Category archives: mines

Mines #39

This blog has gone a bit off-topic recently with a distinct lack of Cold War items, this hasn’t gone unnoticed but I’m having such a blast with the underground lark I’m afraid I’m still showing the love for the underground 🙂

I wish I could show the whole set of these shots as they would truly blow your mind but sadly it would also compromise things so for the top drawer stuff just use your imagination…

Water is a big deal here and boats make sense for much of it, there’s also plenty of Death From Above action going on to keep you on your toes.

Plant Room
Do Not Panic
Stops
Props
Wetlands
Death From Above
This is where it started to get a little damp, when I say damp this next shot was taken in thigh deep water and waders weren’t on the kit list for today.
Wet Legs
The intention was to hit this back wall which will happen next time in the boat. Today’s attempt saw me up to my waist in freezing water for this next shot before I realised I had nearly killed my phone & wallet and if I fell over there was ££££ of camera gear going to die too…..check the ceiling height compared to previous shots, It’s all roughly the same in here.
Stay tuned to this channel for more water filled antics…

Mines #38

Royal Weddings don’t really do it for me so being as far away as possible from a TV on Friday was probably a good thing. The solution was five hours underground and getting to the farthest accessible point in an abandoned mine, what we didn’t expect was to be tripping over artifacts from the 1930’s…

Usual rules apply…No names, no locations, just pictures…

Junction to knowhere
End of the line…1931
Different junction but closed in 1929
1930’s smokes…Ogden’s Guinea Gold 
1930’s Choco Biscuits – Mackintosh’s Creamy Rolls

Mines #35

Plan A was wet and we really needed a boat, nobody had the balls to see how deep it was so I waded on in anyway just to find out. It was thigh deep, cold and I wasn’t wearing waders, seeing as I was now wet I pushed on for a while to see if things dried up….they didn’t.

We aborted and switched locations to Roof Fall City and I tried out a new toy recommended to me by a well known drainer (thanks for the tip in the unlikely event you are reading this…), a portable LED array that uses 64 LED’s on full power or 36 LED’s on reduced power, it has a ‘daylight’ colour temperature of 5,500K and outputs 480 lumens. I got it wrong really and placed it too near the shots so the backlit shots are a bit overcooked, next time I’ll try diffusing it or placing it further away…

Usual rules apply…No names, no locations, just pictures of somewhere. Don’t ask for locations because I won’t tell you, just enjoy the shots.

 
Welcome to Roof Fall City
Wide Gallery
Reflections
 Big Grips

More Big Grips

Mines #34

No names, no locations, just pictures of somewhere. Don’t ask for locations because I won’t tell you, just enjoy the shots.

Sadly I have photographic proof that items are being stolen/damaged from these places, I suspect by idiot ‘tourists’ who show up, know nothing about the location, come poorly equipped, bum to their mates they have ‘done’ the whole place then take a ‘souvenir’ on the way out…

(In case you are curious the Tesco bag was full of lazy peoples rubbish I was collecting to take out)

Mines #27

Shot at the back end of last year on the DMC-TZ6 and also in rushed circumstances so I’m not overly happy with many of these, will go back and re-shoot these with the 40D at some point in the future (and make a much better job!!)

Small roof collapse
Ventilation Room
Ventilation Room
Bang

Mine Rescue

I have a habit of rescuing wildlife from underground locations it seems, this weekend was no different when I extracted this Ditch Parrot (Pheasant) from inside a mine…..he stood blinking for a few moments when I plunged him back into daylight, turned round and winked at me and was gone…
(the last bit of course was a lie….)
Pheasant Ditch Parrott

Mines #31

Not disclosing actual mine names as I believe these are sensitive locations and need preserving, also there are clear and present dangers to the casual observer, not least is the air quality in some of these mines. Human’s start going very twitchy at oxygen levels of 17% and 15% can kill you. If you wander into a heading with oxygen levels of 13% or less it is quite feasible the effect would be so rapid that you wouldn’t be able to help yourself and then its lights out….permanently. If this happens it would be sad for your family and would totally fuck things up access wise for everybody else.

I’ve been caving since the early 1990’s so being underground is nothing new. Low oxygen levels can kill you if you are not prepared…be warned.

Health & Safety lesson over, the following pictures were me messing around with long exposures and trying to perfect the art of Light Painting. Some obvious issues were encountered and lessons learned, one of which is that Xenon/Halogen light is quite bad for light painting but LED light used carefully is good, the other is that my current camera, a Panasonic Lumix DMC-TZ6 only has limited settings for long exposure, namely 15, 30 or 60 seconds. These pictures are either 15 or 30 seconds, ideally I would like the option of less than 15 seconds but ultimately that means buying a DSLR at some point.

Since this visit I have invested in another torch which should help with light painting, a LED Lenser P7 which has a one handed focusing mechanism so you can switch from spot to flood. Every underground location is different though and in many places the P7 would overcook the photos but in others it would work a treat.

All of these photo’s were lit with a combination of Petzl MYO XP (85 lumens) with diffuser, Underwater Kinetics Mini Q40 (50 lumens) and a Surefire Executive Defender (60 lumens)

Dead end in a heading, unusual in that the rails should have been removed when the mine closed!