After August’s first highly successful and enjoyable light painting evening at Bradmill. Another was scheduled for October. In Yarraville, the old Bradmill Factory has been sold to a Chinese developer for $160m. It’s expected to be pulled down and redeveloped into a mini-city, but it’s a photographers mecca until then. And the Bradmill Factory and Lightpainting go hand in hand.

Bradmill

The place is massive.. and I do mean massive—all 24 hectares of it. Opening in 1927 and producing fabrics in heavy-duty cotton and canvas products it was abandoned in 2007 when manufacturing moved overseas. The main buildings are huge, open floor areas, pocked with small and alarmingly deep holes. Every wall is covered with graffiti and every window is broken. Broken glass, empty bottles, burnt mattresses, wrecked and burnt-out cars lie discarded. Not a single intact external or internal door exists. Access is beyond easy. Park the vehicle and walk in.

Exploring the furnace

The light painting was starting at dark, but I wanted to get another go at the site in daylight and my first stop was the old furnace. We crawled in through the small opening and looked straight up the chimney. Adorning the walls inside was a white walker scene. everyone’s a GOT fan 🙂

Leaving the furnace we headed to the little house..apparently, coal was unloaded here, and gone up the conveyor into the main building the fire the boilers. After deciding the conveyor was sturdy enough and seeing another two photographers and two models head up there as well, we entered the little house and walked up the conveyor. It’s not too bad a hike up there… I’m not young, and I made it though the heart was pumping by the time I got to the top 😉

The Boiler Room

At the top, we found a mesh walkway with a tantalising glimpse of stairs the floors below. This top room had machinery and rollers but we could see better machinery downstairs so we headed back down the conveyor again and found an opening on ground level. Once inside again we headed up the stairs one level and hit the mother lode on the first floor…..

Lightpainting

As it was getting close to meet-up time for the light painting, we left the machinery room and headed back over to the main buildings. Lightpainting at Bradmill is fantastic, and Bill and Deanne Holmer are the Light painting maestros. They are like the love children of Mc Gyver, where they take a bottle opener, two nails and a rubber band and create something unique.

 All of their light-emitting equipment is original, designed and made by them. They put on an excellent LED light show for about 30 of us, tripods lined up in front, the camera’s on bulb, with Bill calling the ‘shutter open’ and ‘shutter closed. After the LEDs, they followed up with the steel wool spinning. The factory by now was black as pitch, and when the steel wool spins, it throws out amazing sparks, dancing across the floor and roof. And standing in the middle is our own ‘God of Fire’