Back in June and July, we got a chance to visit the old Irish Cement quarries in Drogheda.

The Main Pond

The quarry is a huge unused landmass that is (unfortunately in our view) closed to the public,  it was last in use as the Drogheda Corporation landfill site, which prior to that was a large limestone quarry used by Irish Cement since the 1930s.

However due to the lack of human interference, It has become an excellent pocket of urban wildlife, as well as a great location for abandoned urban scenes with some small areas of disused buildings and long since vandalised equipment.

Ian’s pic of the main quarry pond is a six photo stitch shot at 24mm. iso 100. f18. shutter speed 1/50. He also used a graduated filter which helped to bring down the brightness of the sky so it wouldn’t be blown out with the slow shutter speed. The shutter was that slow because of the small aperture used.

We managed two separate visits, once on a weekend afternoon and the second was a night shoot in July.

For the day outing, the quarry’s plant life was ablaze with colour, and the beautiful sunshine added to the enjoyment of the day, and for the night outing we got to shoot some sunset scenes as well as some steel wool amid some abandoned vehicles and equipment, needless to say we left everything exactly as we found it, .

Just click on any of the images to get a larger view.

One of our members pretending to be a Tree during my sunset shot

A Steel Wool sample from our night shoot in the old Drogheda Quarry