We found a hole 'int ground

iangreenhalgh1 · Expire: 2014-01-07

I met up with David Lloyd (forum member lloydy) and his lovely wife today for a swap of photographic ephemera and a nice drive around South Cumbria stopping off to play with cameras at a few interesting places. On the way back down from Coniston Old Man we spied this hole in the rock, it's small, no more than 1.5m diameter, dead level and from the echo seems to go back a very long way. I guess it's either a copper or lead mine. I used my NEX-3 with Tokina RMC 3.5/17 on my Velbon tripod.

My colleague Mr Lloyd wielding his new Pentax:

Light levels under the trees were abysmal, but stick the NEX on a tripod, stop the Tokina down to f11, stick it on infinity and rest assured everything will be sharp. This strange building was about 30 feet from the hole, it is built alongside the small stream that flows in front of the hole, but this pit isn't a wheel race, so it wasn't a mill of any kind, so no idea what the purpose of this pit was.

I decided to employ HDR to overcome the crappy light, these were all 5-7 exposures then I converted the RAW files into TIFFs, combined them into HDR TIFFs in Photomatix using the xtra preset then took them back into Photoshop to tweak the brightness, contrast and saturation, applied sharpening using Nik Sharpener plugin with the Structure setting turned up to 20%. I tried to keep them realistic.

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This strange wooden hut stood about 100 feet from the hole, at first glace it looks like a chicken hut or storage hut, but on closer examination it had rather ornate wooden carved pieces around the roof and the two low windows either side of the door look like hatches you would serve tea and cakes from, so we suspected this may have been a Victorian refreshment facility for those taking the very steep but very scenic walk up Coniston Old Man. Interestingly the guttering, rather than being the usual cast iron were carved from wood, suggesting this is a pretty old hut. This area is covered in iron ore deposits and had a lot of small iron forges so maybe this hut predates the industrial revolution? Or maybe the builder was a skilled wood carver and it was cheaper than buying cast iron hardware? I couldn't get far enough back from the hut to fit it all in, even with the Tokina 17mm, so this image is made up from three portrait orientation pictures stitched.

Attila · Expire: 2025-11-18

Beautiful pictures, I am great fond of your HDR pictures. Nice to see David as well Smile

iangreenhalgh1 · Expire: 2014-01-07

Thankyou. It's been many months since I did any HDR work. I did a lot of it, many large stitches, and I got bored of it, especially the lengthy hours of post processing. It felt nice today to revisit it, and it is always a good way of obtaining pleasant imagery in the direst weather conditions. David's wife stayed in the tuck to do some knitting as it was freezing cold. Then again, you don't expect sunbathing weather half way up a mountain in Cumbria in February! Wink

visualopsins · Expire: 2025-04-11

Slate mine?

David · Expire: 2013-01-25

Those are really spectacular. How did you resist the temptation to explore the caves?

iangreenhalgh1 · Expire: 2014-01-07

I think slate is only quarried, rather than mined.

It wasn't tempting to go inside, neither of us had a torch and it could well be pretty dangerous.