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Pennsylvania Avenue Subway, Reading Railroad, Philadelphia, 2004.
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this post was submitted on 01 Oct 2024
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Photography
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Captured with a Fuji GX680 camera, 80mm lens, T-Max 100 film. Some tilt was applied to control focus. It was very dark in there, and focusing required the use of a flashlight.
The Pennsylvania Avenue Subway was built to provide a sub-grade freight connection between the Reading Railroad's main line and its "City Branch". It served the Baldwin Locomotive Works' Callowhill plant and the Philadelphia Inquirer's printing plant, among other Center City industries. Abandoned in the 1980's.
@mattblaze@federate.social
Old stuff like that is fascinating, it has such a sense of mystery to me. St. Louis had a similar tunnel that also served the newspaper.
The GX680 was a fun but very unusual camera that couldn't quite decide what it wanted to be. It's a truly gigantic beast of a medium format SLR camera providing (limited) view camera movements. It shot 120-format roll film with a 6x8cm frame (so a 3:4 aspect ratio), with a built-in autowinder. It's sort of what you'd get if you merged a Nikon F4, a Hasselblad, and a Crown Graphic. Definitely not a point & shoot camera.
I went all digital about a year after this photo.
I love that so many creative people are going back to film today and keeping a lot of that technique from being lost (not to mention maintaining film and developer industries), but I doubt I'll join them. I don't buy the argument that film photography is somehow more "pure" (whatever that means), or that digital photography is "cheating" because it doesn't require certain skills. I'm glad I have film experience, but also glad to leave it behind.
@mattblaze@federate.social
The smell of fixer in the morning… it's the smell of Victory.
@mattblaze@federate.social I’m having a lot of fun with film, big it sure takes a lot of time.
which I have a lot of these days.
In the early 2000's, there was a lot of outright hostility toward digital photography from people who felt heavily invested in film technique. It's a relief that that silliness has by now pretty much disappeared, and now film is simply another photographic medium that you can choose to adopt (or not).
@mattblaze@federate.social Early digital cameras really weren't very good, particularly on the affordable end of the spectrum. I think the swing happened in the mid-2000's, when the megapixel wars got rolling and costs came down. These days, my smartphone blows away any (pocketable) camera I've ever owned, although I do occasionally miss my Yashica T4 Super. That was great for walking around street photography.
@dwallach@discuss.systems Early digital photography had lower resolution and more limited dynamic range. But so what? So does some film.
@dwallach @mattblaze I have yet to experience from a digital photographic system the joy and excitement of watching an image emerge from a sheet of photographic paper as it sits in the developer tray.
@karlauerbach @mattblaze I used to spend a lot of my time in the 80's in darkrooms. While I have a soft spot in my heart for the sharp smell of stop bath, the ability for Photoshop to adjust an image in seconds what would take substantially longer in a darkroom? Priceless.
What the shift to digital from film did for me, both in terms of shooting and processing, was that it increased my willingness to experiment by lowering the cost (time and dollars). I really leveled up in my skills.
@dwallach @karlauerbach I think I genuinely miss about 20% of darkroom work, and say “good riddance” to the other 80%.
@mattblaze@federate.social @dwallach@discuss.systems @karlauerbach@sfba.social I was always pretty awful at darkroom work—pictures that I knew were there never came out the way that I felt that they should. I eventually resorted to dealing with a high-quality commercial lab. With digital, I can try things, undo them, copy the original and try different combinations, and more. Plus, of course, the nature of my chosen subjects means that I have to take a lot of pictures, most of which will be worthless.
@SteveBellovin@mastodon.lawprofs.org @dwallach@discuss.systems @karlauerbach@sfba.social One of the benefits of being in NYC during the film era was the ready availability of high quality commercial labs - often open 24hrs - that served the commercial photography, advertising , and publishing industries. Particularly for E6 transparencies, you could get dip&dunk processing in less than an hour at any time of day for a few bucks/roll. Basically no commercial photographers, and even few fine art photographers, bothered to maintain dark rooms.
@mattblaze@federate.social
That was an episode of Midsomer Murders!
https://midsomermurders.fandom.com/wiki/Picture_of_Innocence#Synopsis
@mattblaze@federate.social @robcinos@hachyderm.io I don’t miss anything about film.
@mattblaze@federate.social And now we can do neat mashups of photographic techniques https://petapixel.com/2020/04/01/how-to-make-cyanotype-prints-of-your-digital-photos-at-home/
@mattblaze@federate.social my spouse was a film person until they got their first digital camera!
@mattblaze@federate.social I took a few more years than you, but 100%. I went from a Nikon 801s -> D70. It was a great choice.
@mattblaze@federate.social It's fun, as is the lost art of darkroom magic.
@mattblaze@federate.social I've considered investing in film photography, but I have yet to pull the trigger. I feel that I could always add constraints to my digital photography workflow, e.g., take only 30 shots a day and post all of them, don't use the LCD to view pictures, only the viewfinder, etc. Maybe one day I may discover the joy of film, but my memories from childhood are the joke that one should gift a camera to people one doesn't like, as they'll end up paying for film. ;)
@mattblaze@federate.social The subject and feel of the photo is kind of "solid" so I'm not surprised it's from your hefty beast.