Note that 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.

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.

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 Rodenstock 138mm/6.5 is unusual for a larger-format lens in that it has a floating internal element that has to move as it’s focused. This means it has to be focused with a helical ring (like an SLR lens) that moves both the focus and the internal element, 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 an extremely sharp design.

@[email protected] I’m not sure what you’re suggesting. I post a lower resolution version (to not clobber my instance), and a link to the full version, which contains licensing information. That seems OK.

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 glass curtain and reflection reminded me of Saul Bass’s iconic title sequence for North By Northwest (imitated in Mad Men), though this is across town. The film also used 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 70mm/5.6 Digaron lens and a bit of vertical shift. The afternoon light highlights the basic arched form of the bridge structure against the background and foreground foliage. A polarizer darkened the clear winter sky.

The Taft Bridge, named for the notably hefty former president and SCOTUS chief justice, is the largest unreinforced concrete bridge in the world. Comprising seven major arches over Rock Creek Park, it links the Kalorama and Woodly Park neighborhoods.

@[email protected] I think distortion from tilting the camera up is mostly a learned expectation from recent times. If you look at architectural photos from 50 or 75 years ago, when fancy cameras routinely supported movements, parallel vertical lines are almost always rendered correctly. It was only after the proliferation of small SLR and rangefinder cameras, which lack movements for correcting this, that tall buildings started tilting backwards.

My photo practice is hipster-retro in that respect.

This was an opportunistic capture from a hotel balcony, made with a small camera and 90mm lens. I made several exposures, waiting for good light, which came out briefly for this one.

The wrong gear is definitely better than nothing, but still not as good as the right gear. This is a perfectly acceptable image, but I can’t look at it without wishing I had used a view camera, a higher resolution sensor, and a slightly longer lens. But if I had insisted on that, I’d have no image at all.

The Inquirer building also housed (until a few years before they moved) their printing plant, making it one of the last major dailies where it was at least theoretically possible for an editor to run downstairs and yell “stop the presses!” if a major story came in. But I’ll bet that never actually happened.

This was captured with a DSLR and a 19mm shifting lens. There’s a bit of barrel distortion from the lens, but I decided this image looked better uncorrected.

The Inquirer building, completed in 1924, to me evokes a cigar-chomping editor who calls everyone “kid” and who says things like “bring me back a scoop”.

The building had been vacant for a few years when this photo was made, the paper having moved to cheaper and leaner facilities. It has since been repurposed as police headquarters.

Precisionism, a roughly century-old modernist American art movement related to cubism, is a strong influence on my work. Its practitioners included Joseph Stella, Georgia O’Keeffe, and Charles Demuth. Paul Strand was probably the most prominent precisionist photographer.

Precisionism is concerned with structure and geometry as well as the relationship between humans, machines, and the industrial landscape.

I’m interested in how the precisionists might interpret the world as it’s become today.

These (de-electrified) catenary wires were captured with a Sinar P camera and a 180mm lens on Polaroid 55 film (scanned) along the former Pennsylvania Railroad’s “high line” in west Philadelphia near the university.

This abstract composition references a 1936 painting, “Electrification”, by precisionist artist Ralston Crawford; see https://hirshhorn.si.edu//collection/artwork/?edanUrl=edanmdm:hmsg_72.75

Captured with the Rodenstock 23mm/5.6 HR-Digaron-S lens and Phase One IQ4-150 Achromatic Back, polarizer+590nm (red) filter.

Washington DC is not a city of many notable inclines, and so lacks the proliferation of “step streets” found in places like San Francisco and The Bronx. Most famous are Georgetown’s Exorcist Steps (so named for the fatal effect they have on members of that profession), and, shown here, Kalorama’s Spanish Steps, which occupy 22nd St NW between S and Decatur.

This is an IR photo, made in afternoon light with a 1000nm filter and the Phase One Achromatic back. 1000nm is a fairly long IR wavelength, rendering a soft, surreal look. (IR photos are usually captured around 750-800nm). I used the Rodenstock 50mm HR-Digaron, which leaves the moon small in the frame but still recognizable.

This is (of course) a nod to Ansel Adams’ “Moonrise, Hernandez, NM”. But Adams’ 1941 photo was made just after sunset, in the visible spectrum. See https://www.moma.org/collection/works/53904

@[email protected] @[email protected] And don’t get me started about WGU-20…

@wa7iut @kyhwana That’s also my recollection of what LORAN-A sounded like. More of a buzz than a pulse (which is how LORAN-C sounds).

The Russian Woodpecker (which was actually Ukrainian!) is another of the sounds I won’t forget but that are almost lost to history.