Talking of delving into the archives, I’m pretty sure this is the oldest picture in my catalog that hasn’t already appeared here. I took this picture back in 1984 or 1985 during a fascinating Lanark Camera Club visit to the Ravenscraig steel mill in Motherwell, Scotland. Our vice president that year worked at Ravenscraig and managed to secure us permission to visit the blast furnace, smelting plant and rolling mill.
This bank of rollers was used to turn a 2 foot by 25 foot, glowing ingot into a ribbon of metal several hundred yards long and of a thickness suitable for cladding washing machines or fridges.
The plant closed in 1992 and the area has since been redeveloped.
You won’t find any EXIF data for this shot because it started as a black and white negative. I shot it on Ilford FP4 using a Praktica MTL-5 SLR, a totally manual but very cheap East German camera that was popular among students and others of limited means back in the 1980s. I definitely used a 50mm lens because that was the only one I owned at the time.