Yorkshire this morning. Its weird for us to be out in the daylight. I'm not saying we're vampires, but like vampires, we do favour the night and darkness for lightpainting. But this was a reccie for me and a chance to do some daylight lightpainting. Unlike Chris this was my first visit, but it was a beautiful morning for a drive; the sun was out, when it made it through the fog, and the temperature was cold, so it was frosty, which is one of my favourite seasons.

I arrived first and found myself at a gate with a big padlock on! After Chris joined me we clambered over the fence and we made the short walk to the abandoned waterworks.

The first point of shooting was in the upper area. I'm not sure of its technical name or what it was originally, but shot with my fisheye it created some great silhouettes..

I really liked the simplicity of the following shot too with the sun poking through the fog at the silhouettes of the trees in front. It had a certain Post Apocalype bleakness to it that really lent itself to the abandoned feel..

Going back to the start of the day, below is the gateway with the lock. I couldn't help myself though while waiting for Chris to arrive as the sun through the mist was beautiful..

Chris couldn't help himself! So I joined suit and we did a lightpainting shot in a long camera in the works itself. Chris shot first with me beingthe silhouette, and then I shot but my viewpoint was from where I was standing as the model originally..

This was a basic backlit silhouette shot on my 8mm fisheye. The trick was getting the backlit gel and the natural light on the same shot. I believe my settings were f5.6, 1.3 of a second and ISO 100, or maybe 200. I liked the silhouette too as I was turning around so got my profile.

For a bit of variety we also used a cool blue gel which lent itself to the coldness of the day!

While Chris sent a text message, I noticed his camera was left on the stairs and it was perfectly lined up for a shot. I thought of offering to press the trigger but instead thought of taking a behind the scenes shot of the image on the camera with the actual image in the background..

Chris liked this idea so took a shot of the shot while I took a shot of him taking his shot of the shot!

I liked the natural framing too of the windows with the dereliction inside and the frosty morning scene outside..

I haven't posted many shots of the interior. I took a lot of these with my camera phone too for the scale and lighting and ease of use. Below is one of my favourite shots of these as I really liked the blue of the grafitti with the green of the weathered wood.

As a photographer I try to mix what I do in my shots, I've done still life, some macro work, lightpainting and I enjoy a good model shoot. If you'd like to check out any of my other work I'm on Facebook, or you can find me on Instagram under neilru75

Thanks very much for looking
Kind Regards, Neil