A FORMER army photographer is now capturing the beauty of Rosedale and surrounding Moors. These images of moorland vistas were taken by Patrick Chambers.

Patrick was an army officer from the late 1970s, in the secretive world of “intelligence photography”. At that time he used a Pentax camera. “They had the quietest shutters,” he said.

His interest in photography goes back further - to receiving a box brownie as a birthday present when he was about 10. “I’ve been interested on and off ever since,” he said.

With the army he travelled a great deal, capturing images of places from Northern Ireland and Germany to Australia and North America.

Upon retiring from the army after 35 years in the early noughties, he did some photography work and now, he often shares pictures on the online photo-sharing site Flickr - where his images have had nearly four million views - and on the Rosedale Abbey village blog.

He also no longer uses Pentax cameras, having recently switched to Fujifilm.

A key subject of these images are the atmospheric old buildings which betray the area’s mining heritage, including Bank Top, and other places now the subject of the North York Moors Land of Iron project. This project seeks to conserve the monuments of the explosion of ironstone mining which happened in the Rosedale and Esk Valley areas in the 1800s.

Follow Patrick on Flickr at flickr.com/people/hectorpatrick.