@wordshaper@weatherishappening.network Thanks!

If you like this stuff, there’s a sadly out of print book, “New York’s Forgotten Substations”, with some excellent photos.

https://www.chrispaynephoto.com/books-1-2-1

NYC’s IRT subway, opened in 1904, is powered by a 600 volt DC third rail running alongside the tracks. Power is fed to the system via a number of substations throughout the city, where high voltage AC is converted to the lower voltage DC used by trains.

Until recently, this was done with electromechanical rotary converters (essentially a combination AC motor and DC generator). They are now supplanted by solid state rectifiers, but a few of the original rotary converters remain operational.

@ai6yr@m.ai6yr.org Oh, totally. I’m a terrible hiking partner when I have a camera with me!

@ai6yr@m.ai6yr.org Nice!

Captured on a short hike with a small mirrorless camera, 35mm lens, lightweight tripod, and enough neutral density for a roughly 30 second exposure.

Flowing water is a subject that lends itself to motion studies that reveal what our unaided eye can’t see, controlled by exposure time. At 1/3000 sec, every drop of water freezes in place. At 30 seconds, we see smooth, cloud-like structures that obscure individual perturbations. Only at around 1/30 sec does the camera see what we do.

@njvack@ruby.social Thanks!

@cigitalgem@sigmoid.social Thanks Gary!

Union Square West between 16th and 17th Streets in Manhattan is home to five distinctive and variously historically significant narrow mid-rise buildings.

The quirky Decker Building (2nd from left, at 33 Union Square West) is now chiefly residential with a retail ground floor storefront. From 1967-1973 the building housed Andy Warhol’s “Factory” studio, where, in 1968, he was famously and nearly fatally shot by an irate Valarie Solanas. The neighborhood was more colorful back then.

Captured with the Rodenstock 32mm/4.0 Digaron-W lens (@ f/6.3), Phase One XT IQ4-150 camera. 12mm vertical shift to maintain geometry.

This is a straightforward head-on single point perspective view of the facades of the varied buildings on this block just after sunrise. It took some time to line up the camera to be parallel to the faces of the buildings, once again making architectural photography be something of an exercise in surveying.

Captured with the Rodenstock 50mm Digaron lens and about 13mm of vertical shift to maintain the geometry (but several architectural features - setbacks and tapers in the building design - still make it appear to converge toward the top).

Pittsburgh’s 42 story “Cathedral of Learning” houses offices and classrooms for the University of Pittsburgh. Completed in 1937, it took 11 years to construct. It remains the tallest academic building in the US.

The lobby is also gorgeous, and worth a visit.

So this was mostly a play on the concept of “street photography”. The street is the literal subject, but everything about it - the absence of people or any depiction of street life, the use of a heavy, tripod-laden camera, the compositional formality - defies the conventions of that genre.

This is a high resolution stitch of three captures with the Rodenstock 32mm/4.0 HR Digaron lens, yielding a 230 MP image with roughly the angle of view of a 14mm “full frame” rectilinear lens. The high resolution invites you to look closely for signs of life, but they remain elusive.

While this is literally a photo of the street, it’s not a “street photo” at all. The empty nocturnal streetscape is completely devoid of life and human activity, though it hints at sometimes being a bustling place.

The metadata for this image claims it was shot at f/16. That’s wrong; it was more like f/2.5 or so. This was an artifact of the too-clever-by-half way Leica M cameras estimate the f stop. There’s no mechanical link between the aperture ring and the camera body, so instead they estimate the f-stop with a separate light sensor that’s compared with the brightness of the recorded image. This works reasonably well, except when you use an ND filter (as here), which confuses it to no end.

Captured with a small full-frame camera and 21mm lens. A three second exposure smoothed waves and surf.

This was an exercise in tone, perspective, and convergence. The four major boundaries of the scene converge (approximately) near the center of the frame, forming a flattened X.

I moved around and composed this both with and without the driftwood in foreground, which interrupts the composition but, I decided, is helpful to anchor the frame.

One of the challenges of very long lenses is that they tempt you to compose images of subjects that are very far away. But the farther away something is, the more the atmosphere can distort the image. The effects of heat distortion, pollution, humidity, and weather are amplified across longer distances, no matter how sharp the lens is or how high resolution the sensor.

Very long lenses like the 400mm, with their narrow field of view, are essential for some compositions (such as this one), but I find I only rarely actually use them. In fact, the longest lens I have for my main medium format camera system is 180mm (which yields the 35mm equivalent view of about a 120mm), and I hardly ever use even that for the most of the photography I do.

For wildlife photographers, on the other hand, 400mm is practically a wide angle.

This was captured with a DSLR and a 400mm lens, which contributed to the compressed perspective. The conductor boarding the leftmost train is essential to the composition, I think.

Ewing, NJ (“West Trenton”) is the last stop on SEPTA’s commuter trains from Philadelphia on the former Reading Railroad’s line to northern NJ. CSX freight trains still use the tracks north of the station, beyond the end of the overhead electrified wiring used for passenger service.

The glass curtain grid and distorted reflection of midtown reminded me of Saul Bass’s iconic title sequence for North By Northwest (imitated in Mad Men), though this is across town. Hitchcock’s film also employed a somewhat different perspective, looking downward, and at a sharper angle. Here, our focus is on the impressionistically rendered Times Square skyline rather than the street below.

Captured with the Rodenstock 138mm/6.5 HR Digaron-SW lens (@ f/8), Phase One IQ4-150 back (@ ISO 50, 1/30 sec), vertically shifted 15mm.

The Rodenstock 138mm/6.5 has a floating internal element that has to move as it’s focused. It has to be focused with a helical ring (like an SLR lens) that moves the focus and the internal element together, rather than simply by moving it back and forth with a bellows. This makes the lens big, heavy, and cumbersome (not to mention spendy), but it’s very sharp.